Rohingya Refugees and Human Security: Foreign Policy Reform Needs

Abstract

Bangladesh’s foreign policy faces severe challenges coping with the mounting pressures of harboring large Rohingya refugee contingents, that too without a formal framework for defining refugees and their rights. Subjected to severe levels of human insecurity, these refugees pose human security concerns for the host community. This chapter explores if the human security framework, when included into Bangladesh’s foreign policy, can alleviate the problems the country is facing with refugees. By analyzing prevailing human security definitions and Bangladesh’s contemporary foreign policy, a comparative approach shows how a foreign policy reform can help improve refugees’ lives. While human security helps to fill in some of the gaps in international refugee laws and in Bangladesh’s foreign policy, the concept is not without its own problems, necessitating further research so that foreign policy-laced human security can benefit both refugees and host communities.Keywords Human Development Report Human security