Understanding everyday security in the Rohingya refugee camps in Bangladesh: a vernacular perspective

Ahmed, Sabrina (2025) Understanding everyday security in the Rohingya refugee camps in Bangladesh: a vernacular perspective. Doctoral thesis, University of East Anglia.

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Abstract

Since 2017, around 1.5 million Rohingya refugees have been living in thirty-three camps in the Cox’s Bazar district of Bangladesh as a result of Myanmar’s systemic persecution against the Rohingya community. The former government of Bangladesh has stressed national and international security concerns in their approach to refugees. In contrast to this approach and the prevailing literature, which predominantly focuses on state and elite perspectives on security, I seek to explore the everyday experiences of (in)security by the refugee population. In this thesis, I aim to provide a nuanced and detailed understanding of how refugees perceive and experience security and insecurity in their everyday lives within the camps. While the influence of politics and contextual factors is omnipresent in their understanding of security and related phenomena, my eight-month-long ethnographic research in the camps reveals notable distinctions and diversities in refugees’ perceptions. My fundamental premise is that security cannot be understood in isolation, without exploring the accounts of those who are impacted by it. If we want to research, understand and write about the ‘others’ experience of (in)security, it is therefore important to include the ‘others’ everyday embodied experiences. Despite the growing global importance of security definitions and perspectives, with a wider focus on scrutinising state-centric security, local security practices pursued by multiple state actors and their impacts on marginalised populations in a humanitarian context are understudied. In a humanitarian context that is neither at war nor in conflict, yet holding a marginalised community such as Rohingya refugees, mainstream security inquiries overlook how security practices reproduce multiple gendered insecurities, with individuals confronting distinct experiences based on both gender and biological sex. Foregrounding, in particular, the vernacular experience of security — by which I mean to embed my focus on refugees’ non-elite experiences — I have given critical attention to how refugees are the principal targets of security practices in the camps. I propose a conceptual framework for capturing refugees’ perceptions of security, their experiences of the state’s security practices, and the gendered insecurities they face. By drawing on a feminist approach and Foucault’s concept of dispositif, this framework allows a nuanced, bottom-up analysis of the complex and gendered aspects of security practices and the insecurities they reproduce. The overarching contributions of this thesis are: i) empirically, the first vernacular analysis of (in)security from the Rohingya refugees’ perspectives through original fieldwork in the camps in Bangladesh, ii) methodologically, an interdisciplinary approach combining ethnography with participatory methods to reveal the subjective experiences of security and the construction of everyday insecurity, iii) conceptually, challenging the universal claims about security knowledge in the camps by situating the ambiguous security practices as essential sites of insecurity and finally, iv) analytically, problematising the inherent gendered hierarchy and power-knowledge relationship in scrutinising security. Coming from a practitioner background with prior experience of working in the same camps, I believe this research will enrich security knowledge by exploring the everyday insecurities of the Rohingya refugees from a vernacular security perspective.

Item Type:	Thesis (Doctoral)
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Arts and Humanities > School of Politics, Philosophy and Area Studies
Depositing User:	Chris White
Date Deposited:	23 Dec 2025 13:40
Last Modified:	23 Dec 2025 13:40
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/101495
DOI:

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