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By Tanjila Afrin

Over the summer of 2024, I conducted my master’s thesis research fieldwork in Malaysia, thanks to the support of the MAIS International Travel Grant from the School for International Studies. Through this fieldwork, I was able to transform my research ambition into an experiential journey using social science methods to understand the lives of Rohingya migrants, a Muslim minority diaspora living in Malaysia. 

This research project, which I designed with my supervisor, Dr. Darren Byler, is the result of months of perseverance, literature review work, scholarly debate, as well as rigorous academic training that I received from my supervisory committee and other faculty members in the School. Thanks to the profound welcome and enthusiastic participation of people in the community, this three-month-long project in Kuala Lumpur immersed me in the core issues confronting Rohingya populations. Most importantly, their participation in this research has also become an instrument to give voice to their unspoken stories—especially for Rohingya women.  

In the face of systematic persecution and ethnic cleansing orchestrated by the authorities in Myanmar on the Rohingya population, more than one million people have been forced to flee their homes in Rakhine state over the past two decades. Most of these refugees are now living liminal lives in the camps of Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, or in the cities of Malaysia. Because Malaysia has not ratified the “1951 Refugee Convention”, nor the “1967 Protocol” to recognize the status of refugees, the population of approximately 180,000 Rohingyas are rendered a stateless population, comprising a major part of the “undocumented” transnational migration regime of Malaysia. The mass killing and violence in Myanmar escalated again in the summer of 2024 when I was still in the field, and I heard reports that thousands of the remaining Rohingya families were again forced to flee for their lives—while many were being killed on the way.

My previous work as a humanitarian professional in the Rohingya refugee context in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, motivated me immensely to pursue this research track for my MA thesis. Drawing on my professional background and language expertise, I decided to do the fieldwork and to collect primary data on the numerous challenges that the Rohingya refugees face in one of the most developed cities in Southeast Asia.  The cities of Malaysia indeed stand out as a unique case as the Rohingya populations are not recognized as refugees by the state, while their lives are completely different than their lives in the rural settings of Myanmar or camps in Bangladesh. Particularly, I wanted to explore how Rohingya women are building lives for themselves and their families through social reproductive work in their households and beyond the domestic circle in the urban community. For Rohingya women, patriarchal dominance and religious barriers play a key role in limiting their movement and autonomy. I wanted to further explore the other factors that dominate and shape these Muslim women’s living experience in the cities of Malaysia—both within the domestic and public spheres.  

The life stories that my interviewees shared with me portray how their experience with multiple displacements have intensified their vulnerabilities and ultimately shaped the course of their lives. Most of my research participants didn’t have the opportunity to receive education beyond the primary school level and were married through parental arrangement at an early age, sometimes with their own relatives, neighbors, or with men much older than them. The common factors that dominate their lives are strong patriarchal control, strict religious and social barriers, early marriage and early pregnancy—which have restricted their mobility in many ways and stopped them from seeking life opportunities such as education and employment. In many cases, I have seen that patriarchal dominance intensifies after these women enter Malaysia. They become solely dependent on their husbands as they are now separated from their support systems, which were previously built by their maternal families and relatives living in Bangladesh or Myanmar. The lives that await them in the cities are often increasingly dehumanizing due to the state structure that confronts them. This is especially the case during childbirth, or when these women try to seek medical treatment, legal help, and state support. These structural barriers are even more intense for Rohingya women who are still waiting for a UN Refugee Status card. For many in this position, it is rare for them to step outside of their homes. Instead, they live a hidden life in slumlord tenements—as if an invisible prison entraps them. 

My interviewees who are engaged with income-generating work are involved in very informal and disenfranchised types of jobs—mostly as cleaners and scrap collectors, as well as babysitters and restaurant workers, with a few trying to engage with entrepreneurial work. Most of these participants had to cross a patriarchal barrier and step outside of their home to find work after they became widowed, divorced, or when their husbands were arrested or suffered from a disability. However, the narrow avenues which are available to them to make income are also dehumanizing in many ways: they are being continuously surveilled by their employers or contractors during work, and are also exploited through long working hours, laborious and backbreaking tasks, minimum payment, and no paid leave. 

I also learned from my interviewees that the income opportunities in the informal sector have become drastically narrower and more competitive in the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic and due to a large influx of refugees across different conflict-ridden countries into Malaysian cities. As a consequence, many families are still trapped in a cycle of debt and struggling with intense poverty. 

Despite these overwhelming challenges, many Rohingya women still find some sense of safety and stability in Malaysia, compared to their lives in Myanmar where they were exposed to everyday violence, or the lives they had in the tight camp-based systems of Cox’s Bazar where they were trapped in a cycle of dowry and debt. As I expanded my research to different areas of the city and continued interviewing Rohingya women and male community leaders, I understood that the key reasons for their survival as a diaspora is their sense of solidarity, as well as their cultural norms and values to offer mutual aid to each other during crises. Shelter provided by relatives, the guidance from older Rohingya friends, and the mindset of protecting their own community have become instrumental for this most vulnerable community’s survival in Malaysian cities.  

However, what pains them most is the fact that they cannot call any of these places their home and the idea that they may have to remain as refugees or an “undocumented” population wherever they go. They say their heart “keeps burning” as they think that their children will remain largely uneducated in Malaysia as no formal education or public schooling are accessible to them, and that they will have to send their adolescent boys out of their homes to find work or marry off their young girls. I learned that for these Rohingya women and the families, the only possibility to get some stability, dignity, and future for their children is through resettlement in a third country, which is unfortunately an extremely slow process and happening at a very limited scale. 

I hope that this project will make a significant impact by bringing these stories to the forefront, as it is one of only a few to consider the multiple vulnerabilities of Rohingya women. It will also contribute to scholarly debates regarding the economic value of marginalized, stateless, and guest worker populations in the global economy. I anticipate that it will, in many ways, confirm findings in the main literature on this topic, but because I am studying South to South transfer of peoples and labor exploitation—rather than South to North migration—it will likely provide further nuance to ongoing conversations in the social sciences regarding the future of the world economy. This research project also hopes to create a broad awareness among different aid agencies, and national and international actors, and to draw their attention to important topics such as resettlement, opportunities for formal labor integration, education and support to create opportunities for Rohingya women.