ETERNAL ‘TRAVAIL’? JOURNEYS AND REFUGEENESS IN SOUTH AND SOUTHEAST ASIA

Abstract

My dissertation is a comparative study of Rohingya refugee journeys across South and Southeast Asia. It is based on one year of ethnographic fieldwork with the Rohingya communities living in Nepal and Thailand. In the dissertation, I argue that Rohingya’s refugee journeys reveal multi-facetted experiences of ‘travail’ composed of forced movement (displacement), suffering (often in the form of trauma), and labour. These journeys of travail lead to the renewal of the Rohingya community as a transnational refugee diaspora that questions the community’s exclusion from competing regimes of refugee recognition and protection. Spread across South and Southeast Asia, Rohingya as a diaspora struggle to contest and simultaneously satisfy the competing norms on ‘the refugee’ in localized contexts. In their travails, they uncover that processes of refugee protection and their norm-alization function as another moment of displacement to refugees.