This article discusses the impact of Rohingya refugee settlements on the local environment and increasing social tensions between the refugees and local residents. Drawing on the qualitative field data from Rohingyas, local residents and various government and non-government organisations, it focuses on the root causes of the environmental loss. It also portrays the viewpoints of both Rohingyas and locals on the socio-environmental crisis. The study found that the massive Rohingya influx created a severe pressure on the local environment in Cox’s Bazar while most of the cultivable lands, hills and forestlands were occupied for their settlements. They have put the local wildlife and the entire ecosystem at risk, and disrupted the ecological habitations. Apart from endangering environment and biodiversity, the Rohingyas’ frequent access to natural resources has fuelled socio-economic tensions between the locals and the Rohingyas. However, there is a growing tendency of generalization in blaming the Rohingyas for socio-environmental crisis in all sphere due to their visible interactions with the environmental resources. The study argues that as the blaming approach does not help; the root causes should be redressed through the socio-economic and environment-friendly plans and policies to find a sustainable solution to the crisis.

Nature conservation has often been depicted as an effective policy measure to redress the ongoing environmental problems across the globe. The need to ensure sustainability for people’s secured subsistence has rendered nature conservation an indispensable scheme in the tourism development policy. It is evident that during the last couple of decades, the notion of “conservation” has become less established whilst tourism development has been prioritised as a profit making venture by both the national and international agencies. Numerous solutions have been prescribed by international organisations adopting tourism as an “immense potentiality” which mostly represented a sustainability effort for the local development and environment. South Asia in general and Bangladesh, in particular, are no different, since policy for nature conservation has been misplaced and misread to reach sustainability goals, as it has always been connected with the tourism development agenda. From a systematic literature review, it was found that the use of natural resources by local people was exemplified as a threat to sustainability where the relations between conservation and tourism became a policy issue. The paper intends to problematise the mechanism of tourism policies for nature conservation or conservation policies for tourism development that overlooks the local eco-cultural management practice for sustainability. Along with the environmental discourses, an eco-cultural critique on sustainability was employed.

In the neoliberal movement facilitated by the corporate mechanism of commodification, the culture and identity of indigenous communities are reconstructed, represented, and commodified as exchangeable objects within the growing tourism economy of the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT), Bangladesh. This paper unearths how multiple narratives and voices from diverse actors involved in tourism collectively construct a “Bengali tourist gaze,” portraying indigenous “other” as a “touristic race,” and how indigenous people resist this hegemonic discourse through their self-representation. Through the lens of critical tourism theories, it problematizes how the politics of representation reshape Indigenous everyday life into spectacles of “otherness.” Based on nine months of ethnographic and netnographic research, the findings illustrate the representational politics at play, highlighting the binary tensions between empowerment and exploitation inherent in tourism practices. The paper challenges conventional views on tourism, incorporating Indigenous voices into planning and policy, aiming to advance a shared model for cultural justice.

The chapter intersects genocide and forced displacement, arguing that genocide not only kills, rapes, bodily harms, and mentally traumatises, but also displaces people from their land to take refuge in another country, posing a threat to the transboundary as well as regional stabilities. It adds new complexities to the existing dynamics of the socio-economic-political and security landscapes between the country of origin and the country of migration. The Rohingya genocide similarly produced massive displacement that produced various complexities in South and Southeast Asian countries, as well as at a global scale. The chapter explores the nexus between genocide and forced displacement, along with their broader implications for both regional and global security, with the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar as a case. This chapter mainly follows two arguments: first, genocide not only kills and does other harms, but also displaces people, putting them into vulnerable conditions with extreme uncertainty; second, Rohingya people have been displaced not by choice but by force, rendering them a threat to national (Bangladesh and Myanmar) and regional (South and Southeast Asia) stability. This argument led us to understand the deeper dynamics of structural violence, dehumanisation, the denial of citizenship, and forced displacement as a fundamental aspect of genocidal strategy. With a decade-long collection of ethnographic details, the chapter explores the long-term consequences of regional and global stability due to forced displacement stemming from the genocidal campaign in 2017. It also focuses on potential cross-border unrest, human trafficking, and the deterioration of diplomatic relationships among states in South and Southeast Asia.

This paper portrays both how indigenous people reframe indigeneity as a local defense against tourism politics through active participation rather than passive performance, and how touristic actors redefine Indigeneity in tourism marketing through visual depletion and depiction in the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT), Bangladesh. The research adopts an ‘otherness’ vs. ‘belongingness’ approach to question the dual position of tourism promotion in the context of indigeneity. Focusing on three research sites in the two districts of CHT, it employs ethnographic analysis of eighty-eight in-depth interviews and three focus group discussions, and netnographic analysis of twenty-five tourist blogs and posts and reviews of six travel websites. The findings unearth that the construction of indigenous ‘otherness’ invokes the reproduction of stereotypes such as ‘primitivism’ and ‘exoticism’. In contrast, indigeneity serves as a local mechanism to control the representation of exogenous agents in opposition to such categorization. The research contributes to reckoning indigeneity as a defensive mechanism for self-visualization in response to one-sided representations of indigenous lifeworlds.