The humanitarian-development nexus is the framework through which emergency aid and long-term development assistance are meant to be bridged, providing complementary support for people affected by crises. On paper, it sounds like common sense: immediate relief saves lives, while development programs build futures. But the study points out that humanitarian action and development work rest on fundamentally different logics. Humanitarian intervention traditionally follows apolitical, needs-based approaches that are not centered on the state, whereas development follows longer-term, political, rights-based approaches that are. Forcing these two paradigms together, the research argues, has created a space in which neoliberal interests, privatization, and the political and economic ambitions of transnational elites can flourish under the banner of compassion.

Newaz’s central question is deceptively simple: why and how has a neoliberal version of the humanitarian-development nexus been implemented in refugee crises? To answer it, the study employs a qualitative, desk-based methodology combined with a systematic literature review. Using the PICO technique, which structures inquiry around population, intervention, comparison, and outcome, the researcher searched databases including Google Scholar and Web of Science with terms spanning humanitarian response, Rohingya relocation, and refugee resistance. The analysis drew on the Rohingya Joint Response Plans, government and nongovernmental reports, documentaries, and news coverage, triangulated with existing interview data. The desk-based approach was chosen partly for ethical reasons: vulnerable refugees are difficult to access directly, and secondary analysis reduces the risk of harm to research participants.

The theoretical backbone of the study is explicitly postcolonial. Postcolonial scholarship links contemporary migration to colonialism and imperialism, deconstructing hegemonic Western knowledge and warning against treating migrants as a homogenous group of voiceless victims. The study draws on scholars such as Lemberg-Pedersen, who has shown how displaced populations in the Global South are monetized through technological financialization, including biometric surveillance and remote sensing, to benefit corporate and donor actors. Arat-Koc’s work on decolonizing refugee studies is also central: she argues that northern-led humanitarian interventions operate within a charity framework that denies Western responsibility for producing refugees in the first place, while expecting rewards for protecting them. Dependency theory completes the framework, explaining how unequal exchanges between the Global North core and the Global South periphery generate what Latin American theorists famously called the development of underdevelopment.

The empirical findings paint a troubling picture of the Rohingya response. After an initial wave of local and national solidarity, the crisis entered a protracted phase at the end of 2018 when the first repatriation attempt failed. Resentment grew within host communities, who saw their lands and markets absorbed by camp settlements while humanitarian assistance flowed only to refugees. The study documents how local elites and business people exploited the crisis to change their fortunes overnight, and how the protection regime, relying on what the author calls neoliberal humanitarianism rather than genuine humanitarian principles, worked to prolong displacement. Humanitarian organizations were found to prioritize pleasing the state over pursuing durable solutions, while the government increasingly treated the Rohingya as outsiders, fueling anti-Rohingya sentiment and bureaucratic measures that eroded fundamental rights.

The pivot toward the humanitarian-development nexus came formally with the Joint Response Plan of 2020, which set targets based on HDN concepts, and deepened in the 2022 plan focused on relocating refugees to Bhasan Char, a remote island in the Bay of Bengal. Here the study uncovers striking gaps in accountability. The 2022 plan, with an estimated budget of 99.7 million dollars for Bhasan Char interventions, provided no clear picture of how the government devised the relocation scheme or who financed it. The following year’s plan reduced the budget to 67.4 million dollars while emphasizing climate vulnerability and self-reliance, yet the roles of government and global agencies in implementation remained opaque. A memorandum of understanding signed in October 2021 between Bangladesh and the UN, on behalf of UNHCR, was kept confidential, and a leaked copy revealed that the promised free movement of refugees between the island and the mainland was in fact contingent on needs determined by the signing authority.

The Bhasan Char project itself embodies the study’s critique of securitized, privatized humanitarian governance. Construction began before the 2017 influx, first proposed in 2015, with flood embankments designed by a Chinese engineering firm and a British consultancy, both of which declined to release information and referred inquiries to the Bangladesh Navy. The Navy became the main implementing authority, surrounding the island with watchtowers, radar stations, perimeter fences, helipads, and police encampments housing dozens of armed personnel. Meanwhile, reports emerged of plans to develop the island as a tourist destination, complete with proposals for mini airports and even, according to an unverified newspaper report, a five-star hotel for UN officials. A senior official defended movement restrictions bluntly, saying refugees would have to stay in the camps until they returned to Myanmar, since the state was providing everything they needed.

For the refugees themselves, the reality has often been grim. Relocated Rohingya described life on the island as prison-like, with restricted movement preventing visits to relatives in Cox’s Bazar. Protests followed UNHCR visits, and roughly 700 refugees were reported to have fled the island. One woman who witnessed many escapes said that if people stayed there for a couple of years, all of them might start having mental issues. Another refused relocation outright, declaring she would only go to the country where she and her father and grandfather were born, even if offered milk and rice on a golden plate. There were also allegations of detainees being beaten and tortured, families harassed for bribes in exchange for information about missing relatives, and threats of extrajudicial crossfire killings. Yet the picture is not uniform: some refugees voluntarily relocated, drawn by concrete buildings, solar systems, hospitals, and mosques, and many have built livelihoods through trading, agriculture, and skills training, demonstrating resilience that the study insists should not be mistaken for consent to permanent encampment.

The discussion section situates these findings within a broader pattern. The author argues that states facing legitimacy crises, such as Bangladesh’s government at the time, respond to humanitarian emergencies within neoliberal frameworks that serve both internal and external power structures. Citing work on Jordan and Northern Uganda, the study shows that similar humanitarian-development transitions elsewhere have also undermined humanitarian principles while satisfying national and local authorities. The relocation of the Rohingya to Bhasan Char is characterized by other scholars as refugee warehousing, a practice with a long history in Asia and the Pacific, and one that was never conceived as a temporary solution. Local NGOs, meanwhile, reported being subordinated under international agencies, with one staff member stating that in the name of localization they were receiving an imposed international doctrine designed to counterfeit localization commitments.

The study’s conclusion is a call for fundamental change rather than technical tinkering. Newaz argues that the plight and protracted displacement of the Rohingya have been shaped by the collaborative intervention of global, national, and local actors who benefit from refugee victimhood while overlooking long-term needs. Any durable solution must begin with understanding how refugees themselves perceive their situation, including their attachment to an imagined homeland, and must ensure a safe, voluntary, and dignified repatriation to Myanmar. That, in turn, requires holding UNHCR more accountable for advancing repatriation, which one cited study describes as an illusion under the current governance framework, and requires Bangladesh to engage strategically with major powers whose competing interests shape the region. Ultimately, the research contends that genuine progress depends on decolonizing the humanitarian-development nexus itself, dismantling the neoliberal logic that transforms compassion into a mechanism of control, dependency, and profit.

Subject of Research: Postcolonial analysis of neoliberal humanitarian-development governance in the Rohingya refugee crisis in Bangladesh

Article Title: Postcolonial perspectives on neoliberal humanitarian governance and the Rohingya refugee crisis in Bangladesh

Article References: Newaz, M. W. (2026). Postcolonial perspectives on neoliberal humanitarian governance and the Rohingya refugee crisis in Bangladesh. Discover Global Society, 4(1), Article 267. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44282-026-00444-0

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44282-026-00444-0

Keywords: Rohingya refugees, humanitarian-development nexus, neoliberalism, postcolonial theory, Bangladesh, Bhasan Char, UNHCR, forced migration, aid dependency, refugee governance, dependency theory, Cox's Bazar

The research team, led by scientists at the Department of Geology of the University of Dhaka, collected 34 sediment samples along a land-sea transect spanning three environmentally contrasting areas: Cox’s Bazar on the eastern coast, Kuakata in the central deltaic zone, and the Sundarbans mangrove forest in the west. Sampling took place during winter, within the intertidal zone at elevations of roughly 0.5 to 4 meters above mean sea level, with cores extracted to a depth of 30 centimeters using a hand auger at low tide. Each sample was dried at 60 degrees Celsius for 24 hours, and 100-gram aliquots were sieved through meshes ranging from 63 to 1000 micrometers at one-phi intervals, following the Wentworth grain-size scale. Mean grain size and sorting were calculated using the Folk and Ward method.

The three study areas could hardly be more different. Cox’s Bazar, home to one of the longest natural beaches on Earth at 145 kilometers, is dominated by fine and medium sand, with fine sand reaching up to 75.1 percent of a sample and averaging 48.2 percent, while mud fractions are scarce. Kuakata displays a mixed picture: sediments at the Tin Nodir Mohona river mouth average 62.4 percent coarse sand, whereas the nearby Jhau Bon and Lebu Bon sites are rich in fine and very fine sand. The Sundarbans, the world’s largest mangrove forest covering roughly 6017 square kilometers, is a low-energy setting where fine and very fine sand dominate, averaging 59.5 and 27.2 percent respectively. These textural contrasts reflect fundamentally different hydrodynamic regimes, from wave-dominated open coast to tide-swept estuary to sheltered, freshwater-influenced mangrove plain.

When the researchers examined the foraminifera preserved in these sediments, the diversity patterns mapped almost perfectly onto the sediment map. Cox’s Bazar yielded 36 species across 26 genera, the highest diversity of the three areas, with Fisher’s alpha index ranging from 9.95 to 17.06 and Shannon values between 2.71 and 3.23. Kuakata produced 32 species from 20 genera with intermediate indices, while the Sundarbans assemblage contained only 19 species from 14 genera, the lowest diversity, with Fisher’s alpha falling as low as 4.89. The single most diverse site was Inani beach in Cox’s Bazar, and the least diverse was Kotka in the Sundarbans, a contrast that the authors link directly to substrate texture and the ecological conditions it implies.

The composition of the assemblages was equally revealing. The genera Ammonia and Elphidium dominated throughout the entire coastline, demonstrating their remarkable ecological tolerance, but each region carried a distinctive signature of companion taxa. Cox’s Bazar was characterized by Rotalinoides, Ammonia, Elphidium, and Asterorotalia, with mean relative abundances of 17.9, 17.4, 12.8, and 9.3 percent respectively. Kuakata was overwhelmingly dominated by Elphidium and Cribroelphidium at 33.8 and 20.7 percent, alongside several Ammonia species. In the Sundarbans, Ammonia reached individual-sample abundances of up to 55.6 percent, accompanied by Rosalina, Haplophragmoides, Entzia, Haynesina, and Trochammina, a suite of stress-tolerant and salt-marsh agglutinated forms typical of fine-grained, organically enriched, freshwater-influenced environments.

To test whether these patterns were statistically robust rather than coincidental, the team deployed a battery of complementary analyses. Spearman’s rank correlation across the combined 34-sample dataset showed that 18 of the 30 analyzed genera had at least one statistically significant association with a sediment fraction. Medium sand emerged as the fraction with the strongest biological signal: twelve genera, including Amphistegina, Spiroloculina, Cibicides, Rotalinoides, Neorotalia, and Operculina, showed significant positive correlations with it, while Ammonia, Elphidium, Rosalina, and Haplophragmoides were significantly and negatively correlated, reflecting their preference for finer substrates. The genus Gyroidella stood out as the only taxon significantly and positively correlated with coarse sand while being negatively correlated with both fine and very fine sand, marking it as a specialist of high-energy, coarse-grained settings.

Canonical correspondence analysis reinforced these findings in striking visual terms. The first two ordination axes together accounted for 90.9 percent of the constrained species-environment variance, with Cox’s Bazar samples aligning strongly with medium sands and Sundarbans samples clustering consistently with finer grains. Species vectors in the biplot closely tracked the sediment gradients, and the analysis independently reproduced the genus-substrate affinities identified by the correlation analysis. Finally, a two-way PERMANOVA based on Bray-Curtis dissimilarity and 9999 permutations confirmed that both location and sediment category significantly structured the assemblages, with p-values of 0.0001 and 0.0031 respectively. Crucially, the interaction term was not significant, meaning that sediment grain size exerts the same directional effect on community composition regardless of which of the three coastal environments is considered.

Why should grain size matter so much to organisms barely visible to the naked eye? The authors point to an indirect but well-supported mechanism: fine-grained sediments have greater surface area and adsorption capacity and are typically associated with higher organic matter concentrations, which in turn can deplete oxygen in the uppermost sediment layer. Although organic matter and dissolved oxygen were not directly measured in this study, a limitation the authors openly acknowledge, the dominance of opportunistic and stress-tolerant taxa such as Ammonia, Elphidium, and agglutinated forms in the Sundarbans is consistent with assemblages known from organically enriched coastal settings worldwide. The reduced diversity there likely reflects these stressed conditions, where a few tolerant species outcompete the rest.

The assemblages also encode hydrodynamic history. At Inani beach in Cox’s Bazar, the researchers found transported planktonic foraminifera, including Globigerina bulloides and Hantkenina alabamensis, species that live in the open water column and could only arrive on the beach through active wave and tidal transport. Their presence signals a well-connected, open-marine setting characteristic of the inner to middle neritic zone, rather than evidence of local productivity. In Kuakata, the combination of Elphidium, Cribroelphidium, Ammonia, and various miliolids, together with the complete absence of planktonic species, points to estuarine to very inner neritic conditions. In the Sundarbans, salt-marsh agglutinated foraminifera such as Trochammina inflata, Miliammina, Haplophragmoides, and Entzia were confined to areas under strong freshwater influence, echoing ecological patterns reported from karstic coasts of the Adriatic.

Beyond its scientific interest, the study carries practical weight for a coastline facing mounting natural and anthropogenic pressures, from sea-level rise to pollution and sediment starvation. By establishing sediment texture as a tractable, measurable, and directly comparable control on foraminiferal diversity, the work provides a framework for using these microfossils as bioindicators in environmental assessment. The authors recommend that future investigations incorporate direct measurements of organic matter, dissolved oxygen, salinity, and sediment mineralogy to refine the picture. For now, the message from the northern Bay of Bengal is clear: the grains on the seafloor, and the energy that arranges them, set the rules by which life at the smallest scale thrives or struggles, and reading those grains through the lens of foraminifera offers a powerful window into the health of coastal ecosystems under change.

Subject of Research: Relationship between sediment grain size and benthic foraminiferal diversity across contrasting coastal environments of Bangladesh

Article Title: Spatial patterns of benthic foraminiferal diversity in relation to sediment type across contrasting coastal environments of Bangladesh

Article References: Al Kabir, M. S., Saha, S. K., Tushar, M. A. N., & Maria, R. S. (2026). Spatial patterns of benthic foraminiferal diversity in relation to sediment type across contrasting coastal environments of Bangladesh. Discover Geoscience, 4(1), Article 344. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44288-026-00712-1

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44288-026-00712-1

Keywords: benthic foraminifera, sediment grain size, Bay of Bengal, Bangladesh coast, Sundarbans, Cox's Bazar, Kuakata, PERMANOVA, canonical correspondence analysis, coastal biomonitoring, microfossils, Ganges-Brahmaputra-Meghna delta