Rohingya in South Asia

The Rohingya are among the world's most persecuted people. Rendered stateless by Myanmar's 1982 Citizenship Act, they face systematic violence, discrimination, and displacement that have forced hundreds of thousands into exile across South and Southeast Asia.

This revised edition provides an expanded examination of Rohingya experiences in Bangladesh and India, analyzing conditions in overcrowded refugee camps, the perilous journeys undertaken in search of safety, and the profound human rights implications of statelessness. It critically assesses international responses to the crisis and confronts the challenges of repatriation without guarantees of citizenship or security.

An essential resource for scholars, students, and practitioners in Refugee Studies, Human Rights, South Asian Studies, and Political Science, this volume also speaks directly to policymakers, activists, and anyone seeking to understand one of the twenty-first century's most urgent humanitarian crises.

Sabyasachi Basu Ray Chaudhury is a Professor in the Department of Political Science, Rabindra Bharati University, Kolkata, India, and also a Member of Calcutta Research Group. He was a Visiting Fellow at the (Institute fur die Wissenschaft vom Menschen (IWM), Vienna, Austria in 2023. His areas of interest include global politics, South Asian politics, human mobilities, platform economy and sociology of labour. He has recently co-edited Sites of Statelessness: Laws, Cities, Seas (2024).

Ranabir Samaddar is currently Emeritus Professor at the Calcutta Research Group. He belongs to the critical school of thinking and is considered as one of the foremost theorists in the field of migration and forced migration studies. His writings on migration, forms of labour, urbanization, and political struggles have signalled a new turn in post-colonial thinking. Among his influential works are The Marginal Nation: Transborder Migration from Bangladesh to West Bengal (1999), Karl Marx and the Postcolonial Age (2018), and written in the background of the COVID pandemic, A Pandemic and the Politics of Life (2021). Imprints of the Populist Time (2022) and Biopolitics from Below: Crisis, Conjuncture, Rupture (2025) carry forward his work on the need to reconceptualize democracy in the postcolonial context.