The Rohingya refugee crisis and minority (in)security in the Bangladesh-Myanmar borderland

Thesis

This thesis examines the impact of the 2017 Rohingya refugee crisis on majority-minority relations in Bangladesh. The Rohingya refugee crisis brought three-quarters of a million Muslim Rohingya refugees from Myanmar across the border in Bangladesh, escalating insecurity, and fear of reprisal attacks for non-Muslim minority groups who are culturally similar to Burmese Buddhists. Collective responses to the influx differed significantly between the groups: the coastal minority groups adopted a concerted pro-Rohingya institutional response, while the hill groups advanced a decidedly anti-Rohingya fear narrative. To explain this variation, this thesis develops a theory about relational patterns that emerge between majority and minority groups and their significance for minority activism, institutional development, and security management capacities. Anchoring the analytical framework with the context of the refugee influx, I argue that variations in collective security perceptions of minority groups and their response to insecurities can be explained by two interrelated factors: the nature of the majority-minority relationship - which I refer to as the relational dyad - and the quality of the minority institutional structure that develops as a result of the dyadic interactions. Whether minority mobilisation is violent or non-violent, whether a minority group has ideological salience and/or is numerically significant for winning elections, shapes the nature of majority-minority dyads, varying across a spectrum from adversarial to allied relations. Groups in an adversarial dyad will generally be more constrained to develop and/or maintain high-quality institutions that can be leveraged towards (in)security management and crisis response than those in an allied dyad. Using controlled historical comparison and extensive ethnographic fieldwork among the minority groups in the Bangladesh-Myanmar borderland, I show how variation in the dyadic relations between the majority Muslims and the coastal and hill minority groups shaped the divergent security perceptions and the institutional capacities to respond to the real and perceived threats from the Rohingya refugee crisis. Departing from the familiar narratives of majority-minority conflict, I demonstrate that although dyadic relations are often asymmetrical, a minority group’s position in the dyadic spectrum can produce radically different security outcomes, ranging from state-sanctioned anti-minority violence to state-driven minority protection. My findings have implications for analyses of minority-majority relations in other crisis situations, including communal riots and ethnic violence.

Authors: Hossain , I

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-pdazexqa9
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Subjects: Forced migration; Intergroup relations