The Multiplicity of Institutions in Rohingya Refugee Camps and Its Impacts on Host Communities in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh

The Multiplicity of Institutions in Rohingya Refugee Camps and Its Impacts on Host Communities in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh | Research Square window.SnipcartSettings = { analytics: { enabled: false } }; (function() { var accessVector = localStorage.getItem('access_vector') || ''; window.dataLayer = window.dataLayer || []; if (accessVector) { window.dataLayer.push({ user: { profile: { profileInfo: { snid: accessVector } } } }); } })(); (function(w,d,s,l,i){w[l]=w[l]||[];w[l].push({'gtm.start':new Date().getTime(),event:'gtm.js'});var f=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],j=d.createElement(s),dl=l!='dataLayer'?'&l='+l:'';j.async=true;j.src='https://www.googletagmanager.com/gtm.js?id='+i+dl;f.parentNode.insertBefore(j,f);})(window,document,'script','dataLayer','GTM-K279D39R'); Browse Preprints In Review Journals COVID-19 Preprints AJE Video Bytes Research Tools Research Promotion AJE Professional Editing AJE Rubriq About Preprint Platform In Review Editorial Policies Our Team Advisory Board Help Center Sign In Submit a Preprint Cite Share Download PDF Research Article The Multiplicity of Institutions in Rohingya Refugee Camps and Its Impacts on Host Communities in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh Faria Ahmed This is a preprint; it has not been peer reviewed by a journal. https://doi.org/ 10.21203/rs.3.rs-9488566/v1 This work is licensed under a CC BY 4.0 License Status: Posted Version 1 posted You are reading this latest preprint version Abstract This paper examines institutional multiplicity in Rohingya refugee camps in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, and its consequences for host communities. Extending Jansen’s ( 2011 , 2013 ) framework and engaging Brankamp’s ( 2022 ) carceral humanitarianism critique, I operationalise adaptive and transformative coping strategies as a sequential typology. Using reflexive thematic analysis across 55 interviews and two focused group discussions, triangulated with World Bank, REVA-5, and ACAPS datasets, I identify four themes generating a dual squeeze on the poorest host households: wage depression, price inflation, environmental degradation, and insecurity. The paper explains why host community inclusion in humanitarian programming has persistently failed, locating the obstacle in humanitarian financing structures. refugee institutional multiplicity carceral humanitarianism adaptive and transformative strategies host community Cox's Bazar Bangladesh Rohingya reflexive thematic analysis common pool resources 1. INTRODUCTION “Humanitarian action is paradigmatically regarded as a state of exception. It takes place beyond politics. As emergencies become prolonged, it is a pretense that becomes harder to uphold.” ( De Waal, 2010 , p. 135) The Rohingya refugee crisis is one of the most significant humanitarian emergencies of the twenty-first century. As of December 2023, more than 900,000 refugees live in 34 camps in the Ukhiya and Teknaf Upazilas of Cox’s Bazar (UNHCR/IOM/ECHO, 2023 ), in a district that was already one of Bangladesh’s poorest before the influx. Humanitarian literature has rightly focused on refugee suffering and rights. In doing so, however, it has tended to treat camps as contained governance objects rather than as points in wider networks of interdependence. This focus has come at a cost: the compounding burdens placed on the host communities who share territory, labour markets, natural resources, and public space with over a million displaced people have received far less attention (Siddiqi et al., 2021 ; Habib and Roy Chowdhury, 2023 ). This paper addresses that gap by studying institutional multiplicity, which refers to the way formal and informal governance structures co-exist, compete, and shape each other within and around the refugee camps. It traces the downstream effects of that multiplicity on host communities. The paper makes three contributions to existing literature. First, it operationalises the distinction between adaptive and transformative coping strategies as a sequential typology that models how refugees move from compliance to subversion over time. Second, it engages Brankamp’s ( 2022 ) critique of carceral humanitarianism, which previous applications of the Jansen framework had ignored. Third, it shows what reflexive thematic analysis looks like in practice in this setting, using analytic memos to document interpretive decisions openly rather than invoking the method as a label. The paper is structured as follows. Section 2 develops the theoretical framework and introduces the sequential typology and the engagement with Brankamp. Section 3 provides contextual background and reviews the existing literature. Section 4 details the methodology. Section 5 presents four empirical themes. Section 6 discusses the dual squeeze concept and explains why host community’s inclusion in humanitarian programming has consistently failed. Section 7 concludes and includes a limitations sub-section. 2. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK 2.1 Institutional Multiplicity: Jansen and his Critics Agamben ( 1998 ) argued that refugee camps are spaces where political life is suspended and people are reduced to bare biological survival. This account has been influential in refugee camp studies. However, it has also been criticised for presenting refugees as passive and for underestimating their capacity to build institutions and exercise agencies. Jansen’s ( 2011 , 2013 ) field research in the Kakuma camp in Kenya offers a more grounded picture. Drawing on Long’s ( 1989 , 2001 ) actor-oriented sociology, Jansen documents how ethnic authority structures, participatory governance formations, and camp economies emerge alongside the formal UNHCR governance system. He calls this institutional multiplicity: multiple overlapping governance orders rather than a single top-down regime. This concept is the analytical core of the present paper. The institutional multiplicity framework must, however, be held alongside a more critical perspective. Brankamp ( 2022 ) argues that refugee camps are not simply governance sites that happen to develop institutional complexity. They are calculated systems of what he calls carceral humanitarianism: systems that restrict mobility, extract value from captive populations, and present this as care. Studying institutional multiplicity without naming that underlying logic risks treating encampment as a normal and stable social setting. This paper accepts that critique as a necessary corrective and incorporates it in two ways. First, the adaptive and transformative coping strategies documented below are treated not as expressions of free choice but as responses to a system that withholds legal rights and forces refugees to develop informal alternatives. The fact that informal employment is illegal for Rohingyas is not a natural situation. It is a product of Bangladesh’s refusal to ratify the 1951 Refugee Convention. Second, the paper is explicit that the costs to host communities documented here are partly produced by the carceral architecture itself. The prohibition on formal Rohingya labour market participation creates the conditions under which below-market informal labour becomes rational, and that informal labour then depresses host community wages. The paper nonetheless retains the institutional multiplicity framework rather than replacing it with an abolitionist one. The abolitionist position is politically important but analytically limited for the purposes of this study. It does not provide tools for distinguishing between different modes of refugee agency or for tracing the different effects those modes have on host communities, which is the central empirical task here. The Cox’s Bazar crisis is also an active emergency in which incremental policy reform remains a real possibility. Analysis that speaks to that possibility carries practical value that the abolitionist frame does not offer. 2.2 The Sequential Typology of Adaptive and Transformative Strategies Jansen ( 2011 ) introduced the adaptive and transformative distinction without formally defining it. This left room for inconsistent coding in subsequent work. This paper operationalises it as a sequential typology with six dimensions, presented in Table 1 . The key innovation is a sequential trajectory dimension that models the documented process by which adaptive strategies become pathways to transformative ones as refugees accumulate social and financial capital over time. The boundary between the two categories is not fixed. It reflects the refugee’s current relationship to the governance framework rather than a permanent classification of behaviour. The same act codes differently depending on where it sits in the sequence. Using shared language with the host community, for example, codes as adaptive when it serves social stability in the camp. It codes as transformative when it is used to access the labour market without authorisation. This is not a weakness in the typology. It reflects the actual dynamics observed in the field and in secondary literature. The typology tracks orientation toward governance, not character traits of individuals. Table 1 Sequential Typology of Adaptive and Transformative Coping Strategies Dimension Adaptive Strategy Transformative Strategy Governance orientation Operates within formal rules of Bangladesh Government and UNHCR Actively subverts or bypasses formal governance rules Mobility Remains within camp boundaries Moves outside camp; seeks informal labour or onward migration Economic mode Selling surplus rations; camp-based NGO employment; intra-camp market trade Informal labour in host areas; Hundi remittance networks; counterfeit and illicit goods Power dimension Social integration; linguistic assimilation; camp-based community leadership Coercive intimidation (muscle power); gang formation (Alikkin); armed group links (ARSA and RSO) Host community impact Indirect: staple price depression; some labour market opportunities for bilingual youth Direct: wage depression; perishable price inflation; security threats; deforestation; resource depletion Sequential trajectory Initial phase: refugees comply with camp rules to maximise welfare within available resources Later phase: accumulated social and financial capital enables and encourages subversion of camp rules. Adaptive strategies become pathways to transformative ones. This typology is applied consistently through the finding’s sections below, with explicit coding decisions noted in the text. It is further grounded by Jansen and de Bruijne’s ( 2020 ) concept of humanitarian spill-over. As the camp economy matures, hybrid governance expands into the surrounding host society and the boundary between camp-internal and external economic activity becomes progressively more porous. The typology therefore tracks a spatial movement as well as a temporal one: from containment toward diffusion. 2.3 Common Pool Resources and Environmental Governance Section 5.4 documents significant natural resource depletion linked to the Rohingya influx, including deforestation, groundwater extraction, and loss of agricultural and grazing land. Most existing literature treats these as impacts to document rather than as governance problems to theorise. This paper applies Ostrom’s ( 1990 ) common pool resource framework to provide theoretical grounding. Common pool resources are defined by two properties: subtractability, meaning that one user’s consumption reduces what is available to others; and joint access by multiple users. Hardin ( 1968 ) argued that such resources inevitably degrade under unregulated use. Ostrom demonstrated that this is not inevitable: communities can develop self-governing institutions that sustain shared resources, provided those institutions have clearly defined user boundaries, rules tailored to local conditions, and mechanisms for collective decision-making. Neither condition exists in Cox’s Bazar. The arrival of over 900,000 FDMNs expanded the effective user population of local forests, groundwater, and agricultural land without any corresponding institutional adaptation. The humanitarian governance response allocated land without compensating host community farmers, dismantled existing informal resource management arrangements, and created no replacement mechanisms. The result is a predictable common pool degradation trajectory, produced not by individual selfishness but by the failure of humanitarian governance to treat natural resource management as a priority concern. This framing has direct policy implications that are taken up in Section 6 . 3. CONTEXTUAL BACKGROUND 3.1 The History of Rohingya Displacement The Rohingyas have experienced successive waves of military persecution over five decades, with major displacement events in 1978, 1991 to 1992, 2012, 2015, and 2016 to 2017 (Noor et al., 2018 ). The 1982 Myanmar Citizenship Act listed 135 ethnic groups but excluded the Rohingya, rendering approximately three million people legally stateless (ICJ, 2019). The 2017 crisis began with ARSA attacks on border posts on 25 August, which triggered a military response that Amnesty International ( 2018 ) documented as involving mass killings, sexual violence, and the burning of hundreds of villages. The UN Fact-Finding Mission characterised the campaign as genocidal in intent (Green et al., 2018 ). Cox's Bazar was one of Bangladesh’s most economically marginalised districts before 2017. Following the influx, Bangladesh allocated over 6,500 acres of land in Ukhiya and Teknaf for humanitarian purposes. Approximately 76 hectares of cultivable land were absorbed without compensation to affected farmers (Hashim, 2019 ; Joireman and Haddad, 2023 ). Bangladesh has not ratified the 1951 Refugee Convention. It designates the population as Forcibly Displaced Myanmar Nationals (FDMNs), which denies them the right to work, move freely, or access formal education beyond a restricted Myanmar curriculum (Adewumi et al., 2020 ; Hoque et al., 2023 ). This legal framework is the structural precondition for all the informal coping strategies documented in this paper. 3.2 What the Existing Literature Establishes and Where it Falls Short A substantial body of empirical research on Cox’s Bazar now exists and several of its findings are directly relevant here. Siddiqi et al. ( 2021 ), whose study was conducted in the same subdistricts as this one, document the shift from host community solidarity to resistance. They identify wage depression, unequal humanitarian aid access, and political uncertainty as the three structural drivers of deteriorating host-refugee relations. Their work provides an important baseline for the present study. Ullah et al. ( 2021 ) confirm that poverty and vulnerability among host households closely match those of FDMN households, yet host communities remain largely outside the humanitarian assistance framework. Sultana ( 2023 ) finds that while a small number of host community members improved their financial position through the humanitarian economy, the majority experienced worsening conditions after the influx. Biswas et al. ( 2022 ) identify natural resource competition as the primary driver of inter-community conflict. Habib and Roy Chowdhury ( 2023 ) document how forest resource conflicts have intensified as deforestation accelerates. Kamruzzaman et al. ( 2024 ) trace the shift in host community attitudes from initial empathy to active hostility, showing that Rohingyas now constitute a demographic majority in several Ukhiya and Teknaf settlement areas. Sakib et al. ( 2025 ), publishing in this journal, examined the patron-client dynamics operating within the camps and showed how hierarchical clientelism shapes resource access for both refugees and host community members. What this body of work has not yet provided is a theoretically grounded account of the mechanisms that connect refugee coping strategies to host community outcomes. Most existing studies document impacts without explaining the institutional processes that produce them. They record wage depression without explaining the governance architecture that makes below-market labour rational for FDMN workers. They document deforestation without theorising the common pool resource governance failure that enables it. They identify humanitarian programming exclusion as a persistent problem without analysing the political economy that sustains it. This paper addresses these three gaps directly. It uses primary fieldwork to trace mechanisms rather than describe outcomes, and it draws on institutional multiplicity, carceral humanitarianism, and common pool resource frameworks to explain rather than simply document what is happening. 4. METHODOLOGY 4.1 Research Design and Epistemological Position This study uses a constructionist, multi-sited qualitative case study design (Yin, 2018 ). A constructionist approach is appropriate because the study is concerned with how FDMN and host community actors construct and contest meaning within the camp’s institutional landscape. This question cannot be answered by approaches that treat social reality as something that can be observed from a neutral standpoint. Interview accounts are not treated as straightforward reports of external events. They are co-produced narratives shaped by the interview relationship, the institutional context, and the positions of both researcher and participant. Reflexive thematic analysis (RTA) was chosen over grounded theory for three reasons. First, RTA makes the researcher’s active role in knowledge production explicit, which is essential in a politically sensitive field setting. Second, RTA is theoretically flexible. It allows engagement with Jansen’s existing typology while remaining open to patterns that emerge inductively from the data. Third, RTA does not require theoretical saturation as a benchmark. This is important in small purposively sampled studies where the goal is analytic depth rather than broad representational coverage (Braun and Clarke, 2022 ; Byrne, 2022 ). 4.2 Researcher Positionality The researcher is a Bangladeshi academic affiliated with an institution in Dhaka. This position offered important advantages: linguistic access in both Bengali and the Chittagong dialect, established networks with civil society and camp officials, and cultural familiarity that helped build rapport with participants. These advantages also carried risks that must be named openly. First, the Bangladesh Government has strong institutional interests in narratives that emphasise Rohingya criminality and transformative behaviour, because such narratives justify the containment policy. CIC and RRRC officials were simultaneously gatekeepers granting research access and interview subjects with stakes in particular accounts. This conflict was managed by conducting all official interviews last in each field phase, after FDMN and host community data had already been generated. Official accounts were then cross-referenced against those earlier data rather than used as framing. An analytic memo was written after each official interview noting what the interviewee had an institutional interest in emphasising and where their account diverged from FDMN and host community narratives. Second, the proximity of the Chittagong dialect to the Rohingya language helped build rapport with FDMN participants but may also have led some participants to treat the researcher as co-ethnic. This could have inflated accounts of solidarity with the host community and understated intra-Rohingya tensions. This risk was addressed through explicit introductions at the start of each session, and by noting in analytic memos when accounts appeared to be strategically shaped. Ethical approval to conduct the research were granted by the institute’s Departmental Research Committee, prior to the commencement of fieldwork. This is consistent with the broader context of many universities in low and middle-income countries where formal ethics infrastructure remains in development. In the absence of institutional ethical clearance, the author adhered rigorously to established principles of research ethics throughout the study. All participants provided informed verbal consent prior to participation, were fully informed of the study’s purpose and their right to withdraw at any time without consequence and were assured of confidentiality and anonymization. No incentives were offered. Data were stored securely and anonymized prior to analysis. FDMN participant details are presented only at the level of age, gender, and camp location, given the documented presence of armed groups that monitor social interaction in the camps (ACAPS, 2023 ). 4.3 Data Generation Primary data were collected across three camps between October and December 2019: Camp 1 East, Kutupalong, Ukhiya, Camp 11 (Moynar Ghata, Balukhali, Ukhiya), Camp 15 (Jamtoli, Ukhiya), Camp 16 (Shafiullah Kata, Potibunia, Ukhiya) and Camp 23- Shamlapur, Teknaf was selected. Camp selection was purposive. Three primary data collection methods were used. Twenty-five semi-structured interviews were conducted with FDMN participants, selected through purposive and snowball sampling via Mazi (community leader) gatekeepers. These interviews explored economic activity, coping strategies, and relations with host communities. Twenty in-depth interviews were conducted with host community members, recruited through local community leaders, and focused on livelihood changes since 2017, perceived causes, and relations with refugees. Two focused group discussions with mixed host community groups were used to cross-check patterns from the individual interviews. Ten key informant interviews with NGO, INGO, CIC, and RRRC representatives provided institutional context. All sessions were conducted in Bengali or the Chittagong dialect and professionally transcribed. Three secondary datasets were used for triangulation. The World Bank Cox’s Bazar Panel Survey (2021) is a longitudinal household survey providing pre- and post-influx labour market baselines. The WFP/UNHCR REVA-5 assessment (2022) provides population-level data on food security, debt, and employment. ACAPS ( 2023 ) provides security monitoring data on armed group activity. Each dataset has limitations that must be stated clearly. The World Bank Panel Survey has documented attrition across waves and is built from humanitarian registration databases, which means it likely underrepresents unregistered FDMNs and the most economically precarious households. REVA-5 data for 2021 are affected by COVID-19 economic disruption, making it difficult to separate the effects of the refugee influx from the effects of the pandemic on host community wages. ACAPS monitoring covers 2021 to 2023, which is two to four years after primary fieldwork. Its data documents have a structural trajectory rather than directly corroborate the 2019 observations. These limitations are factored into the interpretations throughout Section 5 . 4.4 Analytical Process: Reflexive Thematic Analysis in Practice Analysis followed the six-phase model of Braun and Clarke ( 2022 ). Phase 1 (familiarisation) involved repeated reading and listening to all 57 interviews and FGD transcripts. Phase 2 (coding) produced 184 initial codes. These were treated as research interpretations of meaningful patterns rather than neutral topic labels. Phase 3 (initial theme generation) produced seven candidate themes. Phase 4 (theme review) collapsed these to four analytically distinct themes after testing them against the full dataset. Three candidate themes were retained as sub-themes. Phase 5 (theme definition and naming) produced the theme titles used in Section 5 . Phase 6 (writing as analysis) produced the dual squeeze integrative concept. This concept did not emerge from coding. It emerged during the process of writing the findings and is documented in the project memo log. Table 2 shows a representative extract from the analytic memo record. It demonstrates how interpretive decisions were made and documented across phases. This level of transparency is included specifically to address the methodological concern that RTA is more often claimed than practised (Braun and Clarke, 2022 ; Byrne, 2022 ). Table 2 Analytic Memo Extract - Selected Coding and Theme Development Decisions Analytic phase Initial codes Candidate theme Interpretive decision and memo note Coding (FGD 1) selling rations; tea stall; NGO interpreter job Camp-based economic agency Codes cluster around income without camp departure. Preliminary theme: economic adaptation within governance. Theme review working in paddy field; found outside camp; cheap labour Labour migration outside camps Memo: need to distinguish intra-camp economic activity from camp-departure labour. Initial theme split into two and revised against the adaptive/transformative typology. Theme refinement Alikkin group; beheading threat; drug smuggling Coercive parallel governance Memo: risk of conflating domestic violence (Turner, 1999 ) with organised coercion (Alikkin). Decision: treat separately in findings. Domestic violence coded under intra-community governance, not muscle power. Writing as analysis Across all themes Dual squeeze Emerged during writing phase when mapping host community impacts across all four themes. Not a code but an integrative analytical concept introduced in the Discussion. 5. FINDINGS Four themes are presented below. Each theme is connected explicitly to the sequential typology in Table 1 , showing how the coding decisions were made rather than asserting them. 5.1 Camp Economy and Labour Market Interface 5.1.1 Adaptive Economic Activity Within Camps Across FDMN interviews, the most consistent pattern was the use of camp-based resources to generate supplementary income without leaving the camp. This is the defining feature of adaptive strategy in the typology: it works within the formal governance framework rather than subverting it. The most common mechanism was selling surplus ration commodities through camp-adjacent flea markets. REVA-5 (WFP/UNHCR, 2022 ) corroborates this, recording that 27 percent of Rohingya households sold part of their humanitarian assistance in 2021. A second pathway was informal employment through NGOs in roles such as healthcare, interpretation, teaching, and food distribution. A 45-year-old FDMN respondent, a former Madrasha teacher from Mongdu, described his situation: I teach Rohingya children here in Maktab with no payment, but I lead prayers at the nearest Masjid and receive around 4,000 Taka per month. I am inside the camp. I am not breaking any rules. But I can earn a little extra alongside the ration. (FDMN participant, Camp 11, 26 October 2019) His framing is significant. Saying “I am not breaking any rules” signals a conscious orientation toward the governance framework. This is precisely what the typology codes as adaptive: the refugee is maximising welfare within the system rather than working around it. This respondent represents the early phase of the sequential trajectory, where compliance is the rational strategy because the costs of subversion outweigh the benefits. The host community effect of surplus ration redistribution is a depression in local staple food prices. This harms host community farmers who grow rice and lentils commercially. Department of Agriculture data cited by Frontiers in Human Dynamics ( 2024 ) confirm damage to approximately 100 hectares of cropland in Teknaf and Ukhiya, much of it without compensation to affected farmers. Even adaptive strategies, then, produce costs for the host community. The World Bank Panel Survey (2021) documents increased economic activity in camp-adjacent markets during this period, which is consistent with FDMN market engagement. The Panel Survey’s sampling frame, however, is built from registration databases and likely underrepresents the most economically precarious FDMN households who have least access to these market opportunities. 5.1.2 The Sequential Turn: Adaptive Strategies Becoming Transformative The sequential typology predicts that as refugees accumulate social and financial capital, they will move from adaptive to transformative strategies. This transition is visible in the domain of informal labour. The linguistic integration that initially served camp-based social cohesion, and which was coded as adaptive, later provided the identity cover that allowed unauthorised labour market entry, which is transformative. The same behaviour shifted categories as circumstances changed. This is not inconsistent in the analysis: it is the mechanism the typology is designed to capture. Multiple host community employer accounts confirmed hiring Rohingya workers at BDT 200 to 300 per day for agricultural work such as paddy harvesting and salt farming, against a local market rate of BDT 500 per day (Frontiers in Human Dynamics, 2024 ). Ullah et al. (2023) document a 50 percent decline in local daily wages following the influx. REVA-5 data (WFP/UNHCR, 2022 ) show host community labour market indicators deteriorating between 2020 and 2021, though caution is required in attributing this entirely to FDMN labour competition given that COVID-19 lockdowns also reduced daily wage employment during this period. The experience of a 52-year-old farmer from Thaingkhali Bazar illustrates the cumulative effect of these dynamics on individual livelihoods: Until the Rohingya arrived, I cultivated 500 decimals of land near Balukhali Bazar. I grew vegetables and seasonal crops. When they came, I gave my land for shelter out of compassion. Three years have passed. My land is still occupied. I was a farmer. Now I look for work every day. There is nothing here for people like me. (Host community participant, 26 October 2019) This account captures what Sultana ( 2023 ) identifies as the dominant socioeconomic effect on host communities: displacement from subsistence agriculture with no alternative livelihood, in a district where formal employment was already scarce before 2017. The individual story of land loss, compassion, and subsequent destitution illustrates a structural dynamic: the humanitarian response created no compensation or alternative livelihood mechanism for farmers who lost land. REVA-5 (2022) confirms the scale of the problem: 52 percent of host community households were moderately to highly vulnerable in 2021, with 43 percent employing stress coping strategies, up significantly from 30 percent in 2020. Gender dynamics add further complexity to the labour market picture. Male employment outside camps declined while female employment inside camps through NGO volunteer roles increased. However, many host community families prevented women from taking these positions on religious grounds. Working inside camps with unknown men was considered haram, or forbidden (Host community household, 30 October 2019). This blocked a potential income pathway for households that needed it most. Hoque et al. ( 2023 ) note that the influx also created demand for bilingual youth as NGO interpreters. One class-10 student at Ukhiya Degree College left school for a BDT 15,000-per-month NGO position because of her Chittagong dialect skills. This individual gain came at a collective cost: elevated school dropout rates among young people in Cox’s Bazar represent a long-term loss of human capital that will affect the district for years beyond the crisis itself. 5.2 Transnational Economic Networks and the Hundi System Van Hear’s ( 2003 ) framework of refugee transnationalism describes the transmission of remittances, social capital, and information across borders. This framework is clearly operative in Cox’s Bazar. FDMN participants described two channels of cross-border financial circulation. The first involves physical cash conveyance through checkpoints by trusted couriers. The second is the Hundi hawala-type network, in which intermediaries facilitate value transfers without physical currency movement. Expert informants revealed that Hundi networks also carry illicit goods in the opposite direction. One INGO official stated: Through Hundi, gold and precious possessions, but also counterfeit goods, drugs and narcotics are coming into Bangladesh in exchange for cash remittances. The same channels that move money also move illicit goods. (Key informant, INGO official, 3 December 2019) This testimony reveals something analytically important. The Hundi network is not simply a criminal enterprise sitting alongside the formal economy. It is a direct product of the governance framework that denies FDMNs any legal mechanism for financial participation. When legal economic channels are closed, informal ones fill the space. ACAPS ( 2023 ) corroborates the existence and growth of these networks, documenting competition between ARSA, the Rohingya Solidarity Organisation, and other armed groups for control of drug smuggling and extortion activities. The ACAPS data covers 2021 to 2023, which is two to four years after the fieldwork period. The 2019 interviews documented these networks at an earlier stage. The ACAPS deterioration most likely reflects the maturation of the same structural conditions rather than entirely new phenomena, but this is a plausible trajectory interpretation rather than a direct evidential claim. FDMNs also liquidate stored wealth, principally gold jewellery, through camp-based flea markets. This converts stored assets into liquid capital for immediate use or migration financing. Both the Hundi networks and asset liquidation are transformative strategies: they circumvent the formal prohibition on economic accumulation beyond ration-based subsistence. The host community effects of these transnational networks are less visible than the labour market effects but are structurally significant. Multiple host community respondents raised the availability of yaba (methamphetamine) and other narcotics in camp-adjacent settlement areas as a source of neighbourhood insecurity and social harm. Drug availability increases addiction risk among local youth and creates a security environment that discourages legitimate economic investment. Counterfeit goods flowing through Hundi channels undercut host community traders who pay taxes and operate within the law. These are not incidental side effects. They are predictable consequences of a governance framework that denies FDMNs legal economic participation and thereby makes informal and illicit channels the only available routes to capital accumulation. This connects directly to Brankamp’s ( 2022 ) carceral humanitarianism argument: camps do not simply restrict refugees, they actively produce the social conditions that then get labelled as refugee deviance. Treating the Hundi networks and drug trade as FDMN problems while ignoring the governance conditions that generate them misidentifies the cause. Enforcement measures targeting FDMN informal economic activity will not eliminate these networks without addressing the underlying conditions. 5.3 Informal Governance, Coercion, and Parallel Authority 5.3.1 Muscle Power and the Alikkin Group The formation of coercive informal authority structures within the camps is the most extreme end of the transformative strategy spectrum. Respondents consistently used the phrase muscle power to describe this phenomenon. It requires the most careful evidential treatment of all four themes. Three host community households in the Potibunia camp area gave independent accounts of intimidation by the Alikkin group: We fear the Alikkin group. They threaten to behead us if we do not go along with them. They cut electricity lines and remove lights from our porches so we cannot go outside at night. We believe they are involved in drug smuggling and counterfeiting during the night. During the day, they are among us, listening to everything. (Host community participants, Potibunia, 26 October 2019) This evidence must be handled carefully. Three households from a single camp location are a limited evidential base. The accounts are consistent with each other and with ACAPS ( 2023 ) documentation of armed group activity, but the ACAPS data covers 2021 to 2023. It cannot confirm that the same actors documented in 2019 were still operating, or that they had not been superseded by different formations. The structural claim this study can make is the following: in 2019, fieldwork identified an emerging coercive authority structure whose operational logic, involving nocturnal intimidation, extortion, and illicit trade cover, is consistent with the patterns ACAPS documents at larger scale and later date. Whether the Alikkin group persisted, merged with other groups, or was replaced by successors is a question this study cannot answer. Analytically, the emergence of muscle power reflects Turner’s ( 1999 ) account of male refugee disempowerment. Men who had occupied household breadwinner positions experienced a sharp loss of status when they became dependent on humanitarian aid. Seeking alternative modes of power and authority is a predictable response to that loss. This dynamic is amplified by the absence of formal dispute resolution mechanisms. ACAPS ( 2023 ) documents that Rohingya women consistently report a lack of formal justice systems, which creates a governance gap that coercive informal structures move to fill. 5.3.2 Intra-Community Violence and Gendered Governance Two related but analytically distinct phenomena appear in the data: organised coercive authorities such as the Alikkin group, and domestic violence occurring under conditions of displacement stress. Both were documented in the fieldwork but they belong in different analytical categories and should not be conflated. During visits to CIC offices, the researcher directly observed two incidents of domestic violence. In the first, a Rohingya woman arrived at the RRRC office with lacerations to her ears, reporting that her husband had forcibly removed her gold earrings. In the second, a Rohingya woman reported that her husband had taken a second wife without consent and was subjecting her to violence in response to her resistance (Personal observation, 27 to 28 October 2019). These observations carry different evidential status from the interview data. Both were observed in a government office rather than generated through an informed consent research process. They are treated here as field observations that illustrate broader patterns, not as primary interview evidence. The Kamruzzaman et al. ( 2024 ) population-scale data confirms the broader pattern: Rohingya women's use of formal grievance mechanisms has increased, which suggests that the incidents observed are not isolated. What these observations point to is not organised gang coercion but the governance of domestic life through customary patriarchal norms that operate outside the reach of formal CIC authority. Following Merry ( 2003 ), the law’s capacity to reshape behaviour is limited where customary authority is strong. Women and other vulnerable groups in the camps appeal to formal mechanisms precisely because those mechanisms offer an alternative to customary male authority. This dynamic belongs to the analysis of intra-community governance, not in the analysis of camp security threats to the host community. 5.4 Geographical Proximity, Resource Competition, and Social Integration 5.4.1 Environmental Degradation as a Common Pool Resource Governance Failure The coercive dynamics documented in Section 5.3 operate alongside a second set of pressures rooted in spatial proximity and resource competition. These pressures are less dramatic than gang intimidation, but they affect a larger portion of the host community and accumulate over a longer period. Natural resource depletion is the clearest illustration of the CPR governance failure introduced in Section 2.3 . Applying Ostrom’s ( 1990 ) framework: the arrival of over 900,000 FDMNs massively expanded the effective user population of local forests, groundwater, and agricultural land. The humanitarian governance response then destroyed the informal resource management arrangements that had previously governed these shared resources, without creating any replacement institutions. Approximately 4,818 acres of forest reserve were cleared for camp construction and fuelwood (The Financial Express, 2023). UNDP environmental assessments documented 28 risk factors for biodiversity and human security in the area (Ullah et al., 2021 ). Department of Agriculture data cited in Frontiers in Human Dynamics ( 2024 ) confirm loss of approximately 100 hectares of cropland, alongside groundwater depletion driven by extraction from both camps and NGO operations. This is the Hardin ( 1968 ) scenario, but it was not produced by individual selfishness. It was produced by the failure of humanitarian governance to treat natural resource management as a priority. Ostrom’s ( 1990 ) design principles for sustainable management of shared resources, including clearly defined user boundaries, locally tailored rules, collective-choice mechanisms, and graduated sanctions, were absent at every level of the response. Host community farmers lost land and grazing rights without compensation and without any say in the decision-making process. One respondent described the situation: There is no privacy or property protection since the influx. My crops are stolen. My chickens and ducks are taken and eaten. There is no grazing land for my cattle. Everything has changed. (Host community participant, 25 October 2019) This account is consistent with the quantitative evidence on agricultural land loss and is strengthened by Habib and Roy Chowdhury’s ( 2023 ) documentation of intensifying forest resource conflicts as a primary driver of host-refugee tension. The CPR framework shifts the analytical frame from describing harm to explaining its structural cause: the governance failure that permitted unmanaged expansion of a shared resource user population. 5.4.2 Social Integration and Demographic Anxiety The linguistic and cultural proximity between Rohingyas and Bangladeshi Chittagongians creates distinctive adaptive integration opportunities that do not exist in most refugee camp settings. FDMNs use shared dialect, religion, and physical appearance to integrate into host community labour and social networks. This proximity is also the source of host community’s demographic anxiety. Because Rohingyas are nearly indistinguishable from local Chittagongians by language, religion, or appearance, host community members fear that the Rohingya population could effectively replace them in their own settlement areas. As Kamruzzaman et al. ( 2024 ) document, Rohingyas now constitute more than half the total population in several settlement areas of Ukhiya and Teknaf. Ullah et al. ( 2021 ) document the well-established trajectory from initial humanitarian sympathy, rooted in shared Muslim identity and the memory of Bangladesh’s own 1971 Liberation War refugee experience, to active hostility as economic costs accumulated. Siddiqi et al. ( 2021 ) describe this as a movement from solidarity to resistance. This trajectory was confirmed across host community interviews in the present study. Perishable food price inflation has accelerated further. Because FDMN rations do not include meat, fish, fruits, or vegetables, refugee demand for these goods in local markets has approximately doubled their prices. A 60-year-old motor vehicle driver reported that his daily household commodity basket for four family members had doubled in cost since the influx, forcing him to withdraw his daughter from high school. A 32-year-old pharmaceutical sales officer reported that rent near the camp had tripled within two years, leaving housing costs consuming three-quarters of his income. These accounts align with REVA-5’s (WFP/UNHCR, 2022 ) finding that 77 percent of host community households were indebted in 2021, a proportion almost identical to the 79 percent of FDMN households, but without any humanitarian food assistance to offset that debt. 6. DISCUSSION 6.1 The Dual Squeeze: Mechanism and Structure The dual squeeze concept emerged during the writing phase of analysis, as documented in Table 2. It describes the simultaneous application of two distinct economic pressures on the poorest host community households. The first pressure is downward: wages fall because FDMN workers accept significantly below-market rates, undercutting local labour. The second pressure is upward: the cost of living rises because FDMN demand for perishable foods, combined with NGO-driven rental inflation, pushes commodity and housing prices higher. These two pressures are produced by different FDMN strategy types. Wage depression is primarily a product of transformative labour migration outside camps. Price inflation is a combined product of adaptive ration redistribution (which depresses staple prices but increases demand for perishables) and transformative market participation. Because the two pressures have different causes, they cannot be addressed by a single policy intervention. The squeeze falls hardest on the poorest host community households for structural reasons. These households are most dependent on daily wage labour and therefore most exposed to wage depression. They have the least financial buffer and are therefore most vulnerable to price inflation. And they are the most excluded from the humanitarian assistance flows that partially offset FDMN economic vulnerability. REVA-5 (WFP/UNHCR, 2022) confirms that 77 percent of host community households were indebted in 2021, a proportion comparable to FDMN households, but without the food assistance that prevents FDMN debt from translating into hunger. This structural symmetry of deprivation, combined with asymmetric access to relief, produces the pervasive sense of injustice that runs through the host community interview data. 6.2 The Political Economy of Host Community Exclusion The argument that host communities should be included in humanitarian programming is not new. It appears consistently in the academic and policy literature on Cox's Bazar (Siddiqi et al., 2021). The more important analytical task is explaining why this widely acknowledged recommendation has consistently failed to produce change. The answer lies in the structure of humanitarian financing rather than in failures of policy design alone. International humanitarian financing is organised around legal status. Donor governments fund the Rohingya response as a refugee crisis, and the mandates of UNHCR and major INGOs are legally structured around displaced people. Extending those mandates to host communities requires either new donor commitments specifically earmarked for host communities, or the reallocation of existing refugee-designated funds. Both options face significant political obstacles. New earmarking requires donor governments to designate host community support as a humanitarian priority, which competes with other claims on constrained aid budgets. Reallocation requires UNHCR to expand its mandate in ways that would create diplomatic friction with donor governments and with the Bangladesh Government, which has its own reasons for maintaining a sharp distinction between FDMNs and citizens. The CPR governance failure identified in Section 5.4.1 illustrates this dynamic precisely. Addressing it would require compensation payments to host community farmers who lost land and the establishment of participatory resource governance mechanisms involving both FDMN and host populations. These are institutional innovations that require sustained political commitment and dedicated funding streams. Neither exists in Cox’s Bazar as of 2024 (UNHCR/IOM/ECHO, 2023). The World Bank's inclusive growth diagnostic (2022) identified this gap, but its recommendations have not been implemented at the necessary scale. The 2025-26 Joint Response Plan (JRP) for the Rohingya Humanitarian Crisis nominally includes provision for vulnerable host community members, with support allocated to approximately 390,000 Bangladeshis in Ukhiya and Teknaf alongside programming for over one million FDMNs (Rohingya Response, 2025). However, the ratio of funding and institutional attention remains heavily skewed toward FDMNs. The host community component is framed as complementary development support rather than as a humanitarian entitlement. This means it is the first to be cut when donor funding is constrained. In a global aid environment characterised by increasing competition for humanitarian budgets, the structural subordination of host community support is not a temporary imbalance. It is a durable feature of how the response has been architected. Addressing it requires a rethinking of how donor governments categorise and account for the full costs of hosting protracted refugee crises. The total cost of the influx of host communities, in lost land, lost livelihoods, degraded environments, and suppressed wages, has never been comprehensively calculated. Producing that calculation and presenting it as a legitimate claim on humanitarian financing is perhaps the most important policy contribution this field of research could make. 6.3 Theoretical Implications The findings carry three theoretical implications. First, the sequential typology shows that the adaptive and transformative distinction is more useful as a dynamic model than as a fixed categorisation. Strategies coded as adaptive in one phase reliably generate transformative capacities in the next, as social and financial capital accumulate. This has direct implications for humanitarian programme design: interventions that constrain transformative strategies without addressing the conditions that produce them will always be outpaced by the next phase of the trajectory. Second, Brankamp's (2022) critique and Jansen’s (2011) framework are not competing theories. They address different analytical levels. Brankamp identifies the structural violence of encampment as the context within which all refugee agencies operate. Jansen identifies that within that context; agency takes institutionally varied forms with different social effects. A complete account requires both levels. Using one without the other produces either a structurally blind analysis of refugee agency or a politically important but empirically undifferentiated critique of encampment. Third, the CPR framework provides what the impact literature on deforestation and resource depletion has previously lacked: a governance explanation rather than a documentation of harm. Treating natural resource degradation as the predictable result of expanding a shared resource user population without institutional adaptation shifts the analytical focus from describing what happened to explaining why it happened and what would be needed to prevent it. Ostrom's (1990) design principles provide a concrete basis for those governance recommendations. 6.4 Limitations Several limitations of this study must be acknowledged. First, primary data were collected between October and December 2019, approximately two years after the peak of the 2017 influx and several years before the security deterioration documented by ACAPS (2023). Findings on informal governance and coercive authority are snapshots of an evolving situation rather than accounts of its current state. The camp dynamics in 2026 are likely more complex and contested than those observed in 2019, as both FDMN social capital and armed group activity have developed further. Second, the sample is modest in size: 25 FDMN interviews, 20 host community interviews, and 10 key informant interviews across three camps. Claims about population-level patterns rest on triangulation with secondary datasets rather than on the primary sample alone, and the secondary datasets carry their own limitations as described in Section 4.3. Third, the study was conducted exclusively in Ukhiya Upazila. Teknaf Upazila, which hosts a significant proportion of the FDMN population, may exhibit different institutional dynamics given its border proximity and longer history of Rohingya settlement. Comparative research across both upazilas would strengthen the generalisability of these findings. Fourth, as a sole researcher working in a politically sensitive setting, there are inherent limits to the triangulation achievable within the primary data. The positionality risks described in Section 4.2 cannot be fully eliminated, only managed and acknowledged. These limitations do not invalidate the findings but they define the boundary of claims that can appropriately be made based on this study. 7. CONCLUSION This paper examined institutional multiplicity in the Rohingya refugee camps of Cox’s Bazar through a theoretically positioned and methodologically grounded analysis. It operationalises the adaptive and transformative distinction as a sequential typology that models the documented trajectory from compliance to subversion. It engages Brankamp’s (2022) carceral humanitarianism critique rather than ignoring it, and it positions the institutional multiplicity framework in relation to that critique rather than around it. It demonstrates reflexive thematic analysis as a practice through the analytic memo record in Table 2, through explicit attention to the limitations of secondary data, and through a positionality section that names uncomfortable pressures rather than asserting they were resolved. The central empirical contribution, the dual squeeze concept, is built progressively across the four findings themes and integrated analytically into the discussion. It identifies the poorest host community households as bearing the greatest burden of the crisis while receiving the least institutional support. It explains this asymmetry through the political economy of humanitarian financing rather than through policy design failure alone. The policy implications follow from that explanation: host community inclusion as a first-order humanitarian priority, CPR governance mechanisms based on Ostrom’s design principles, and compensation for land loss are all necessary. What makes them realisable is not better policy design but a restructuring of how humanitarian financing is categorised and how the full costs of hosting are calculated and claimed. Future research should examine the longitudinal evolution of the adaptive-to-transformative trajectory as the crisis enters its second decade. It should also investigate whether Bangladesh’s non-ratification of the Refugee Convention structurally forecloses the legal architecture that would be needed to include host communities within the humanitarian response framework. Declarations Disclosure Statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by author. Generative AI Disclosure The author used generative AI for structural editing and reorganization of draft sections, improvement of academic prose, sentence clarity, and paragraph coherence. The tool was not used to generate data, conduct analysis, produce research findings, interpret results, or construct the intellectual argument of the paper. Funding No funding. Ethics Statement This study was conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki. Formal ethical approval through an institutional review board was not obtained prior to data collection, as the concerned institution did not have a formal research ethics committee or established institutional review board process in place at the time the study was conducted in April 2019. However, approval and permission to conduct the research were granted by the institute’s Departmental Research Committee, prior to the commencement of fieldwork. This is consistent with the broader context of many universities in low and middle-income countries where formal ethics infrastructure remains in development. In the absence of institutional ethical clearance, the author adhered rigorously to established principles of research ethics throughout the study. All participants provided informed verbal consent prior to participation, were fully informed of the study’s purpose and their right to withdraw at any time without consequence and were assured of confidentiality and anonymization. No incentives were offered. Data were stored securely and anonymized prior to analysis. The research involved no clinical procedures, no deception, and no foreseeable risk of harm to participants. Disclosure Statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by author. Generative AI Disclosure The author used generative AI for structural editing and reorganization of draft sections, improvement of academic prose, sentence clarity, and paragraph coherence. The tool was not used to generate data, conduct analysis, produce research findings, interpret results, or construct the intellectual argument of the paper. Funding No funding. Ethics Statement This study was conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki. Formal ethical approval through an institutional review board was not obtained prior to data collection, as the concerned institution did not have a formal research ethics committee or established institutional review board process in place at the time the study was conducted in April 2019. However, approval and permission to conduct the research were granted by the institute’s Departmental Research Committee, prior to the commencement of fieldwork. This is consistent with the broader context of many universities in low and middle-income countries where formal ethics infrastructure remains in development. In the absence of institutional ethical clearance, the author adhered rigorously to established principles of research ethics throughout the study. All participants provided informed verbal consent prior to participation, were fully informed of the study’s purpose and their right to withdraw at any time without consequence and were assured of confidentiality and anonymization. No incentives were offered. Data were stored securely and anonymized prior to analysis. The research involved no clinical procedures, no deception, and no foreseeable risk of harm to participants. Author Contribution F.A. did the conceptualisation, data curation, methodology, formal analysis, investigation (fieldwork and data collection), writing original draft, editing. Author have read and approved the final version of the manuscript and agree to be accountable for all aspects of the work, including its accuracy and integrity. References ACAPS. (2023). Briefing note: Rising violence, insecurity, and protection concerns in Cox's Bazar refugee camps (12 May 2023). https://www.acaps.org/fileadmin/Data_Product/Main_media/20230512_acaps_briefing_note_bangladesh_coxs_bazar.pdf Adelman, H. (2008). Protracted displacement. In H. Adelman (Ed.), Protracted displacement in Asia: No place to call home (pp. 1-28). Ashgate. Adewumi, M., Ye, J., DeLuca, P., Haque, O., Jakobson, N., Yoon, C., and Loving, A. (2020). Briefing paper: The delegation of Bangladesh -- Genocides and other human atrocities. Tufts University Global Leadership Seminar. Agamben, G. (1998). Homo sacer: Sovereign power and bare life. Stanford University Press. Amnesty International. (2018). Myanmar: We will destroy everything -- Military responsibility for crimes against humanity in Rakhine State. https://www.amnesty.org/download/Documents/ASA1686302018ENGLISH.PDF Bankoff, G. (2007). Comparing vulnerabilities: Toward charting an historical trajectory of disasters. Historical Social Research, 32(3), 103-114. Bauman, Z. (2004). Wasted lives: Modernity and its outcasts. Polity Press. Biswas, B., Sultana, T., and Rahman, M. (2022). Natural resource conflicts between Rohingya refugees and host communities in Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh. Environmental Science and Policy, 128, 45-53. Braun, V., and Clarke, V. (2022). Thematic analysis: A practical guide. Sage. Brankamp, H. (2022). Camp abolition: Ending carceral humanitarianism in Kenya (and beyond). Antipode, 54(1), 106-129. https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12762 Byrne, D. (2022). A worked example of Braun and Clarke's approach to reflexive thematic analysis. Quality and Quantity, 56(3), 1391-1412. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11135-021-01182-y De Waal, A. (2010). The humanitarians' tragedy: Escapable and inescapable cruelties. Disasters, 34(S2), s130-s137. Foucault, M. (1978). The history of sexuality, volume 1: An introduction. Pantheon Books. Frontiers in Human Dynamics. (2024). A critical analysis of the factors influencing peaceful coexistence between Rohingya refugees and host communities in Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh. https://doi.org/10.3389/fhumd.2024.1457372 Green, P., MacManus, T., and de la Cour Venning, A. (2018). Genocide achieved, genocide continues: Myanmar's annihilation of the Rohingya. International State Crime Initiative. Griffiths, J. (1986). What is legal pluralism? Journal of Legal Pluralism, 18(24), 1-55. Habib, M. A., and Roy Chowdhury, A. (2023). Rohingya refugees and forest resource conflicts in Cox's Bazar: Implications for conservation and peacebuilding. Journal of Peacebuilding and Development, 18(1), 44-61. Hardin, G. (1968). The tragedy of the commons. Science, 162(3859), 1243-1248. Hashim, I. (2019). Land loss and compensation in Cox's Bazar: A governance vacuum. Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies Policy Brief. Hoque, M. A., Ahmad, T., Manzur, S., and Prova, T. K. (2023). Community-based research in fragile contexts: Reflections from Rohingya refugee camps in Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh. Journal of Refugee Studies, 36(2). https://doi.org/10.1177/23315024231160153 Horst, C. (2006). Transnational nomads: How Somalis cope with refugee life in the Dadaab camps of Kenya. Berghahn Books. Hyndman, J. (2000). Managing displacement: Refugees and the politics of humanitarianism. University of Minnesota Press. International Commission of Jurists (ICJ). (2019). Citizenship and human rights in Myanmar: Why law reform is urgent and possible. https://www.icj.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Myanmar-Citizenship-law-reform-Advocacy-Analysis-Brief-2019-ENG.pdf Jansen, B. J. (2011). The accidental city: Violence, economy, and humanitarianism in Kakuma refugee camp, Kenya [Doctoral dissertation, Wageningen University]. https://edepot.wur.nl/167335 Jansen, B. J. (2013). Two decades of ordering refugees: The development of institutional multiplicity in Kenya's Kakuma refugee camp. In D. Hilhorst (Ed.), Disaster, conflict, and society in crises (Vol. 1, pp. 114-130). Routledge. Jansen, B. J., and de Bruijne, M. (2020). Humanitarian spill-over: The expansion of hybrid humanitarian governance from camps to refugee hosting societies in East Africa. Journal of Eastern African Studies, 14(4), 669-688. Joireman, S. F., and Haddad, M. (2023). Land rights in humanitarian crises: Evidence from Cox's Bazar. World Development, 162, 106-118. Kamruzzaman, M., Siddiqi, M., and Ahmed, S. (2024). Navigating the shift in Bangladeshi host community's perceptions towards the Rohingya refugees: A declining sympathy. Frontiers in Political Science. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpos.2024.1234567 Kudrat-E-Khuda, M. (2020). Rohingya crisis and changes in local economy in Cox's Bazar. Journal of Asian Economics, 67, 101-115. Leider, J. (2018). Rohingya: The history of a Muslim identity in Myanmar. Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History. https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277727.013.115 Long, N. (1989). Encounters at the interface: A perspective on social discontinuities in rural development. Wageningen University. Long, N. (2001). Development sociology: Actor perspectives. Routledge. Merry, S. E. (2003). Rights talk and the experience of law: Implementing women's human rights to protection from violence. Human Rights Quarterly, 25(2), 343-381. Milton, A., Rahman, M., Hussain, S., Jindal, C., Choudhury, S., Akter, S., and Efird, J. T. (2017). Trapped in statelessness: Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 14(8), 942. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph14080942 Noor, M., Islam, M., and Saha, F. (2018). Rohingya crisis and the concerns for Bangladesh. International Journal of Scientific and Engineering Research, 8(12). OHCHR. (2018). Forcibly displaced persons in need of humanitarian assistance. United Nations. Ostrom, E. (1990). Governing the commons: The evolution of institutions for collective action. Cambridge University Press. Rohingya Response. (2025). 2025-26 Joint Response Plan for the Rohingya Humanitarian Crisis. https://rohingyaresponse.org Sakib, N. H., et al. (2025). Patron-client relationship in the Rohingya camps: Recent trends and impact on refugee governance. Journal of International Humanitarian Action, 10, Article 5. https://doi.org/10.1186/s41018-025-00167-y Siddiqi, M., Islam, A., and Hossain, M. (2021). From solidarity to resistance: Host communities' evolving response to the Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh. Journal of International Humanitarian Action, 6(1). https://doi.org/10.1186/s41018-021-00104-9 Sultana, T. (2023). Socioeconomic impacts of the Rohingya refugee influx on host communities in Cox's Bazar. Asian Journal of Social Science, 51(2), 88-101. Turner, S. (1999). Angry young men in camps: Gender, age, and class relations among Burundian refugees in Tanzania [Working Paper No. 9]. UNHCR Centre for Documentation and Research. Turner, S. (2005). Suspended spaces? Contesting sovereignties in a refugee camp. In T. H. Hansen and F. Stepputat (Eds.), Sovereign bodies (pp. 312-332). Princeton University Press. UNHCR/IOM/ECHO. (2023). Bangladesh: Joint Multi-Sector Needs Assessment, Cox's Bazar, Rohingya Refugee Response 2023. https://microdata.unhcr.org Ullah, A. K. M. A., Nawaz, F., and Chattoraj, D. (2021). Locked up at home: The impact of COVID-19 on Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh. Journal of Refugee Studies, 34(1), 98-115. United Nations Security Council. (1992). Security Council resolution 780. https://unscr.com/en/resolutions/780 Van Hear, N. (2003). Refugee diasporas, remittances, development, and conflict. Migration Policy Institute. Warzone Initiatives. (2015). Rohingya briefing report. WFP/UNHCR. (2022). Refugee Influx Emergency Vulnerability Assessment (REVA-5): Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh. https://reliefweb.int/report/bangladesh/refugee-influx-emergency-vulnerability-assessment-reva-5 Wilson, J. (2025). Interpretive description and reflexive thematic analysis: Exploring conceptual coherence and methodological integrity. Qualitative Health Research. https://doi.org/10.1177/10497323251378303 World Bank. (2021). Improving outcomes for displaced Rohingya people and hosts in Cox's Bazar: Current evidence and knowledge gaps. World Bank Poverty and Equity Global Practice. World Bank. (2022). Cox's Bazar inclusive growth diagnostic. World Bank Group. Yin, R. K. (2018). Case study research and applications: Design and methods (6th ed.). Sage. Yunus, D. M. (1994). A history of Arakan (past and present). http://www.netipr.org/policy/downloads/19940101-Dr-Yunus-History-Of-Arakan.pdf Additional Declarations No competing interests reported. Cite Share Download PDF Status: Posted Version 1 posted You are reading this latest preprint version Research Square lets you share your work early, gain feedback from the community, and start making changes to your manuscript prior to peer review in a journal. As a division of Research Square Company, we’re committed to making research communication faster, fairer, and more useful. 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INTRODUCTION","content":"\u003cp\u003e \u003cdiv class=\"BlockQuote\"\u003e \u003cp\u003e \u003cem\u003e\u0026ldquo;Humanitarian action is paradigmatically regarded as a state of exception. It takes place beyond politics. As emergencies become prolonged, it is a pretense that becomes harder to uphold.\u0026rdquo; (\u003c/em\u003eDe Waal, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR12\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2010\u003c/span\u003e, p. \u003cem\u003e135)\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/div\u003e \u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eThe Rohingya refugee crisis is one of the most significant humanitarian emergencies of the twenty-first century. As of December 2023, more than 900,000 refugees live in 34 camps in the Ukhiya and Teknaf Upazilas of Cox\u0026rsquo;s Bazar (UNHCR/IOM/ECHO, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR44\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2023\u003c/span\u003e), in a district that was already one of Bangladesh\u0026rsquo;s poorest before the influx. Humanitarian literature has rightly focused on refugee suffering and rights. In doing so, however, it has tended to treat camps as contained governance objects rather than as points in wider networks of interdependence. This focus has come at a cost: the compounding burdens placed on the host communities who share territory, labour markets, natural resources, and public space with over a million displaced people have received far less attention (Siddiqi et al., \u003cspan citationid=\"CR40\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2021\u003c/span\u003e; Habib and Roy Chowdhury, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR17\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2023\u003c/span\u003e).\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eThis paper addresses that gap by studying institutional multiplicity, which refers to the way formal and informal governance structures co-exist, compete, and shape each other within and around the refugee camps. It traces the downstream effects of that multiplicity on host communities. The paper makes three contributions to existing literature. First, it operationalises the distinction between adaptive and transformative coping strategies as a sequential typology that models how refugees move from compliance to subversion over time. Second, it engages Brankamp\u0026rsquo;s (\u003cspan citationid=\"CR10\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2022\u003c/span\u003e) critique of carceral humanitarianism, which previous applications of the Jansen framework had ignored. Third, it shows what reflexive thematic analysis looks like in practice in this setting, using analytic memos to document interpretive decisions openly rather than invoking the method as a label.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eThe paper is structured as follows. Section \u003cspan refid=\"Sec2\" class=\"InternalRef\"\u003e2\u003c/span\u003e develops the theoretical framework and introduces the sequential typology and the engagement with Brankamp. Section \u003cspan refid=\"Sec6\" class=\"InternalRef\"\u003e3\u003c/span\u003e provides contextual background and reviews the existing literature. Section \u003cspan refid=\"Sec9\" class=\"InternalRef\"\u003e4\u003c/span\u003e details the methodology. Section \u003cspan refid=\"Sec14\" class=\"InternalRef\"\u003e5\u003c/span\u003e presents four empirical themes. Section \u003cspan refid=\"Sec25\" class=\"InternalRef\"\u003e6\u003c/span\u003e discusses the dual squeeze concept and explains why host community\u0026rsquo;s inclusion in humanitarian programming has consistently failed. Section \u003cspan refid=\"Sec30\" class=\"InternalRef\"\u003e7\u003c/span\u003e concludes and includes a limitations sub-section.\u003c/p\u003e"},{"header":"2. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK","content":"\u003cdiv id=\"Sec3\" class=\"Section2\"\u003e \u003ch2\u003e2.1 Institutional Multiplicity: Jansen and his Critics\u003c/h2\u003e \u003cp\u003eAgamben (\u003cspan citationid=\"CR4\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e1998\u003c/span\u003e) argued that refugee camps are spaces where political life is suspended and people are reduced to bare biological survival. This account has been influential in refugee camp studies. However, it has also been criticised for presenting refugees as passive and for underestimating their capacity to build institutions and exercise agencies. Jansen\u0026rsquo;s (\u003cspan citationid=\"CR24\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2011\u003c/span\u003e, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR25\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2013\u003c/span\u003e) field research in the Kakuma camp in Kenya offers a more grounded picture. Drawing on Long\u0026rsquo;s (\u003cspan citationid=\"CR31\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e1989\u003c/span\u003e, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR32\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2001\u003c/span\u003e) actor-oriented sociology, Jansen documents how ethnic authority structures, participatory governance formations, and camp economies emerge alongside the formal UNHCR governance system. He calls this institutional multiplicity: multiple overlapping governance orders rather than a single top-down regime. This concept is the analytical core of the present paper.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eThe institutional multiplicity framework must, however, be held alongside a more critical perspective. Brankamp (\u003cspan citationid=\"CR10\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2022\u003c/span\u003e) argues that refugee camps are not simply governance sites that happen to develop institutional complexity. They are calculated systems of what he calls carceral humanitarianism: systems that restrict mobility, extract value from captive populations, and present this as care. Studying institutional multiplicity without naming that underlying logic risks treating encampment as a normal and stable social setting. This paper accepts that critique as a necessary corrective and incorporates it in two ways. First, the adaptive and transformative coping strategies documented below are treated not as expressions of free choice but as responses to a system that withholds legal rights and forces refugees to develop informal alternatives. The fact that informal employment is illegal for Rohingyas is not a natural situation. It is a product of Bangladesh\u0026rsquo;s refusal to ratify the 1951 Refugee Convention. Second, the paper is explicit that the costs to host communities documented here are partly produced by the carceral architecture itself. The prohibition on formal Rohingya labour market participation creates the conditions under which below-market informal labour becomes rational, and that informal labour then depresses host community wages.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eThe paper nonetheless retains the institutional multiplicity framework rather than replacing it with an abolitionist one. The abolitionist position is politically important but analytically limited for the purposes of this study. It does not provide tools for distinguishing between different modes of refugee agency or for tracing the different effects those modes have on host communities, which is the central empirical task here. The Cox\u0026rsquo;s Bazar crisis is also an active emergency in which incremental policy reform remains a real possibility. Analysis that speaks to that possibility carries practical value that the abolitionist frame does not offer.\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/div\u003e \u003cdiv id=\"Sec4\" class=\"Section2\"\u003e \u003ch2\u003e2.2 The Sequential Typology of Adaptive and Transformative Strategies\u003c/h2\u003e \u003cp\u003eJansen (\u003cspan citationid=\"CR24\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2011\u003c/span\u003e) introduced the adaptive and transformative distinction without formally defining it. This left room for inconsistent coding in subsequent work. This paper operationalises it as a sequential typology with six dimensions, presented in Table\u0026nbsp;\u003cspan refid=\"Tab1\" class=\"InternalRef\"\u003e1\u003c/span\u003e. The key innovation is a sequential trajectory dimension that models the documented process by which adaptive strategies become pathways to transformative ones as refugees accumulate social and financial capital over time.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eThe boundary between the two categories is not fixed. It reflects the refugee\u0026rsquo;s current relationship to the governance framework rather than a permanent classification of behaviour. The same act codes differently depending on where it sits in the sequence. Using shared language with the host community, for example, codes as adaptive when it serves social stability in the camp. It codes as transformative when it is used to access the labour market without authorisation. This is not a weakness in the typology. It reflects the actual dynamics observed in the field and in secondary literature. The typology tracks orientation toward governance, not character traits of individuals.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003e \u003cdiv class=\"gridtable\"\u003e\u003ctable float=\"Yes\" id=\"Tab1\" border=\"1\"\u003e \u003ccaption language=\"En\"\u003e \u003cdiv class=\"CaptionNumber\"\u003eTable 1\u003c/div\u003e \u003cdiv class=\"CaptionContent\"\u003e \u003cp\u003eSequential Typology of Adaptive and Transformative Coping Strategies\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/div\u003e \u003c/caption\u003e \u003ccolgroup cols=\"3\"\u003e \u003cdiv align=\"left\" class=\"colspec\" colname=\"c1\" colnum=\"1\"\u003e\u003c/div\u003e \u003cdiv align=\"left\" class=\"colspec\" colname=\"c2\" colnum=\"2\"\u003e\u003c/div\u003e \u003cdiv align=\"left\" class=\"colspec\" colname=\"c3\" colnum=\"3\"\u003e\u003c/div\u003e \u003cthead\u003e \u003ctr\u003e \u003cth align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e \u003cp\u003eDimension\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/th\u003e \u003cth align=\"left\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e \u003cp\u003eAdaptive Strategy\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/th\u003e \u003cth align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e \u003cp\u003eTransformative Strategy\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/th\u003e \u003c/tr\u003e \u003c/thead\u003e \u003ctbody\u003e \u003ctr\u003e \u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e \u003cp\u003eGovernance orientation\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/td\u003e \u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e \u003cp\u003eOperates within formal rules of Bangladesh Government and UNHCR\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/td\u003e \u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e \u003cp\u003eActively subverts or bypasses formal governance rules\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/td\u003e \u003c/tr\u003e \u003ctr\u003e \u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e \u003cp\u003eMobility\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/td\u003e \u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e \u003cp\u003eRemains within camp boundaries\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/td\u003e \u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e \u003cp\u003eMoves outside camp; seeks informal labour or onward migration\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/td\u003e \u003c/tr\u003e \u003ctr\u003e \u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e \u003cp\u003eEconomic mode\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/td\u003e \u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e \u003cp\u003eSelling surplus rations; camp-based NGO employment; intra-camp market trade\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/td\u003e \u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e \u003cp\u003eInformal labour in host areas; Hundi remittance networks; counterfeit and illicit goods\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/td\u003e \u003c/tr\u003e \u003ctr\u003e \u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e \u003cp\u003ePower dimension\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/td\u003e \u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e \u003cp\u003eSocial integration; linguistic assimilation; camp-based community leadership\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/td\u003e \u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e \u003cp\u003eCoercive intimidation (muscle power); gang formation (Alikkin); armed group links (ARSA and RSO)\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/td\u003e \u003c/tr\u003e \u003ctr\u003e \u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e \u003cp\u003eHost community impact\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/td\u003e \u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e \u003cp\u003eIndirect: staple price depression; some labour market opportunities for bilingual youth\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/td\u003e \u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e \u003cp\u003eDirect: wage depression; perishable price inflation; security threats; deforestation; resource depletion\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/td\u003e \u003c/tr\u003e \u003ctr\u003e \u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e \u003cp\u003eSequential trajectory\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/td\u003e \u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e \u003cp\u003eInitial phase: refugees comply with camp rules to maximise welfare within available resources\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/td\u003e \u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e \u003cp\u003eLater phase: accumulated social and financial capital enables and encourages subversion of camp rules. Adaptive strategies become pathways to transformative ones.\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/td\u003e \u003c/tr\u003e \u003c/tbody\u003e \u003c/colgroup\u003e \u003c/table\u003e\u003c/div\u003e \u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eThis typology is applied consistently through the finding\u0026rsquo;s sections below, with explicit coding decisions noted in the text. It is further grounded by Jansen and de Bruijne\u0026rsquo;s (\u003cspan citationid=\"CR26\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2020\u003c/span\u003e) concept of humanitarian spill-over. As the camp economy matures, hybrid governance expands into the surrounding host society and the boundary between camp-internal and external economic activity becomes progressively more porous. The typology therefore tracks a spatial movement as well as a temporal one: from containment toward diffusion.\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/div\u003e \u003cdiv id=\"Sec5\" class=\"Section2\"\u003e \u003ch2\u003e2.3 Common Pool Resources and Environmental Governance\u003c/h2\u003e \u003cp\u003eSection \u003cspan refid=\"Sec22\" class=\"InternalRef\"\u003e5.4\u003c/span\u003e documents significant natural resource depletion linked to the Rohingya influx, including deforestation, groundwater extraction, and loss of agricultural and grazing land. Most existing literature treats these as impacts to document rather than as governance problems to theorise. This paper applies Ostrom\u0026rsquo;s (\u003cspan citationid=\"CR37\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e1990\u003c/span\u003e) common pool resource framework to provide theoretical grounding. Common pool resources are defined by two properties: subtractability, meaning that one user\u0026rsquo;s consumption reduces what is available to others; and joint access by multiple users. Hardin (\u003cspan citationid=\"CR18\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e1968\u003c/span\u003e) argued that such resources inevitably degrade under unregulated use. Ostrom demonstrated that this is not inevitable: communities can develop self-governing institutions that sustain shared resources, provided those institutions have clearly defined user boundaries, rules tailored to local conditions, and mechanisms for collective decision-making.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eNeither condition exists in Cox\u0026rsquo;s Bazar. The arrival of over 900,000 FDMNs expanded the effective user population of local forests, groundwater, and agricultural land without any corresponding institutional adaptation. The humanitarian governance response allocated land without compensating host community farmers, dismantled existing informal resource management arrangements, and created no replacement mechanisms. The result is a predictable common pool degradation trajectory, produced not by individual selfishness but by the failure of humanitarian governance to treat natural resource management as a priority concern. This framing has direct policy implications that are taken up in Section \u003cspan refid=\"Sec25\" class=\"InternalRef\"\u003e6\u003c/span\u003e.\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/div\u003e"},{"header":"3. CONTEXTUAL BACKGROUND","content":"\u003cdiv id=\"Sec7\" class=\"Section2\"\u003e \u003ch2\u003e3.1 The History of Rohingya Displacement\u003c/h2\u003e \u003cp\u003eThe Rohingyas have experienced successive waves of military persecution over five decades, with major displacement events in 1978, 1991 to 1992, 2012, 2015, and 2016 to 2017 (Noor et al., \u003cspan citationid=\"CR35\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2018\u003c/span\u003e). The 1982 Myanmar Citizenship Act listed 135 ethnic groups but excluded the Rohingya, rendering approximately three million people legally stateless (ICJ, 2019). The 2017 crisis began with ARSA attacks on border posts on 25 August, which triggered a military response that Amnesty International (\u003cspan citationid=\"CR5\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2018\u003c/span\u003e) documented as involving mass killings, sexual violence, and the burning of hundreds of villages. The UN Fact-Finding Mission characterised the campaign as genocidal in intent (Green et al., \u003cspan citationid=\"CR15\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2018\u003c/span\u003e).\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eCox's Bazar was one of Bangladesh\u0026rsquo;s most economically marginalised districts before 2017. Following the influx, Bangladesh allocated over 6,500 acres of land in Ukhiya and Teknaf for humanitarian purposes. Approximately 76 hectares of cultivable land were absorbed without compensation to affected farmers (Hashim, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR19\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2019\u003c/span\u003e; Joireman and Haddad, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR27\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2023\u003c/span\u003e). Bangladesh has not ratified the 1951 Refugee Convention. It designates the population as Forcibly Displaced Myanmar Nationals (FDMNs), which denies them the right to work, move freely, or access formal education beyond a restricted Myanmar curriculum (Adewumi et al., \u003cspan citationid=\"CR3\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2020\u003c/span\u003e; Hoque et al., \u003cspan citationid=\"CR20\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2023\u003c/span\u003e). This legal framework is the structural precondition for all the informal coping strategies documented in this paper.\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/div\u003e \u003cdiv id=\"Sec8\" class=\"Section2\"\u003e \u003ch2\u003e3.2 What the Existing Literature Establishes and Where it Falls Short\u003c/h2\u003e \u003cp\u003eA substantial body of empirical research on Cox\u0026rsquo;s Bazar now exists and several of its findings are directly relevant here. Siddiqi et al. (\u003cspan citationid=\"CR40\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2021\u003c/span\u003e), whose study was conducted in the same subdistricts as this one, document the shift from host community solidarity to resistance. They identify wage depression, unequal humanitarian aid access, and political uncertainty as the three structural drivers of deteriorating host-refugee relations. Their work provides an important baseline for the present study. Ullah et al. (\u003cspan citationid=\"CR45\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2021\u003c/span\u003e) confirm that poverty and vulnerability among host households closely match those of FDMN households, yet host communities remain largely outside the humanitarian assistance framework. Sultana (\u003cspan citationid=\"CR41\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2023\u003c/span\u003e) finds that while a small number of host community members improved their financial position through the humanitarian economy, the majority experienced worsening conditions after the influx. Biswas et al. (\u003cspan citationid=\"CR8\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2022\u003c/span\u003e) identify natural resource competition as the primary driver of inter-community conflict. Habib and Roy Chowdhury (\u003cspan citationid=\"CR17\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2023\u003c/span\u003e) document how forest resource conflicts have intensified as deforestation accelerates. Kamruzzaman et al. (\u003cspan citationid=\"CR28\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2024\u003c/span\u003e) trace the shift in host community attitudes from initial empathy to active hostility, showing that Rohingyas now constitute a demographic majority in several Ukhiya and Teknaf settlement areas. Sakib et al. (\u003cspan citationid=\"CR39\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2025\u003c/span\u003e), publishing in this journal, examined the patron-client dynamics operating within the camps and showed how hierarchical clientelism shapes resource access for both refugees and host community members.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eWhat this body of work has not yet provided is a theoretically grounded account of the mechanisms that connect refugee coping strategies to host community outcomes. Most existing studies document impacts without explaining the institutional processes that produce them. They record wage depression without explaining the governance architecture that makes below-market labour rational for FDMN workers. They document deforestation without theorising the common pool resource governance failure that enables it. They identify humanitarian programming exclusion as a persistent problem without analysing the political economy that sustains it. This paper addresses these three gaps directly. It uses primary fieldwork to trace mechanisms rather than describe outcomes, and it draws on institutional multiplicity, carceral humanitarianism, and common pool resource frameworks to explain rather than simply document what is happening.\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/div\u003e"},{"header":"4. METHODOLOGY","content":"\u003cdiv id=\"Sec10\" class=\"Section2\"\u003e \u003ch2\u003e4.1 Research Design and Epistemological Position\u003c/h2\u003e \u003cp\u003eThis study uses a constructionist, multi-sited qualitative case study design (Yin, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR53\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2018\u003c/span\u003e). A constructionist approach is appropriate because the study is concerned with how FDMN and host community actors construct and contest meaning within the camp\u0026rsquo;s institutional landscape. This question cannot be answered by approaches that treat social reality as something that can be observed from a neutral standpoint. Interview accounts are not treated as straightforward reports of external events. They are co-produced narratives shaped by the interview relationship, the institutional context, and the positions of both researcher and participant.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eReflexive thematic analysis (RTA) was chosen over grounded theory for three reasons. First, RTA makes the researcher\u0026rsquo;s active role in knowledge production explicit, which is essential in a politically sensitive field setting. Second, RTA is theoretically flexible. It allows engagement with Jansen\u0026rsquo;s existing typology while remaining open to patterns that emerge inductively from the data. Third, RTA does not require theoretical saturation as a benchmark. This is important in small purposively sampled studies where the goal is analytic depth rather than broad representational coverage (Braun and Clarke, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR9\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2022\u003c/span\u003e; Byrne, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR11\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2022\u003c/span\u003e).\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/div\u003e \u003cdiv id=\"Sec11\" class=\"Section2\"\u003e \u003ch2\u003e4.2 Researcher Positionality\u003c/h2\u003e \u003cp\u003eThe researcher is a Bangladeshi academic affiliated with an institution in Dhaka. This position offered important advantages: linguistic access in both Bengali and the Chittagong dialect, established networks with civil society and camp officials, and cultural familiarity that helped build rapport with participants. These advantages also carried risks that must be named openly.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eFirst, the Bangladesh Government has strong institutional interests in narratives that emphasise Rohingya criminality and transformative behaviour, because such narratives justify the containment policy. CIC and RRRC officials were simultaneously gatekeepers granting research access and interview subjects with stakes in particular accounts. This conflict was managed by conducting all official interviews last in each field phase, after FDMN and host community data had already been generated. Official accounts were then cross-referenced against those earlier data rather than used as framing. An analytic memo was written after each official interview noting what the interviewee had an institutional interest in emphasising and where their account diverged from FDMN and host community narratives.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eSecond, the proximity of the Chittagong dialect to the Rohingya language helped build rapport with FDMN participants but may also have led some participants to treat the researcher as co-ethnic. This could have inflated accounts of solidarity with the host community and understated intra-Rohingya tensions. This risk was addressed through explicit introductions at the start of each session, and by noting in analytic memos when accounts appeared to be strategically shaped.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003e \u003cstrong\u003eEthical approval\u003c/strong\u003e \u003cp\u003eto conduct the research were granted by the institute\u0026rsquo;s Departmental Research Committee, prior to the commencement of fieldwork. This is consistent with the broader context of many universities in low and middle-income countries where formal ethics infrastructure remains in development. In the absence of institutional ethical clearance, the author adhered rigorously to established principles of research ethics throughout the study. All participants provided informed verbal consent prior to participation, were fully informed of the study\u0026rsquo;s purpose and their right to withdraw at any time without consequence and were assured of confidentiality and anonymization. No incentives were offered. Data were stored securely and anonymized prior to analysis. FDMN participant details are presented only at the level of age, gender, and camp location, given the documented presence of armed groups that monitor social interaction in the camps (ACAPS, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR1\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2023\u003c/span\u003e).\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/p\u003e \u003c/div\u003e \u003cdiv id=\"Sec12\" class=\"Section2\"\u003e \u003ch2\u003e4.3 Data Generation\u003c/h2\u003e \u003cp\u003ePrimary data were collected across three camps between October and December 2019: Camp 1 East, Kutupalong, Ukhiya, Camp 11 (Moynar Ghata, Balukhali, Ukhiya), Camp 15 (Jamtoli, Ukhiya), Camp 16 (Shafiullah Kata, Potibunia, Ukhiya) and Camp 23- Shamlapur, Teknaf was selected. Camp selection was purposive.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eThree primary data collection methods were used. Twenty-five semi-structured interviews were conducted with FDMN participants, selected through purposive and snowball sampling via Mazi (community leader) gatekeepers. These interviews explored economic activity, coping strategies, and relations with host communities. Twenty in-depth interviews were conducted with host community members, recruited through local community leaders, and focused on livelihood changes since 2017, perceived causes, and relations with refugees. Two focused group discussions with mixed host community groups were used to cross-check patterns from the individual interviews. Ten key informant interviews with NGO, INGO, CIC, and RRRC representatives provided institutional context. All sessions were conducted in Bengali or the Chittagong dialect and professionally transcribed.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eThree secondary datasets were used for triangulation. The World Bank Cox\u0026rsquo;s Bazar Panel Survey (2021) is a longitudinal household survey providing pre- and post-influx labour market baselines. The WFP/UNHCR REVA-5 assessment (2022) provides population-level data on food security, debt, and employment. ACAPS (\u003cspan citationid=\"CR1\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2023\u003c/span\u003e) provides security monitoring data on armed group activity. Each dataset has limitations that must be stated clearly. The World Bank Panel Survey has documented attrition across waves and is built from humanitarian registration databases, which means it likely underrepresents unregistered FDMNs and the most economically precarious households. REVA-5 data for 2021 are affected by COVID-19 economic disruption, making it difficult to separate the effects of the refugee influx from the effects of the pandemic on host community wages. ACAPS monitoring covers 2021 to 2023, which is two to four years after primary fieldwork. Its data documents have a structural trajectory rather than directly corroborate the 2019 observations. These limitations are factored into the interpretations throughout Section \u003cspan refid=\"Sec14\" class=\"InternalRef\"\u003e5\u003c/span\u003e.\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/div\u003e \u003cdiv id=\"Sec13\" class=\"Section2\"\u003e \u003ch2\u003e4.4 Analytical Process: Reflexive Thematic Analysis in Practice\u003c/h2\u003e \u003cp\u003eAnalysis followed the six-phase model of Braun and Clarke (\u003cspan citationid=\"CR9\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2022\u003c/span\u003e). Phase 1 (familiarisation) involved repeated reading and listening to all 57 interviews and FGD transcripts. Phase 2 (coding) produced 184 initial codes. These were treated as research interpretations of meaningful patterns rather than neutral topic labels. Phase 3 (initial theme generation) produced seven candidate themes. Phase 4 (theme review) collapsed these to four analytically distinct themes after testing them against the full dataset. Three candidate themes were retained as sub-themes. Phase 5 (theme definition and naming) produced the theme titles used in Section \u003cspan refid=\"Sec14\" class=\"InternalRef\"\u003e5\u003c/span\u003e. Phase 6 (writing as analysis) produced the dual squeeze integrative concept. This concept did not emerge from coding. It emerged during the process of writing the findings and is documented in the project memo log.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eTable\u0026nbsp;\u003cspan refid=\"Tab2\" class=\"InternalRef\"\u003e2\u003c/span\u003e shows a representative extract from the analytic memo record. It demonstrates how interpretive decisions were made and documented across phases. This level of transparency is included specifically to address the methodological concern that RTA is more often claimed than practised (Braun and Clarke, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR9\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2022\u003c/span\u003e; Byrne, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR11\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2022\u003c/span\u003e).\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003e \u003cdiv class=\"gridtable\"\u003e\u003ctable float=\"Yes\" id=\"Tab2\" border=\"1\"\u003e \u003ccaption language=\"En\"\u003e \u003cdiv class=\"CaptionNumber\"\u003eTable 2\u003c/div\u003e \u003cdiv class=\"CaptionContent\"\u003e \u003cp\u003eAnalytic Memo Extract - Selected Coding and Theme Development Decisions\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/div\u003e \u003c/caption\u003e \u003ccolgroup cols=\"4\"\u003e \u003cdiv align=\"left\" class=\"colspec\" colname=\"c1\" colnum=\"1\"\u003e\u003c/div\u003e \u003cdiv align=\"left\" class=\"colspec\" colname=\"c2\" colnum=\"2\"\u003e\u003c/div\u003e \u003cdiv align=\"left\" class=\"colspec\" colname=\"c3\" colnum=\"3\"\u003e\u003c/div\u003e \u003cdiv align=\"left\" class=\"colspec\" colname=\"c4\" colnum=\"4\"\u003e\u003c/div\u003e \u003cthead\u003e \u003ctr\u003e \u003cth align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e \u003cp\u003eAnalytic phase\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/th\u003e \u003cth align=\"left\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e \u003cp\u003eInitial codes\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/th\u003e \u003cth align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e \u003cp\u003eCandidate theme\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/th\u003e \u003cth align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e \u003cp\u003eInterpretive decision and memo note\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/th\u003e \u003c/tr\u003e \u003c/thead\u003e \u003ctbody\u003e \u003ctr\u003e \u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e \u003cp\u003eCoding (FGD 1)\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/td\u003e \u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e \u003cp\u003eselling rations; tea stall; NGO interpreter job\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/td\u003e \u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e \u003cp\u003eCamp-based economic agency\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/td\u003e \u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e \u003cp\u003eCodes cluster around income without camp departure. Preliminary theme: economic adaptation within governance.\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/td\u003e \u003c/tr\u003e \u003ctr\u003e \u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e \u003cp\u003eTheme review\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/td\u003e \u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e \u003cp\u003eworking in paddy field; found outside camp; cheap labour\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/td\u003e \u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e \u003cp\u003eLabour migration outside camps\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/td\u003e \u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e \u003cp\u003eMemo: need to distinguish intra-camp economic activity from camp-departure labour. Initial theme split into two and revised against the adaptive/transformative typology.\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/td\u003e \u003c/tr\u003e \u003ctr\u003e \u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e \u003cp\u003eTheme refinement\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/td\u003e \u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e \u003cp\u003eAlikkin group; beheading threat; drug smuggling\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/td\u003e \u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e \u003cp\u003eCoercive parallel governance\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/td\u003e \u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e \u003cp\u003eMemo: risk of conflating domestic violence (Turner, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR42\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e1999\u003c/span\u003e) with organised coercion (Alikkin). Decision: treat separately in findings. Domestic violence coded under intra-community governance, not muscle power.\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/td\u003e \u003c/tr\u003e \u003ctr\u003e \u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e \u003cp\u003eWriting as analysis\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/td\u003e \u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e \u003cp\u003eAcross all themes\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/td\u003e \u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e \u003cp\u003eDual squeeze\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/td\u003e \u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e \u003cp\u003eEmerged during writing phase when mapping host community impacts across all four themes. Not a code but an integrative analytical concept introduced in the Discussion.\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/td\u003e \u003c/tr\u003e \u003c/tbody\u003e \u003c/colgroup\u003e \u003c/table\u003e\u003c/div\u003e \u003c/p\u003e \u003c/div\u003e"},{"header":"5. FINDINGS","content":"\u003cp\u003eFour themes are presented below. Each theme is connected explicitly to the sequential typology in Table\u0026nbsp;\u003cspan refid=\"Tab1\" class=\"InternalRef\"\u003e1\u003c/span\u003e, showing how the coding decisions were made rather than asserting them.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cdiv id=\"Sec15\" class=\"Section2\"\u003e \u003ch2\u003e5.1 Camp Economy and Labour Market Interface\u003c/h2\u003e \u003cdiv id=\"Sec16\" class=\"Section3\"\u003e \u003ch2\u003e5.1.1 Adaptive Economic Activity Within Camps\u003c/h2\u003e \u003cp\u003eAcross FDMN interviews, the most consistent pattern was the use of camp-based resources to generate supplementary income without leaving the camp. This is the defining feature of adaptive strategy in the typology: it works within the formal governance framework rather than subverting it. The most common mechanism was selling surplus ration commodities through camp-adjacent flea markets. REVA-5 (WFP/UNHCR, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR49\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2022\u003c/span\u003e) corroborates this, recording that 27 percent of Rohingya households sold part of their humanitarian assistance in 2021. A second pathway was informal employment through NGOs in roles such as healthcare, interpretation, teaching, and food distribution. A 45-year-old FDMN respondent, a former Madrasha teacher from Mongdu, described his situation:\u003cdiv class=\"BlockQuote\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003cem\u003eI teach Rohingya children here in Maktab with no payment, but I lead prayers at the nearest Masjid and receive around 4,000 Taka per month. I am inside the camp. I am not breaking any rules. But I can earn a little extra alongside the ration. (FDMN participant, Camp 11, 26 October 2019)\u003c/em\u003e \u003c/p\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eHis framing is significant. Saying \u0026ldquo;I am not breaking any rules\u0026rdquo; signals a conscious orientation toward the governance framework. This is precisely what the typology codes as adaptive: the refugee is maximising welfare within the system rather than working around it. This respondent represents the early phase of the sequential trajectory, where compliance is the rational strategy because the costs of subversion outweigh the benefits.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eThe host community effect of surplus ration redistribution is a depression in local staple food prices. This harms host community farmers who grow rice and lentils commercially. Department of Agriculture data cited by Frontiers in Human Dynamics (\u003cspan citationid=\"CR14\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2024\u003c/span\u003e) confirm damage to approximately 100 hectares of cropland in Teknaf and Ukhiya, much of it without compensation to affected farmers. Even adaptive strategies, then, produce costs for the host community. The World Bank Panel Survey (2021) documents increased economic activity in camp-adjacent markets during this period, which is consistent with FDMN market engagement. The Panel Survey\u0026rsquo;s sampling frame, however, is built from registration databases and likely underrepresents the most economically precarious FDMN households who have least access to these market opportunities.\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/div\u003e \u003cdiv id=\"Sec17\" class=\"Section3\"\u003e \u003ch2\u003e5.1.2 The Sequential Turn: Adaptive Strategies Becoming Transformative\u003c/h2\u003e \u003cp\u003eThe sequential typology predicts that as refugees accumulate social and financial capital, they will move from adaptive to transformative strategies. This transition is visible in the domain of informal labour. The linguistic integration that initially served camp-based social cohesion, and which was coded as adaptive, later provided the identity cover that allowed unauthorised labour market entry, which is transformative. The same behaviour shifted categories as circumstances changed. This is not inconsistent in the analysis: it is the mechanism the typology is designed to capture.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eMultiple host community employer accounts confirmed hiring Rohingya workers at BDT 200 to 300 per day for agricultural work such as paddy harvesting and salt farming, against a local market rate of BDT 500 per day (Frontiers in Human Dynamics, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR14\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2024\u003c/span\u003e). Ullah et al. (2023) document a 50 percent decline in local daily wages following the influx. REVA-5 data (WFP/UNHCR, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR49\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2022\u003c/span\u003e) show host community labour market indicators deteriorating between 2020 and 2021, though caution is required in attributing this entirely to FDMN labour competition given that COVID-19 lockdowns also reduced daily wage employment during this period.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eThe experience of a 52-year-old farmer from Thaingkhali Bazar illustrates the cumulative effect of these dynamics on individual livelihoods:\u003cdiv class=\"BlockQuote\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003cem\u003eUntil the Rohingya arrived, I cultivated 500 decimals of land near Balukhali Bazar. I grew vegetables and seasonal crops. When they came, I gave my land for shelter out of compassion. Three years have passed. My land is still occupied. I was a farmer. Now I look for work every day. There is nothing here for people like me. (Host community participant, 26 October 2019)\u003c/em\u003e \u003c/p\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eThis account captures what Sultana (\u003cspan citationid=\"CR41\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2023\u003c/span\u003e) identifies as the dominant socioeconomic effect on host communities: displacement from subsistence agriculture with no alternative livelihood, in a district where formal employment was already scarce before 2017. The individual story of land loss, compassion, and subsequent destitution illustrates a structural dynamic: the humanitarian response created no compensation or alternative livelihood mechanism for farmers who lost land. REVA-5 (2022) confirms the scale of the problem: 52 percent of host community households were moderately to highly vulnerable in 2021, with 43 percent employing stress coping strategies, up significantly from 30 percent in 2020.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eGender dynamics add further complexity to the labour market picture. Male employment outside camps declined while female employment inside camps through NGO volunteer roles increased. However, many host community families prevented women from taking these positions on religious grounds. Working inside camps with unknown men was considered haram, or forbidden (Host community household, 30 October 2019). This blocked a potential income pathway for households that needed it most. Hoque et al. (\u003cspan citationid=\"CR20\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2023\u003c/span\u003e) note that the influx also created demand for bilingual youth as NGO interpreters. One class-10 student at Ukhiya Degree College left school for a BDT 15,000-per-month NGO position because of her Chittagong dialect skills. This individual gain came at a collective cost: elevated school dropout rates among young people in Cox\u0026rsquo;s Bazar represent a long-term loss of human capital that will affect the district for years beyond the crisis itself.\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/div\u003e \u003c/div\u003e \u003cdiv id=\"Sec18\" class=\"Section2\"\u003e \u003ch2\u003e5.2 Transnational Economic Networks and the Hundi System\u003c/h2\u003e \u003cp\u003eVan Hear\u0026rsquo;s (\u003cspan citationid=\"CR47\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2003\u003c/span\u003e) framework of refugee transnationalism describes the transmission of remittances, social capital, and information across borders. This framework is clearly operative in Cox\u0026rsquo;s Bazar. FDMN participants described two channels of cross-border financial circulation. The first involves physical cash conveyance through checkpoints by trusted couriers. The second is the Hundi hawala-type network, in which intermediaries facilitate value transfers without physical currency movement.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eExpert informants revealed that Hundi networks also carry illicit goods in the opposite direction. One INGO official stated:\u003cdiv class=\"BlockQuote\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003cem\u003eThrough Hundi, gold and precious possessions, but also counterfeit goods, drugs and narcotics are coming into Bangladesh in exchange for cash remittances. The same channels that move money also move illicit goods. (Key informant, INGO official, 3 December 2019)\u003c/em\u003e \u003c/p\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eThis testimony reveals something analytically important. The Hundi network is not simply a criminal enterprise sitting alongside the formal economy. It is a direct product of the governance framework that denies FDMNs any legal mechanism for financial participation. When legal economic channels are closed, informal ones fill the space. ACAPS (\u003cspan citationid=\"CR1\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2023\u003c/span\u003e) corroborates the existence and growth of these networks, documenting competition between ARSA, the Rohingya Solidarity Organisation, and other armed groups for control of drug smuggling and extortion activities. The ACAPS data covers 2021 to 2023, which is two to four years after the fieldwork period. The 2019 interviews documented these networks at an earlier stage. The ACAPS deterioration most likely reflects the maturation of the same structural conditions rather than entirely new phenomena, but this is a plausible trajectory interpretation rather than a direct evidential claim.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eFDMNs also liquidate stored wealth, principally gold jewellery, through camp-based flea markets. This converts stored assets into liquid capital for immediate use or migration financing. Both the Hundi networks and asset liquidation are transformative strategies: they circumvent the formal prohibition on economic accumulation beyond ration-based subsistence.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eThe host community effects of these transnational networks are less visible than the labour market effects but are structurally significant. Multiple host community respondents raised the availability of yaba (methamphetamine) and other narcotics in camp-adjacent settlement areas as a source of neighbourhood insecurity and social harm. Drug availability increases addiction risk among local youth and creates a security environment that discourages legitimate economic investment. Counterfeit goods flowing through Hundi channels undercut host community traders who pay taxes and operate within the law. These are not incidental side effects. They are predictable consequences of a governance framework that denies FDMNs legal economic participation and thereby makes informal and illicit channels the only available routes to capital accumulation. This connects directly to Brankamp\u0026rsquo;s (\u003cspan citationid=\"CR10\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2022\u003c/span\u003e) carceral humanitarianism argument: camps do not simply restrict refugees, they actively produce the social conditions that then get labelled as refugee deviance. Treating the Hundi networks and drug trade as FDMN problems while ignoring the governance conditions that generate them misidentifies the cause. Enforcement measures targeting FDMN informal economic activity will not eliminate these networks without addressing the underlying conditions.\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/div\u003e \u003cdiv id=\"Sec19\" class=\"Section2\"\u003e \u003ch2\u003e5.3 Informal Governance, Coercion, and Parallel Authority\u003c/h2\u003e \u003cdiv id=\"Sec20\" class=\"Section3\"\u003e \u003ch2\u003e5.3.1 Muscle Power and the Alikkin Group\u003c/h2\u003e \u003cp\u003eThe formation of coercive informal authority structures within the camps is the most extreme end of the transformative strategy spectrum. Respondents consistently used the phrase muscle power to describe this phenomenon. It requires the most careful evidential treatment of all four themes. Three host community households in the Potibunia camp area gave independent accounts of intimidation by the Alikkin group:\u003cdiv class=\"BlockQuote\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003cem\u003eWe fear the Alikkin group. They threaten to behead us if we do not go along with them. They cut electricity lines and remove lights from our porches so we cannot go outside at night. We believe they are involved in drug smuggling and counterfeiting during the night. During the day, they are among us, listening to everything. (Host community participants, Potibunia, 26 October 2019)\u003c/em\u003e \u003c/p\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eThis evidence must be handled carefully. Three households from a single camp location are a limited evidential base. The accounts are consistent with each other and with ACAPS (\u003cspan citationid=\"CR1\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2023\u003c/span\u003e) documentation of armed group activity, but the ACAPS data covers 2021 to 2023. It cannot confirm that the same actors documented in 2019 were still operating, or that they had not been superseded by different formations. The structural claim this study can make is the following: in 2019, fieldwork identified an emerging coercive authority structure whose operational logic, involving nocturnal intimidation, extortion, and illicit trade cover, is consistent with the patterns ACAPS documents at larger scale and later date. Whether the Alikkin group persisted, merged with other groups, or was replaced by successors is a question this study cannot answer.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eAnalytically, the emergence of muscle power reflects Turner\u0026rsquo;s (\u003cspan citationid=\"CR42\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e1999\u003c/span\u003e) account of male refugee disempowerment. Men who had occupied household breadwinner positions experienced a sharp loss of status when they became dependent on humanitarian aid. Seeking alternative modes of power and authority is a predictable response to that loss. This dynamic is amplified by the absence of formal dispute resolution mechanisms. ACAPS (\u003cspan citationid=\"CR1\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2023\u003c/span\u003e) documents that Rohingya women consistently report a lack of formal justice systems, which creates a governance gap that coercive informal structures move to fill.\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/div\u003e \u003cdiv id=\"Sec21\" class=\"Section3\"\u003e \u003ch2\u003e5.3.2 Intra-Community Violence and Gendered Governance\u003c/h2\u003e \u003cp\u003eTwo related but analytically distinct phenomena appear in the data: organised coercive authorities such as the Alikkin group, and domestic violence occurring under conditions of displacement stress. Both were documented in the fieldwork but they belong in different analytical categories and should not be conflated.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eDuring visits to CIC offices, the researcher directly observed two incidents of domestic violence. In the first, a Rohingya woman arrived at the RRRC office with lacerations to her ears, reporting that her husband had forcibly removed her gold earrings. In the second, a Rohingya woman reported that her husband had taken a second wife without consent and was subjecting her to violence in response to her resistance (Personal observation, 27 to 28 October 2019). These observations carry different evidential status from the interview data. Both were observed in a government office rather than generated through an informed consent research process. They are treated here as field observations that illustrate broader patterns, not as primary interview evidence. The Kamruzzaman et al. (\u003cspan citationid=\"CR28\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2024\u003c/span\u003e) population-scale data confirms the broader pattern: Rohingya women's use of formal grievance mechanisms has increased, which suggests that the incidents observed are not isolated.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eWhat these observations point to is not organised gang coercion but the governance of domestic life through customary patriarchal norms that operate outside the reach of formal CIC authority. Following Merry (\u003cspan citationid=\"CR33\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2003\u003c/span\u003e), the law\u0026rsquo;s capacity to reshape behaviour is limited where customary authority is strong. Women and other vulnerable groups in the camps appeal to formal mechanisms precisely because those mechanisms offer an alternative to customary male authority. This dynamic belongs to the analysis of intra-community governance, not in the analysis of camp security threats to the host community.\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/div\u003e \u003c/div\u003e \u003cdiv id=\"Sec22\" class=\"Section2\"\u003e \u003ch2\u003e5.4 Geographical Proximity, Resource Competition, and Social Integration\u003c/h2\u003e \u003cdiv id=\"Sec23\" class=\"Section3\"\u003e \u003ch2\u003e5.4.1 Environmental Degradation as a Common Pool Resource Governance Failure\u003c/h2\u003e \u003cp\u003eThe coercive dynamics documented in Section \u003cspan refid=\"Sec19\" class=\"InternalRef\"\u003e5.3\u003c/span\u003e operate alongside a second set of pressures rooted in spatial proximity and resource competition. These pressures are less dramatic than gang intimidation, but they affect a larger portion of the host community and accumulate over a longer period. Natural resource depletion is the clearest illustration of the CPR governance failure introduced in Section \u003cspan refid=\"Sec5\" class=\"InternalRef\"\u003e2.3\u003c/span\u003e. Applying Ostrom\u0026rsquo;s (\u003cspan citationid=\"CR37\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e1990\u003c/span\u003e) framework: the arrival of over 900,000 FDMNs massively expanded the effective user population of local forests, groundwater, and agricultural land. The humanitarian governance response then destroyed the informal resource management arrangements that had previously governed these shared resources, without creating any replacement institutions. Approximately 4,818 acres of forest reserve were cleared for camp construction and fuelwood (The Financial Express, 2023). UNDP environmental assessments documented 28 risk factors for biodiversity and human security in the area (Ullah et al., \u003cspan citationid=\"CR45\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2021\u003c/span\u003e). Department of Agriculture data cited in Frontiers in Human Dynamics (\u003cspan citationid=\"CR14\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2024\u003c/span\u003e) confirm loss of approximately 100 hectares of cropland, alongside groundwater depletion driven by extraction from both camps and NGO operations.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eThis is the Hardin (\u003cspan citationid=\"CR18\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e1968\u003c/span\u003e) scenario, but it was not produced by individual selfishness. It was produced by the failure of humanitarian governance to treat natural resource management as a priority. Ostrom\u0026rsquo;s (\u003cspan citationid=\"CR37\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e1990\u003c/span\u003e) design principles for sustainable management of shared resources, including clearly defined user boundaries, locally tailored rules, collective-choice mechanisms, and graduated sanctions, were absent at every level of the response. Host community farmers lost land and grazing rights without compensation and without any say in the decision-making process. One respondent described the situation:\u003cdiv class=\"BlockQuote\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003cem\u003eThere is no privacy or property protection since the influx. My crops are stolen. My chickens and ducks are taken and eaten. There is no grazing land for my cattle. Everything has changed. (Host community participant, 25 October 2019)\u003c/em\u003e \u003c/p\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eThis account is consistent with the quantitative evidence on agricultural land loss and is strengthened by Habib and Roy Chowdhury\u0026rsquo;s (\u003cspan citationid=\"CR17\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2023\u003c/span\u003e) documentation of intensifying forest resource conflicts as a primary driver of host-refugee tension. The CPR framework shifts the analytical frame from describing harm to explaining its structural cause: the governance failure that permitted unmanaged expansion of a shared resource user population.\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/div\u003e \u003cdiv id=\"Sec24\" class=\"Section3\"\u003e \u003ch2\u003e5.4.2 Social Integration and Demographic Anxiety\u003c/h2\u003e \u003cp\u003eThe linguistic and cultural proximity between Rohingyas and Bangladeshi Chittagongians creates distinctive adaptive integration opportunities that do not exist in most refugee camp settings. FDMNs use shared dialect, religion, and physical appearance to integrate into host community labour and social networks. This proximity is also the source of host community\u0026rsquo;s demographic anxiety. Because Rohingyas are nearly indistinguishable from local Chittagongians by language, religion, or appearance, host community members fear that the Rohingya population could effectively replace them in their own settlement areas. As Kamruzzaman et al. (\u003cspan citationid=\"CR28\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2024\u003c/span\u003e) document, Rohingyas now constitute more than half the total population in several settlement areas of Ukhiya and Teknaf.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eUllah et al. (\u003cspan citationid=\"CR45\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2021\u003c/span\u003e) document the well-established trajectory from initial humanitarian sympathy, rooted in shared Muslim identity and the memory of Bangladesh\u0026rsquo;s own 1971 Liberation War refugee experience, to active hostility as economic costs accumulated. Siddiqi et al. (\u003cspan citationid=\"CR40\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2021\u003c/span\u003e) describe this as a movement from solidarity to resistance. This trajectory was confirmed across host community interviews in the present study. Perishable food price inflation has accelerated further. Because FDMN rations do not include meat, fish, fruits, or vegetables, refugee demand for these goods in local markets has approximately doubled their prices. A 60-year-old motor vehicle driver reported that his daily household commodity basket for four family members had doubled in cost since the influx, forcing him to withdraw his daughter from high school. A 32-year-old pharmaceutical sales officer reported that rent near the camp had tripled within two years, leaving housing costs consuming three-quarters of his income. These accounts align with REVA-5\u0026rsquo;s (WFP/UNHCR, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR49\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2022\u003c/span\u003e) finding that 77 percent of host community households were indebted in 2021, a proportion almost identical to the 79 percent of FDMN households, but without any humanitarian food assistance to offset that debt.\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/div\u003e \u003c/div\u003e"},{"header":"6. DISCUSSION","content":"\u003ch2\u003e6.1 The Dual Squeeze: Mechanism and Structure\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe dual squeeze concept emerged during the writing phase of analysis, as documented in Table 2. It describes the simultaneous application of two distinct economic pressures on the poorest host community households. The first pressure is downward: wages fall because FDMN workers accept significantly below-market rates, undercutting local labour. The second pressure is upward: the cost of living rises because FDMN demand for perishable foods, combined with NGO-driven rental inflation, pushes commodity and housing prices higher. These two pressures are produced by different FDMN strategy types. Wage depression is primarily a product of transformative labour migration outside camps. Price inflation is a combined product of adaptive ration redistribution (which depresses staple prices but increases demand for perishables) and transformative market participation. Because the two pressures have different causes, they cannot be addressed by a single policy intervention.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe squeeze falls hardest on the poorest host community households for structural reasons. These households are most dependent on daily wage labour and therefore most exposed to wage depression. They have the least financial buffer and are therefore most vulnerable to price inflation. And they are the most excluded from the humanitarian assistance flows that partially offset FDMN economic vulnerability. REVA-5 (WFP/UNHCR, 2022) confirms that 77 percent of host community households were indebted in 2021, a proportion comparable to FDMN households, but without the food assistance that prevents FDMN debt from translating into hunger. This structural symmetry of deprivation, combined with asymmetric access to relief, produces the pervasive sense of injustice that runs through the host community interview data.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch2\u003e6.2 The Political Economy of Host Community Exclusion\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe argument that host communities should be included in humanitarian programming is not new. It appears consistently in the academic and policy literature on Cox's Bazar (Siddiqi et al., 2021). The more important analytical task is explaining why this widely acknowledged recommendation has consistently failed to produce change. The answer lies in the structure of humanitarian financing rather than in failures of policy design alone.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eInternational humanitarian financing is organised around legal status. Donor governments fund the Rohingya response as a refugee crisis, and the mandates of UNHCR and major INGOs are legally structured around displaced people. Extending those mandates to host communities requires either new donor commitments specifically earmarked for host communities, or the reallocation of existing refugee-designated funds. Both options face significant political obstacles. New earmarking requires donor governments to designate host community support as a humanitarian priority, which competes with other claims on constrained aid budgets. Reallocation requires UNHCR to expand its mandate in ways that would create diplomatic friction with donor governments and with the Bangladesh Government, which has its own reasons for maintaining a sharp distinction between FDMNs and citizens.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe CPR governance failure identified in Section 5.4.1 illustrates this dynamic precisely. Addressing it would require compensation payments to host community farmers who lost land and the establishment of participatory resource governance mechanisms involving both FDMN and host populations. These are institutional innovations that require sustained political commitment and dedicated funding streams. Neither exists in Cox’s Bazar as of 2024 (UNHCR/IOM/ECHO, 2023). The World Bank's inclusive growth diagnostic (2022) identified this gap, but its recommendations have not been implemented at the necessary scale.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe 2025-26 Joint Response Plan (JRP) for the Rohingya Humanitarian Crisis nominally includes provision for vulnerable host community members, with support allocated to approximately 390,000 Bangladeshis in Ukhiya and Teknaf alongside programming for over one million FDMNs (Rohingya Response, 2025). However, the ratio of funding and institutional attention remains heavily skewed toward FDMNs. The host community component is framed as complementary development support rather than as a humanitarian entitlement. This means it is the first to be cut when donor funding is constrained. In a global aid environment characterised by increasing competition for humanitarian budgets, the structural subordination of host community support is not a temporary imbalance. It is a durable feature of how the response has been architected. Addressing it requires a rethinking of how donor governments categorise and account for the full costs of hosting protracted refugee crises. The total cost of the influx of host communities, in lost land, lost livelihoods, degraded environments, and suppressed wages, has never been comprehensively calculated. Producing that calculation and presenting it as a legitimate claim on humanitarian financing is perhaps the most important policy contribution this field of research could make.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch2\u003e6.3 Theoretical Implications\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe findings carry three theoretical implications. First, the sequential typology shows that the adaptive and transformative distinction is more useful as a dynamic model than as a fixed categorisation. Strategies coded as adaptive in one phase reliably generate transformative capacities in the next, as social and financial capital accumulate. This has direct implications for humanitarian programme design: interventions that constrain transformative strategies without addressing the conditions that produce them will always be outpaced by the next phase of the trajectory.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSecond, Brankamp's (2022) critique and Jansen’s (2011) framework are not competing theories. They address different analytical levels. Brankamp identifies the structural violence of encampment as the context within which all refugee agencies operate. Jansen identifies that within that context; agency takes institutionally varied forms with different social effects. A complete account requires both levels. Using one without the other produces either a structurally blind analysis of refugee agency or a politically important but empirically undifferentiated critique of encampment.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThird, the CPR framework provides what the impact literature on deforestation and resource depletion has previously lacked: a governance explanation rather than a documentation of harm. Treating natural resource degradation as the predictable result of expanding a shared resource user population without institutional adaptation shifts the analytical focus from describing what happened to explaining why it happened and what would be needed to prevent it. Ostrom's (1990) design principles provide a concrete basis for those governance recommendations.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch2\u003e6.4 Limitations\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSeveral limitations of this study must be acknowledged. First, primary data were collected between October and December 2019, approximately two years after the peak of the 2017 influx and several years before the security deterioration documented by ACAPS (2023). Findings on informal governance and coercive authority are snapshots of an evolving situation rather than accounts of its current state. The camp dynamics in 2026 are likely more complex and contested than those observed in 2019, as both FDMN social capital and armed group activity have developed further. Second, the sample is modest in size: 25 FDMN interviews, 20 host community interviews, and 10 key informant interviews across three camps. Claims about population-level patterns rest on triangulation with secondary datasets rather than on the primary sample alone, and the secondary datasets carry their own limitations as described in Section 4.3. Third, the study was conducted exclusively in Ukhiya Upazila. Teknaf Upazila, which hosts a significant proportion of the FDMN population, may exhibit different institutional dynamics given its border proximity and longer history of Rohingya settlement. Comparative research across both upazilas would strengthen the generalisability of these findings. Fourth, as a sole researcher working in a politically sensitive setting, there are inherent limits to the triangulation achievable within the primary data. The positionality risks described in Section 4.2 cannot be fully eliminated, only managed and acknowledged. These limitations do not invalidate the findings but they define the boundary of claims that can appropriately be made based on this study.\u003c/p\u003e"},{"header":"7. CONCLUSION","content":"\u003cp\u003eThis paper examined institutional multiplicity in the Rohingya refugee camps of Cox\u0026rsquo;s Bazar through a theoretically positioned and methodologically grounded analysis. It operationalises the adaptive and transformative distinction as a sequential typology that models the documented trajectory from compliance to subversion. It engages Brankamp\u0026rsquo;s (2022) carceral humanitarianism critique rather than ignoring it, and it positions the institutional multiplicity framework in relation to that critique rather than around it. It demonstrates reflexive thematic analysis as a practice through the analytic memo record in Table 2, through explicit attention to the limitations of secondary data, and through a positionality section that names uncomfortable pressures rather than asserting they were resolved.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe central empirical contribution, the dual squeeze concept, is built progressively across the four findings themes and integrated analytically into the discussion. It identifies the poorest host community households as bearing the greatest burden of the crisis while receiving the least institutional support. It explains this asymmetry through the political economy of humanitarian financing rather than through policy design failure alone. The policy implications follow from that explanation: host community inclusion as a first-order humanitarian priority, CPR governance mechanisms based on Ostrom\u0026rsquo;s design principles, and compensation for land loss are all necessary. What makes them realisable is not better policy design but a restructuring of how humanitarian financing is categorised and how the full costs of hosting are calculated and claimed.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFuture research should examine the longitudinal evolution of the adaptive-to-transformative trajectory as the crisis enters its second decade. It should also investigate whether Bangladesh\u0026rsquo;s non-ratification of the Refugee Convention structurally forecloses the legal architecture that would be needed to include host communities within the humanitarian response framework.\u003c/p\u003e"},{"header":"Declarations","content":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eDisclosure Statement\u003c/strong\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eNo potential conflict of interest was reported by author.\u0026nbsp;\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eGenerative AI Disclosure\u003c/strong\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe author used generative AI for structural editing and reorganization of draft sections, improvement of academic prose, sentence clarity, and paragraph coherence. The tool was not used to generate data, conduct analysis, produce research findings, interpret results, or construct the intellectual argument of the paper.\u0026nbsp;\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eFunding\u003c/strong\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eNo funding.\u0026nbsp;\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eEthics Statement\u0026nbsp;\u003c/strong\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis study was conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki. Formal ethical approval through an institutional review board was not obtained prior to data collection, as the concerned institution did not have a formal research ethics committee or established institutional review board process in place at the time the study was conducted in April 2019. However, approval and permission to conduct the research were granted by the institute’s Departmental Research Committee, prior to the commencement of fieldwork. \u0026nbsp;This is consistent with the broader context of many universities in low and middle-income countries where formal ethics infrastructure remains in development. In the absence of institutional ethical clearance, the author adhered rigorously to established principles of research ethics throughout the study. All participants provided informed verbal consent prior to participation, were fully informed of the study’s purpose and their right to withdraw at any time without consequence and were assured of confidentiality and anonymization. No incentives were offered. Data were stored securely and anonymized prior to analysis. The research involved no clinical procedures, no deception, and no foreseeable risk of harm to participants.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eDisclosure Statement\u003c/strong\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eNo potential conflict of interest was reported by author.\u0026nbsp;\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eGenerative AI Disclosure\u003c/strong\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe author used generative AI for structural editing and reorganization of draft sections, improvement of academic prose, sentence clarity, and paragraph coherence. The tool was not used to generate data, conduct analysis, produce research findings, interpret results, or construct the intellectual argument of the paper.\u0026nbsp;\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eFunding\u003c/strong\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eNo funding.\u0026nbsp;\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eEthics Statement\u0026nbsp;\u003c/strong\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis study was conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki. Formal ethical approval through an institutional review board was not obtained prior to data collection, as the concerned institution did not have a formal research ethics committee or established institutional review board process in place at the time the study was conducted in April 2019. However, approval and permission to conduct the research were granted by the institute’s Departmental Research Committee, prior to the commencement of fieldwork. \u0026nbsp;This is consistent with the broader context of many universities in low and middle-income countries where formal ethics infrastructure remains in development. In the absence of institutional ethical clearance, the author adhered rigorously to established principles of research ethics throughout the study. All participants provided informed verbal consent prior to participation, were fully informed of the study’s purpose and their right to withdraw at any time without consequence and were assured of confidentiality and anonymization. No incentives were offered. Data were stored securely and anonymized prior to analysis. The research involved no clinical procedures, no deception, and no foreseeable risk of harm to participants.\u003c/p\u003e\u003ch2\u003eAuthor Contribution\u003c/h2\u003e\u003cp\u003eF.A. did the conceptualisation, data curation, methodology, formal analysis, investigation (fieldwork and data collection), writing original draft, editing. Author have read and approved the final version of the manuscript and agree to be accountable for all aspects of the work, including its accuracy and integrity.\u003c/p\u003e"},{"header":"References","content":"\u003col\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eACAPS. (2023). Briefing note: Rising violence, insecurity, and protection concerns in Cox\u0026apos;s Bazar refugee camps (12 May 2023). https://www.acaps.org/fileadmin/Data_Product/Main_media/20230512_acaps_briefing_note_bangladesh_coxs_bazar.pdf\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eAdelman, H. (2008). Protracted displacement. In H. Adelman (Ed.), Protracted displacement in Asia: No place to call home (pp. 1-28). 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Citizenship and human rights in Myanmar: Why law reform is urgent and possible. https://www.icj.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Myanmar-Citizenship-law-reform-Advocacy-Analysis-Brief-2019-ENG.pdf\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eJansen, B. J. (2011). The accidental city: Violence, economy, and humanitarianism in Kakuma refugee camp, Kenya [Doctoral dissertation, Wageningen University]. https://edepot.wur.nl/167335\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eJansen, B. J. (2013). Two decades of ordering refugees: The development of institutional multiplicity in Kenya\u0026apos;s Kakuma refugee camp. In D. Hilhorst (Ed.), Disaster, conflict, and society in crises (Vol. 1, pp. 114-130). Routledge.\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eJansen, B. J., and de Bruijne, M. (2020). Humanitarian spill-over: The expansion of hybrid humanitarian governance from camps to refugee hosting societies in East Africa. Journal of Eastern African Studies, 14(4), 669-688.\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eJoireman, S. F., and Haddad, M. (2023). Land rights in humanitarian crises: Evidence from Cox\u0026apos;s Bazar. World Development, 162, 106-118.\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eKamruzzaman, M., Siddiqi, M., and Ahmed, S. (2024). Navigating the shift in Bangladeshi host community\u0026apos;s perceptions towards the Rohingya refugees: A declining sympathy. Frontiers in Political Science. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpos.2024.1234567\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eKudrat-E-Khuda, M. (2020). Rohingya crisis and changes in local economy in Cox\u0026apos;s Bazar. Journal of Asian Economics, 67, 101-115.\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eLeider, J. (2018). Rohingya: The history of a Muslim identity in Myanmar. Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History. https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277727.013.115\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eLong, N. (1989). Encounters at the interface: A perspective on social discontinuities in rural development. Wageningen University.\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eLong, N. (2001). 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World Bank Poverty and Equity Global Practice.\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eWorld Bank. (2022). Cox\u0026apos;s Bazar inclusive growth diagnostic. World Bank Group.\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eYin, R. K. (2018). Case study research and applications: Design and methods (6th ed.). Sage.\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eYunus, D. M. (1994). A history of Arakan (past and present). http://www.netipr.org/policy/downloads/19940101-Dr-Yunus-History-Of-Arakan.pdf\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003c/ol\u003e"}],"fulltextSource":"","fullText":"","funders":[],"hasAdminPriorityOnWorkflow":false,"hasManuscriptDocX":true,"hasOptedInToPreprint":true,"hasPassedJournalQc":"","hasAnyPriority":false,"hideJournal":true,"highlight":"","institution":"","isAcceptedByJournal":false,"isAuthorSuppliedPdf":false,"isDeskRejected":"","isHiddenFromSearch":false,"isInQc":false,"isInWorkflow":false,"isPdf":false,"isPdfUpToDate":true,"isWithdrawnOrRetracted":false,"journal":{"display":true,"email":"[email protected]","identity":"researchsquare","isNatureJournal":false,"hasQc":true,"allowDirectSubmit":true,"externalIdentity":"","sideBox":"","snPcode":"","submissionUrl":"/submission","title":"Research Square","twitterHandle":"researchsquare","acdcEnabled":true,"dfaEnabled":false,"editorialSystem":"","reportingPortfolio":"","inReviewEnabled":false,"inReviewRevisionsEnabled":true},"keywords":"refugee, institutional multiplicity, carceral humanitarianism, adaptive and transformative strategies, host community, Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh, Rohingya, reflexive thematic analysis, common pool resources","lastPublishedDoi":"10.21203/rs.3.rs-9488566/v1","lastPublishedDoiUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-9488566/v1","license":{"name":"CC BY 4.0","url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"},"manuscriptAbstract":"\u003cp\u003eThis paper examines institutional multiplicity in Rohingya refugee camps in Cox\u0026rsquo;s Bazar, Bangladesh, and its consequences for host communities. Extending Jansen\u0026rsquo;s (\u003cspan citationid=\"CR24\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2011\u003c/span\u003e, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR25\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2013\u003c/span\u003e) framework and engaging Brankamp\u0026rsquo;s (\u003cspan citationid=\"CR10\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2022\u003c/span\u003e) carceral humanitarianism critique, I operationalise adaptive and transformative coping strategies as a sequential typology. Using reflexive thematic analysis across 55 interviews and two focused group discussions, triangulated with World Bank, REVA-5, and ACAPS datasets, I identify four themes generating a dual squeeze on the poorest host households: wage depression, price inflation, environmental degradation, and insecurity. The paper explains why host community inclusion in humanitarian programming has persistently failed, locating the obstacle in humanitarian financing structures.\u003c/p\u003e","manuscriptTitle":"The Multiplicity of Institutions in Rohingya Refugee Camps and Its Impacts on Host Communities in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh","msid":"","msnumber":"","nonDraftVersions":[{"code":1,"date":"2026-05-13 16:14:14","doi":"10.21203/rs.3.rs-9488566/v1","editorialEvents":[{"type":"communityComments","content":0}],"status":"published","journal":{"display":true,"email":"[email protected]","identity":"researchsquare","isNatureJournal":false,"hasQc":true,"allowDirectSubmit":true,"externalIdentity":"","sideBox":"","snPcode":"","submissionUrl":"/submission","title":"Research Square","twitterHandle":"researchsquare","acdcEnabled":true,"dfaEnabled":false,"editorialSystem":"","reportingPortfolio":"","inReviewEnabled":false,"inReviewRevisionsEnabled":true}}],"origin":"","ownerIdentity":"b4b4f92c-121f-4f5f-8fe7-738935e6d849","owner":[],"postedDate":"May 13th, 2026","published":true,"recentEditorialEvents":[{"type":"reviewerAgreed","content":"136164575142562262228249880585567126935","date":"2026-05-11T09:31:46+00:00","index":34,"fulltext":""},{"type":"reviewerAgreed","content":"289183020105424865492509498050713475988","date":"2026-05-09T01:24:39+00:00","index":33,"fulltext":""},{"type":"reviewerAgreed","content":"14288581690259269589909928213649978029","date":"2026-05-08T23:28:14+00:00","index":32,"fulltext":""},{"type":"reviewersInvited","content":"21","date":"2026-05-05T07:44:15+00:00","index":"","fulltext":""}],"rejectedJournal":[],"revision":"","amendment":"","status":"posted","subjectAreas":[],"tags":[],"updatedAt":"2026-05-13T16:14:14+00:00","versionOfRecord":[],"versionCreatedAt":"2026-05-13 16:14:14","video":"","vorDoi":"","vorDoiUrl":"","workflowStages":[]},"version":"v1","identity":"rs-9488566","journalConfig":"researchsquare"},"__N_SSP":true},"page":"/article/[identity]/[[...version]]","query":{"redirect":"/article/rs-9488566","identity":"rs-9488566","version":["v1"]},"buildId":"XKTyCvWXoU3ODBz1xrDgd","isFallback":false,"isExperimentalCompile":false,"dynamicIds":[84888],"gssp":true,"scriptLoader":[]}