In this new video, Anas Ansar gives an insight into his monography “Rohingyas and the Geographies of Precarity in Exile: Everyday Life in Bangladesh and Malaysia“ and the research process behind it.
The book is Anas Ansars dissertation, which was published in September 2025 in the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies series with De Gruyter Brill. The monography ist available on the publisher's website (Open Access).
The study analyzes the precarious situation of Rohingya refugees from Myanmar who now live in Bangladesh and Malaysia. In the context of the forced displacement of over one million Rohingya from Myanmar's Rakhine State to neighboring Bangladesh in 2017, the book offers a nuanced and empirically grounded analysis of the precarious living conditions in the host countries today.
The book contributes to the academic debate on the topic by going beyond the relatively well-known camps in Bangladesh, both geographically and historically. Anas Ansar extended his field research to urban centers in Malaysia. In his analysis of precarity, he also draws on historical mechanisms of exclusion in the nation-state of Myanmar to explain that precarity did not arise only as a result of forced migration, but has its roots in historically grown exclusion. The study summarizes the diverse manifestations of precarity along the lines of identity, status, space, mobility, gender, and labor and analyzes their interrelationships.
Previously published in our YouTube series 'Research in a Nutshell':
Viviana García Pinzón on 'Trajectories of Governance' and
Amya Argawal on 'Contesting Masculinities and Women’s Agency in Kashmir'.