The humanitarian discussion around Rohingya refugees often portrays Bangladesh as a generous host burdened by circumstances beyond its control. This “burdened host” humanitarian storytelling is everywhere. But this narrative misses the real story.
Bangladesh has built a political economy of containment around the Rohingya refugee population. In fact, its posture as a reluctant host masks a calculated strategy. Successive governments have adapted to the Rohingya presence through policies that convert exclusion into domestic political capital and international leverage. Control and restriction are not unfortunate by-products of crisis management; they are deliberate, embedded in policy, and materially rewarding for political and economic elites.
We’ve seen the same pattern again and again — from forced returns in 1978 and the 1990s, to the refusal to register Rohingya after 1992, to the post-2017 regime of restrictions. Temporary shelter is offered, but long-term marginalisation is the rule.
The camps have been deliberately kept isolated and securitised. Barbed wire fencing, bans on formal education, livelihoods, and movement, and the tolerance of armed groups and abusive policing all serve a dual purpose: to avoid integration and to maintain a constant crisis atmosphere that is useful for bargaining.
The real question is: how do we make it more costly for Bangladesh to maintain the current system of Rohingya exclusion?
Bangladesh extracts four key benefits from its restrictive approach:
- Political dividends: Bangladesh portrays itself internationally as a humanitarian host. By doing so, it secures global legitimacy and donor goodwill — even as it enforces draconian policies against the Rohingya.
- Economic gains: Bangladesh secures aid flows, infrastructure development, and contracts for local elites.
- Labour exploitation: Bangladesh benefits from undocumented Rohingya workers in various industries.
- Geostrategic leverage: The refugee population becomes a bargaining chip in relations with China, India, ASEAN, and the West.
Wherever you read about the Rohingya, you will read that they are “aid-dependent.” But let’s deconstruct that.
The idea that the Rohingya are merely passive recipients of aid erases their economic contributions and, more crucially, their systematic exploitation in Bangladesh’s informal labour markets. Far from being idle, many Rohingya work — without rights, protections, or fair pay — in agriculture, construction, salt farming, and informal garment production. These roles remain unrecognised precisely because formal recognition would require labour protections and disrupt a supply of cheap, exploitable labour.
The “aid-dependent” label functions ideologically: it naturalises containment, justifies exclusionary policies, and conceals the surplus value extracted from Rohingya lives. It also serves the interests of both Bangladeshi elites and international agencies — one gains control and patronage, the other maintains funding pipelines and institutional relevance. In truth, the Rohingya are made vulnerable not because they are a burden, but so they can be exploited — both as cheap labour and as commodities within the aid economy.
When aid is cut and work is criminalised, refugees are pushed into unregulated, exploitative labour markets just to survive. The system traps them between dependence and danger — punished if they rely on aid, punished if they try to be self-reliant.
This is why framing the challenge as one of “mitigating impact” through infrastructure or investment is so misleading. The issue is not the presence of refugees, but the architecture of exclusion that keeps them from contributing safely and legally. The greatest constraint on economic potential in Cox’s Bazar is not the refugees themselves, but Bangladesh’s deliberate policy of containment. Restrictions on movement, work, and education have disabled meaningful participation while fuelling dependency and resentment. Infrastructure without rights becomes another tool of control.
A serious strategy ought to begin by enabling safe, lawful livelihoods — not as a political reward, but as a practical necessity in a protracted crisis. Denying Rohingya the ability to work legally compounds both humanitarian dependency and local economic dysfunction. It prevents them from living with dignity and denies host communities the potential gains of shared growth.
Forward-looking investment must integrate both refugee and host communities through area-based development: co-owned enterprises, skills training centres, and joint access to services, energy, and water. Development finance must be made conditional on rights-based reforms and not used to entrench a regime of exclusion. Any serious economic strategy must begin by restoring Rohingya agency.
This architecture of control is enforced top-down through the Camp-in-Charge (CiC) system. It is a command structure run by government officials with absolutely no democratic accountability to refugees. CiCs sit at the top of an exploitative hierarchy, overseeing everything from aid distribution to information flows. They act as gatekeepers for UN agencies, NGOs, and refugees alike, wielding authority through favouritism and coercion. The CiC system does not increase protection or participation. Instead, it entrenches dependency and sidelines Rohingya voices from decisions that shape their lives. It is not a humanitarian mechanism; it is an authoritarian one.
Local hostility to the ideas proposed by United Against Inhumanity is almost inevitable unless the structural drivers of resentment are confronted. For years, state narratives and media framing have cast the Rohingya as job-stealers, resource burdens, criminals, and security threats — a portrayal weaponised by political elites to justify harsh restrictions while ignoring the role of state policy in manufacturing this tension. Any serious alternative must go beyond service delivery and confront this manufactured hostility head-on.
To elicit support from both local people and authorities, the strategy must centre on shared prosperity, not parallel systems. That means:
- Area-based development that visibly benefits both groups (e.g. joint access to schools, health clinics, water, and transport infrastructure);
- Transparent governance of aid funds to reduce elite capture and corruption;
- Job creation schemes that favour Bangladeshi–Rohingya collaboration, rather than competition;
- Narrative re-framing, supported by independent media and civil society, to dismantle the image of the Rohingya as burdens and instead show them as contributors.
So what does it really mean to go beyond the tired script of “repatriation and relief”?
It means breaking with the architecture of containment — a system that international agencies have too often stabilised through funding models, risk aversion, and bureaucratic inertia. Donor models remain timid: short-term, optics-driven, and allergic to political confrontation. By avoiding issues like movement, legal identity, or work rights, they end up reinforcing the very architecture of containment they claim to alleviate.
Institutions like the World Bank, ADB, UNDP, UNHCR, and IOM must fundamentally reorient their engagement.
That means:
- No more funding without rights. Development finance must be tied to concrete gains: freedom of movement, access to work, education, and legal identity.
- No more secret MOUs. How on earth would that be acceptable to the Rohingya?
- No more parallel systems. Investments need to link refugee well-being to host community prosperity — not as some kind of charity, but through inclusive planning and shared governance of infrastructure, services, and livelihoods.
- No more empty theatre. Stop staging high-profile visits while the real economy is built on refugee exploitation.
To conclude: Bangladesh’s model of Rohingya containment is not a temporary holding pattern — it is politically and economically rewarding for the state. International actors must stop sustaining it. That means recalibrating the cost-benefit equation: confronting the aid-industrial complex, dismantling the fiction of dependency, and building pathways to refugee agency through enforceable rights and economic inclusion. Anything less will simply reproduce the very exclusions we claim to oppose.
About the author: Shafiur Rahman is a journalist and documentary filmmaker focusing on the politics of refugee management in South and Southeast Asia. He writes the Rohingya Refugee News newsletter.
The opinions expressed in this blog are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of United Against Inhumanity (UAI).
