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  • Coming soon
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Expected online publication date:
June 2024
Print publication year:
2024
Online ISBN:
9781009414845
Subjects:
Sociology of Gender, South Asian Government, Politics and Policy, Political Sociology, Sociology

Book description

After the Exodus examines how forced migration of the Rohingya from Myanmar to Bangladesh has affected the gendered subjectivities and lived experiences of Rohingya refugee women, and transformed gender relations and roles in displacement. Based on feminist ethnographic fieldwork in Bangladesh's Kutupalong-Balukhali refugee camp in 2017 and 2018, the book uncovers the everyday strategies employed by refugee women to create a sense of belonging and to make a life for themselves after forced migration. Rohingya women adapt to camp life by negotiating marriage and intimate experiences, adjusting to changing gender divisions of labour, and navigating encounters with humanitarian aid agencies and male camp leaders. These women strategically bargain shifting power relations to reconstruct their lives in displacement, thereby reclaiming agency and asserting their identity through the spaces they create, inhabit, and reshape; the coping mechanisms they employ; and the bonds of kinship and community they forge.

Reviews

‘This book provides a much needed in-depth and poignant examination of the experiences of Rohingya women in the refugee camps of Bangladesh, exploring the complex interplay of gender identity, relations, and roles amid the harsh realities of forced displacement. Rahman restores women as resilient social agents navigating and negotiating patriarchal structures, rather than writing off their experiences as being those of victims unable to attend to their own wellbeing. Her unique approach instead emphasizes the resilience and creative strategies deployed by the Rohingya women to reconstruct their lives and communities, chief among them being the ‘Majhee' system. This refreshing focus on the quotidian aspects of life in the camps provides an insightful and much-needed contribution to our understanding of refugee experiences more broadly and of refugee women specifically. Overall, a brilliantly researched and compelling book that offers a crucial perspective on the world's most marginalized individuals, making it a highly relevant and significant read.'

Azeem Ibrahim OBE - Director, Special Initiatives, New Lines Institute for Strategy and Policy

‘This extraordinary monograph weaves the politics of storytelling in the context of acutely gendered violence and ethnic cleansing among Rohingya people with the futures they forge as they remake ‘home' in the refugee camps of Bangladesh. Rahman's exquisite research has clearly earned the trust of her informants, and reveals the horrid death and sexual violence against Rohingya by the Burmese military during what is often a forgotten humanitarian disaster of dispossession and genocide, but also the ways people are remaking home in a new place. This reflexive and original feminist ethnography grapples with the unspeakable crimes against humanity faced by the Rohingya, but goes well beyond their survival in the camps of Cox's Bazaar in Bangladesh, highlighting their presence, perseverance and strength under conditions not of their own making.'

Jennifer Hyndman - Associate Vice-President of Research, York University

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