SOAS Research Online

Abstract

This essay aims to respond to the question of how people inhabit and politicise the border through the case study of the Rohingya refugee crisis. It considers borderlands through Navaro-Yashin's notion of the no-man's land, where people are stuck in a limbo, and Jones's work on how people inhabit borders through their everyday lives. It will first look at how the lack of documentation restricts people, and is one way in which they are trapped within an abstract border imposed by the nation-state. The Rohingya defy this border in different ways, from creating verification cards to marrying into Bangladeshi families. As borders are places of waithood too, this paper moves onto investigating how Rohingya refugees traverse the temporal borders and changing rhythms between everyday life and sudden removal of it. The essay will lastly recognise the vast reality of the situation: many of the refugees die while passing borders and it is their dead corpses that are entrapped in the no-man's land. This paper will also compare the Rohingya refugee crisis to other migration case studies to give an ample understanding of what it means to be in a state of waithood within borders, and also because there has been a lack of investigation of this ongoing situation.