Displacement and Gendered Lived Experiences: Rohingya Women in Bangladesh Refugee Camps

Rohingya Crisis: Rightlessness and Forced Migration

Rohingya is the Muslim ethnic minority that has faced extreme ethnic violence against themselves in their home country, Myanmar. The mass displacement of Rohingya refugees to Bangladesh since Myanmar’s 2017 violence exemplifies one of the largest refugee crises in contemporary times, drawing sustained international attention to the urgent need to protect their human rights. Beyond immediate humanitarian concerns, this crisis underscores the profound issue of statelessness that structures Rohingya life. This condition renders the book under review a necessary intervention.

Engaging with Agamben’s (1998) concept of the camp as a ‘state of exception’, Rahman describes how the Bangladeshi state governs Rohingya refugees as extra-territorial persona non-grata, confining them within highly regulated camps under exceptional restrictions pending repatriation (p. 13). Rahman’s work, however, goes beyond the denial of political and legal belonging and investigates how the withdrawal of formal rights reshapes the intimate, everyday terrains through which gendered lives are lived and negotiated.

The book under review takes as its point of departure the large-scale displacement of over 700,000 Rohingya to the precarious camps of Cox’s Bazar following the violence in August 2017. It navigates the uncertainty of identity, life, belonging, and kinship of the expelled Rohingya women. Based on rigorous, well-crafted 14 months of feminist ethnographic research conducted between 2017 and 2018 in the world’s largest refugee camp, the Kutupalong-Balukhali, the author critically examines the everyday negotiations, contestations, strategies, and coping mechanisms that Rohingya women use to affirm spaces for themselves. The ethnography foregrounds the meanings attached to place—both remembered and lived—and underscores the importance of word-of-mouth narratives in contexts of conflict and displacement, where such accounts serve as vital repositories of first-hand histories.

Although traditional constructions of gender often shift or are renegotiated during periods of conflict, their implications for gender-based violence, prominently in contexts of displacement, remain insufficiently understood, and that is where the book’s chief contribution lies. Quoting Szczepaniková (2008), Rahman suggests that ‘migration is both a gendered and gendering process’ (p. 9). The author compellingly illustrates how communities grappling with displacement, war, and forced migration are further burdened by the imposition of new or external ideas about gender, precisely when their entire social structures are at their most vulnerable state due to the disruption of what constitutes everyday life. In this context, the author further highlights that conflict and crisis exacerbate shifting power differentials within society, as established patterns of life begin to unravel. These individuals often turn to cultural norms and traditional practices, which frequently serve as stabilising anchors, such as familiar gender norms and practices—taleem (education) and purdah (veil), a theme that will be examined in greater detail in subsequent sections.

Dispossession, Genocide and Gendered Lived Experience

Central to the book lies the author’s conceptualisation of the lived experiences of Rohingya refugee women after their forced migration. Through careful depiction of physical surroundings, living conditions and the eyewitness account of survivors, the book documents both the structural precarity of camp life and the lingering trauma of genocide. As Rahman observes, ‘The poor conditions can also be seen in the overflowing latrines and contaminated waters. Overcrowding, indoor cooking, and suboptimal shelters made of plastic have also increased the risk of fire’ (p. 29).

The book has eight chapters, including the introduction and the conclusion, that examine a range of interrelated themes that are organised to discuss the Rohingya expulsion, migration, and the condition of their statelessness. A central thread running across the chapters is the gendered consequences of humanitarian catastrophe—shaped by dispossession and genocide—which also illuminates the processes through which displaced populations reconstitute social worlds and reimagine home in contexts of exile and resettlement. Chapter 1 outlines the main theme of the book. Here, the author aims to dismantle the control of refugee women’s narrative in international discourses and shows that despite their lives being marked by trauma and constraints, Rohingya women subvert and challenge the victim narrative by negotiating patriarchal structures and power asymmetries.

Chapter 2 explains the study’s methodological foundations and reflects on the author’s positionality as a Bangladeshi origin researcher—the dominant majority in the Rohingya’s new country of refuge. Situated within a feminist ethnographic tradition, the chapter emphasises ethical witnessing and reflexivity, centring the voices and agency of her Rohingya interlocutors. Chapter 3 excavates the Rohingya’s lived realities in Myanmar, presenting a landscape of violence so extreme that it verges on the unimaginable—yet must be rigorously confronted to understand how states and majoritarian groups enact the systematic unmaking of a minority population. This is also crucial to understand and make sense of what follows in the book. Here, Rahman traces the routinised and often spectacular forms of brutality—killings, sexual violence, looting and arson—foregrounding how women’s bodies become both terrain and target of sovereign power in genocidal and ethnic-cleansing violence.

As the name suggests, ‘At Journey’s End’, chapter 4 examines the meaning of ‘home’ and ‘belonging’ after Rohingya women arrived at the camps. Here, Rahman illustrates the re-establishment of life after migration, where bonding, kinship and social organisation are of utmost importance. Given the author’s focus on space-making here, this chapter is an important reflection on space, authority and legitimacy. In chapter 5, the author draws on the voices of young Rohingya women to show how, under conditions of displacement, marital possibilities are both constrained and continually renegotiated. Concepts such as izzot (honour) and the emerging ‘crisis of femininity’ are framed to explain patriarchal norms and the structural precarity of refugee life and to further show how honour, marriage and femininity are experienced, negotiated and contested from within. These narratives illustrate the constrained yet ongoing possibilities for self-making in a world where agency is both limited and reimagined through everyday survival.

In chapters 6 and 7, Rahman critiques the neoliberal development model, warning that women’s economic participation through Non-governmental organisation (NGO)-led livelihood programmes targetted at women does not automatically lead to empowerment. In fact, it can often impose additional burdens of expectation, moral regulation, and surveillance. Drawing on Szczepaniková’s (2008) notion of the ‘feminisation of the refugee clientele’, Rahman argues that while such interventions have opened limited spaces for women and contributed to shifting gender relations within the camps, they often reproduce orientalist andheteronormative assumptions, casting Rohingya women as passive beneficiaries rather than political agents (p. 131).

Gender Belonging and Social Production of ‘Space’ and ‘Home’

Building on Peteet’s (2005) influential analysis that denotes place-making as the ‘social production of place’, Rahman draws parallels with the Rohingyas and discusses how refugees create meaningful spaces despite their displacement. Peteet demonstrates that by recreating familiar relationships that connect to their ancestral villages, Palestinians can foster a sense of familial and social stability. Similarly, Rahman examines the re-establishment of life after migration, emphasising the importance of bonding, kinship and social organisation. Next, moving on to Gren’s (2015) work on Palestinian refugees, Rahman demonstrates that homemaking emerges as one of the most significant practices through which displaced communities attempt to rebuild stability amid their profoundly disrupted lives. Part of the ‘home-making’ process also entails solidifying bonds with those who share similar experiences of exile, despite the lack of prior personal connections.

It is through mundane practices—routines, order and predictability—that displaced women reclaim a sense of continuity and agency. For Rohingya women in particular, the preparation of food, the maintenance of domestic order, and the completion of everyday chores constitute embodied strategies of coping—ways of ‘carrying on’ with life—despite deep precarity and loss.

Similarly, Mahmood’s (2005) analysis of the Egyptian women’s mosque movement is a crucial backdrop here, for understanding how practices of piety can function as modes of ethical self-formation rather than as simple internalisations of patriarchal authority. This insight provides an important lens for interpreting the role of religion and taleem—commonly used in South Asia to describe gatherings for prayer, recitation and supplication—among Rohingya women in the Balukhali camps. Participation in taleem offers these women a vital means of coping with displacement, providing an effective refuge in which they can temporarily unburden themselves from experiences of trauma and loss. Given that gender segregation shapes Rohingya social life and severely restricts women’s mobility within the camp, taleem emerges as one of the few socially sanctioned spaces accessible to women.

This dynamic resonates with observations from my own study of sacred spaces such as shrines in Kashmir, where the protracted armed conflict and limited availability of public space have transformed shrines into crucial sites of socialisation, religious pedagogy, and emotional sustenance (Batul, 2022). In both contexts, religious spaces and practices—whether taleem circles or shrine visitation—serve as gendered sanctuaries in which women cultivate resilience, forge communal ties, and engage in subtle forms of ethical self-making within the restraints imposed by conflict, displacement, and patriarchy. Not only the spaces of socialisation, but these also become, however small, sites for reclaiming agency. For example, as one interlocutor puts it: ‘So, I try to do small things to take control of my life in a place where I don’t have anything. Holding this taleem (gatherings for prayer) is one of my small efforts’ (p. 65).

Rethinking Marriage: Surveilling Youth and Maintaining Izzot

In chapter 5, ‘Beyond Brides: On Marriage and Moral Panics’, Rahman challenges the conventional view of marriage as rooted in Western romantic ideals of love and choice. The author observes that in repeated conversations with her interlocutors, marriage emerged not as a romantic ideal but as a pragmatic, survival-oriented institution. She argues that marriage often involves complex renegotiations of selfhood, gender identities, and aspirations, forming an essential part of social continuity and reproduction for refugees. Rohingya women consistently framed marriage as a means of securing emotional, social, and material support for themselves and their children, with stability and care—rather than love—constituting its primary value.

Mahmood (2005) contends that agency is ultimately the ability to understand one’s own interests against traditional expectations—and as the stories remind us, this capacity may be found even in the direst of circumstances. For Zannat, Hajera and many of the author’s young female interlocutors, marriage provides a renewed sense of hope that had been missing due to the overwhelming suffering they had faced during the process of forced migration. Further, for a woman like Hajera, marriage is associated with having children, which enhances a woman’s status, given her role in the social reproduction of the community.

Turning to issues such as privacy and security, the author once again interestingly complicates the mundane yet consequential realities of everyday life under conditions of vulnerability. Privacy and security emerge as urgent concerns in the camps, where shelters cannot be adequately secured and fragile bamboo-and-straw doors often open directly onto congested, narrow walkways. This ethnographic detail also serves as an important reminder that ideals of women’s privacy and modesty, often treated as stable moral goods, are in fact contingent upon material conditions of possibility. These moral anxieties permeate camp life, shaping social interactions and further complicating intimate relations, including the already challenging task of locating a marital partner.

Among the Rohingya, izzot emerged repeatedly in the narratives of the authors’ interlocutors, shaping ideals of womanhood and respectability. By situating izzot with the cultural and social context, Rahman traces a gradual reconfiguration of attitudes towards women’s work. This transformation enabled certain forms of mobility and limited autonomy outside the domestic sphere, albeit within carefully negotiated boundaries of purdah and izzot. Furthermore, she examines the constrained employment opportunities for men, which further shift gendered norms of respect and propriety.

Men, Masculinities, and Humanitarian Work

Continuing the same themes, Rahman subsequently turns to the role, impact, and politics of NGOs, arguing that their interventions often rely on overly simplistic narratives that cast Rohingya women primarily as passive victims. She also records interlocutors’ accounts of the performative nature of NGO encounters, where victimhood narratives were cultivated in ways experienced as exploitative. Rohingya women described how ‘sad stories’ were mobilised by NGOs, echoing Ong’s (2003) notion of ‘systems of female clientship’. As Szczepaniková (2008) also argues in a different context, refugees are often rendered ‘clients’ to legitimise humanitarian work, reducing women to an apolitical ‘women and children’ category devoid of social complexity.

This section also offers a nuanced examination of the diverse livelihood strategies women adopt, as well as the new opportunities generated through employment, NGO programmes, skills training, and other forms of work that have reconfigured both women’s and men’s sense of self in conditions of displacement. The analysis makes a significant contribution to scholarship on how conflict settings reinforce and intensify gendered norms through the construction of perceived ‘others’ as threats to communal morality.

Drawing on the theoretical frameworks developed by Judith Gardner and Judy El-Bushra (2016), Rahman moves on to interrogate the implications of male vulnerability in conditions of displacement. Gardner and El-Bushra’s work demonstrates how the Somali women—as wives, mothers, and daughters—contribute to the social construction and attainment of manhood. Within this framework, the author highlights how displacement disrupts men’s ability to fulfil their socially prescribed roles as providers, thereby further exposing and intensifying masculine vulnerability. This analysis addresses the frequently overlooked issue of the crisis of masculinity, as well as its impact on the welfare of women and families. The absence of livelihood opportunities undermines refugee men’s breadwinner roles, diminishing their sense of manhood and generating shame within gendered relationships.

Conclusion

The concluding chapter integrates the themes of gendered displacement, moral authority, and contested belonging, urging scholars to reimagine refugee studies through an intersectional feminist lens. The book’s main analytical strength lies in its attentiveness to the everyday—examining the Rohingya refugee crisis not only through borders and states but also through marriages, silences, kitchens, and small acts of negotiation and refusal. Thus, the book productively shifts attention from state-centred politics to the textures of everyday life under conditions of refuge and repression, demonstrating how ‘high politics’ pervades the ordinary.

It foregrounds the deeply gendered nature of violence, particularly the ways in which conflict is inscribed upon women’s bodies. While Rahman’s work draws on established scholarly traditions, it remains significant for its depth of clarity, concision, and analytical coherence. One observation that warrants reflection—rather than criticism—is that the analysis at times attributes substantial agency to Rohingya refugees in navigating everyday decisions, even as they remain profoundly politically powerless.

After the Exodus is a significant contribution to the study of the rightlessness experienced by marginalised populations and the ways in which such lives are rendered socially and politically invisible. The work is accessible to both specialists and general readers, offering a nuanced comprehension that recasts refugees as dignified and fully human. Rahman’s layered engagement wissssth first-hand interlocutors’ accounts of violence, approached through the interdisciplinary lenses, is a notable contribution to the study of sociology, ethnography, gender studies, migration studies, postcolonial theory, and South Asian studies.