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Removing Authorship is a Second Erasure: A Rohingya Review of Reshaping Rohingya Futures (edited by Nasir Uddin)

  • Writer: Rohingyatographer
    Rohingyatographer
  • 1 hour ago
  • 7 min read

By Ahtaram Shin, Enayet Khan, Sahat Zia Hero, Yassin Abdumonab and Ro BM Hairu. Edited by David Palazón. Produced with the support of the Global Statelessness Fund.




The paradox of the Rohingya in contemporary academia is stark: we are perhaps among the most researched peoples in the world, yet remain among the least heard. Since the genocidal campaigns of 2017, much of the scholarship surrounding our community has been what Nasir Uddin himself calls “calamity research”, a body of work saturated with narratives of suffering, victimhood, and humanitarian crisis. His edited volume, Reshaping Rohingya Futures: Coping Strategies and Emerging Agencies (2025), sets out to challenge this pattern. It promises a shift away from passive representations of despair and towards a recognition of Rohingya agency, resilience, and self-determination.


This is an important and necessary intervention. The insistence that Rohingya are not merely victims but active participants in shaping their own futures is long overdue. Yet the success of such a project depends not only on what it argues, but on how it represents those it seeks to empower. From a Rohingya perspective, the volume reveals a troubling contradiction: while it speaks the language of agency, its methods often reproduce the very hierarchies it claims to dismantle.


The book is structured across three thematic sections: livelihood and social exclusion, digital activism and youth, and vulnerability alongside resilience. Across these chapters, the contributors document a wide range of practices that complicate the image of the passive refugee. We see evidence of environmental stewardship, with refugees participating in reforestation and land stabilisation; linguistic negotiation, where interpreters subtly reshape narratives in interactions with donors; and digital mobilisation, as Rohingya youth engage global conversations on gender-based violence through social media platforms.


These contributions are valuable. They provide grounded insight into the everyday strategies through which Rohingya communities navigate constraint. Particularly strong are chapters that critically examine humanitarian systems themselves. Analyses of institutional behaviour, especially critiques of bureaucratic rigidity within international organisations, offer an important corrective to overly sanitised policy narratives. Likewise, documentation of refugee-led initiatives, including grassroots education and community-based protection networks, affirms a reality that is often overlooked: we are not waiting to be saved; we are already organising, adapting, and creating within the limits imposed upon us.


Yet it is precisely here, at the level of representation, that the book begins to falter.


A central issue lies in the treatment of visual and creative material. Throughout the volume, images of Rohingya individuals are routinely anonymised: faces blurred, names removed, identities obscured. This practice is presented as ethical protection, aligned with institutional research protocols designed to safeguard vulnerable populations. But in effect, it produces a different outcome. It transforms identifiable individuals, artists, activists, photographers, into anonymous figures, detached from their own work.


In one chapter, Uddin introduces “Mohammad Sharif (pseudonym),” a 26-year-old Rohingya youth whose work has been published by international outlets and exhibited abroad. Sharif is quoted as saying, “My photography is my biography,” and is described as the author of a photobook documenting Rohingya life. Similarly, the text refers to “Shurma Khatun (pseudonym),” an award-winning painter, and “Mr. Mahmud (pseudonym),” a recognised photojournalist and videographer.


While the use of pseudonyms may be intended as a protective measure, its application here raises serious concerns. The individuals described are not anonymous participants, but publicly active creators whose work already circulates internationally. The imposition of pseudonyms in such cases does not simply obscure identity; it risks disconnecting recognised authors from their own work. In doing so, attribution is replaced with abstraction, and authorship becomes indistinct.


In some instances, this anonymisation appears to extend even to individuals whose identities and works are already publicly established, raising questions about whether consent was sought for this transformation.


For a community that has been systematically erased from history, citizenship, and recognition, this matters. Names and faces are not incidental details; they are evidence of existence. For a community like ours, these are often the only markers through which we assert that we are here. When a Rohingya photographer publishes work internationally, or when a young artist creates a mural asserting her presence in the world, these acts are claims to visibility. To reproduce such work while removing authorship is not neutral. It is a second erasure.


Social media posts, illustrations, and photographs are reproduced with generic attributions such as “Source: Twitter/X” or “Source: Facebook”. The individuals who created these works, who wrote the posts, drew the images, or captured the photographs, are absent. Their contributions are treated as data points rather than authored expressions. There is little indication that explicit consent was obtained for their inclusion in a commercially published academic volume.


This is not simply a technical oversight; it reflects a broader pattern. The transformation of creative work into anonymised research material risks reducing people to subjects rather than recognising them as contributors. It suggests, implicitly, that Rohingya cultural production exists in a kind of public domain, available for analysis, circulation, and interpretation without the need for attribution or permission. Such an approach stands in tension with the very idea of agency the book seeks to foreground.


These concerns are not limited to visual representation. They extend to the broader conduct of research and reporting in Rohingya contexts. In our experience, researchers and journalists often fail to provide clear introductions of their purpose or methods. Communication is frequently mediated through external translators whose dialects differ from Rohingya language, leading to distortions and misunderstandings.


Follow-up and verification are also inconsistent. Testimonies are recorded, translated, and published without returning to participants to confirm accuracy. In some cases, this has led to serious misrepresentation. One account described a woman as a survivor of sexual violence; when revisited, she denied the claim entirely, expressing distress at the social consequences of a narrative imposed upon her. Without mechanisms for correction or accountability, such errors remain, leaving individuals to bear the consequences within their own communities.


These practices raise fundamental questions about ethical standards in both journalism and academic research. When engagement is extractive, when language is mediated without care, and when participants are excluded from the verification of their own testimonies, the result is not documentation but distortion. For communities already subject to erasure and misrepresentation, such failures are not incidental; they compound harm.


The issue extends beyond images to the structure of authorship itself. A review of the contributors reveals that the volume is dominated by institutional academics affiliated with universities in Bangladesh, Japan, Europe, and North America. Rohingya individuals appear primarily as respondents, informants, or case studies. Their experiences are central to the analysis, but their voices are rarely present as authors.


This imbalance points to what might be described as intellectual extraction: the use of lived experience as raw material for academic production. Knowledge is generated from within the community, but ownership of that knowledge remains largely external. Even when the subject is Rohingya agency, the authority to define, interpret, and publish that agency rests with others.


It is here that the editorial voice becomes particularly significant. In the preface and introductory sections, Nasir Uddin foregrounds his extensive academic trajectory, decades of research, multiple publications, and affiliations with prestigious institutions. Such credentials are, of course, relevant. But their repeated emphasis risks shifting the focus away from the subject of the book towards the authority of the editor himself.


At moments, this self-positioning becomes difficult to reconcile with the stated aim of the volume. Claims of having “rediscovered” the interior world of the Rohingya, for instance, carry an unintended implication: that this world required external interpretation in order to exist meaningfully. For readers from within the community, such assertions can feel less like insight and more like overreach.


There is an irony here. The book critiques humanitarian and institutional systems for their paternalism, for making decisions on behalf of refugees, for filtering their voices, for defining their realities from a distance. Yet aspects of its own methodology mirror these dynamics. The result is a text that is, in many ways, divided against itself: committed to the idea of agency, yet constrained by practices that limit its full expression.


None of this negates the book’s contributions. On the contrary, its empirical insights and critical perspectives make it a valuable addition to Rohingya scholarship. It succeeds in challenging reductive narratives and in documenting forms of resilience that deserve recognition. But it also exposes a crucial lesson: representation is not only about what is said, but about who is allowed to say it, and under what conditions.


For future research, the implications are clear. Ethical engagement with Rohingya communities must move beyond frameworks that treat people as subjects of study and towards models that recognise them as collaborators and authors. Consent cannot be assumed; it must be obtained. Attribution cannot be optional; it must be standard. Protection should not come at the cost of erasure.


There are already examples of such approaches in practice, initiatives that foreground Rohingya authorship, credit creative work, and build partnerships based on mutual respect. These demonstrate that it is entirely possible to conduct rigorous research while preserving agency and dignity. The challenge is not a lack of viable models, but a willingness to adopt them.


Reshaping Rohingya Futures marks an important step in shifting the discourse from victimhood to agency. But it also reveals how easily that shift can remain incomplete. Agency is not only the ability to act within constraint; it is the right to be recognised as the author of one’s own actions, words, and creations.


Without that recognition, what remains is not agency, but documentation.


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About the authors

The authors of this review are Rohingya practitioners and collaborators engaged in cultural production, research, and community-led initiatives.


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Book details

Edited by Nasir UddinPalgrave Macmillan, 2025

Contributors include: Md. Habibur Rahman, Yohei Mitani, Mohammad Harun Or Rashid, Sadrul Alam Kanok, Mahmuda Khatun, Valentina Grillo, Sarah Nandi, Md. Tareq Hossain, Sariful Islam, Tejal Khanna, Ibtesum Afrin, and Taslima Aktar.

Price: $160


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Further reading

For readers interested in Rohingya-led narratives and authorship, a selection of publications and projects developed by Rohingya practitioners can be accessed here:



A fourth issue, focused on human rights and Rohingya-led narratives, is currently in production and will be available in December.


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