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

Arrighi, who taught at the State University of New York at Binghamton’s Fernand Braudel Center and later at Johns Hopkins University, built his theory in dialogue with the founders of dependency theory and world-systems analysis, including Andre Gunder Frank and Immanuel Wallerstein. The starting point of that tradition is deceptively simple: states cannot be understood in isolation. The world is a single, unified system in which economic actors, above all corporations, have become political actors in their own right, often more powerful than the nation-states that host them. Within this system, some nations occupy the core while others are pushed to the periphery, and the relationship between the two is not accidental but structural.

Frank’s version of dependency theory, developed in the 1960s, described the mechanism in starkly extractive terms. Core powers draw raw materials and cheap labor from peripheral nations, process them into finished goods, and sell those goods back at high prices, flooding local markets and preventing indigenous industry from developing. Underdevelopment in the periphery, in this account, is not a failure to modernize but the very condition that makes development in the core possible. Colonial monocultures, such as tea cultivation in India, and later mechanisms like production relocation and international loans, all served to lock peripheral economies into dependency. Latin American critics of the theory, from Ruy Mauro Marini to Theotonio dos Santos, went on to identify escape routes: building domestic industry behind protective walls, detaching from a weakening hegemon, or pursuing revolutionary rupture.

Wallerstein took these insights and scaled them up. In his four-volume The Modern World-System, he replaced the dyadic core-periphery model with a tripartite structure that included semi-peripheral countries such as Brazil, India and China, states that aspire to core status and progressively move closer to it. Drawing on Marx’s analysis of capitalism and Fernand Braudel’s attention to long-term processes, Wallerstein distinguished centralized world-empires, which extract taxes from their peripheries, from the decentralized capitalist world-system that emerged in the sixteenth century, in which the periphery supplies cheap raw materials and labor while the core monopolizes high-value production. It was within this intellectual milieu that Arrighi developed his own distinctive contribution.

Arrighi’s masterwork, The Long Twentieth Century, first published in 1994, proposed that the history of capitalism unfolds in a series of systemic cycles of accumulation stretching back to the fifteenth century. Each cycle begins with the productive expansion of capital, money invested in commodity production, described by the Marxian formula M-C, and ends when overaccumulation sets in and a signal crisis marks the turning point. At that moment capital retreats from production into finance, the C-M’ phase, and the accumulated wealth is lent out to finance the next cycle, typically under new leadership. Arrighi identified four such long centuries: the Genoese cycle from the late fifteenth to the early seventeenth century, the Dutch cycle through the mid-eighteenth century, the British cycle through the late nineteenth century, and the American cycle, whose signal crisis arrived in the 1970s amid the Vietnam War and the collapse of the Bretton Woods monetary order.

The pattern behind these cycles is remarkably regular. Each hegemonic power operates on a progressively larger state scale, from the city-state of Genoa to the Dutch Republic, the British Empire and the American world system. Some cycles, notably the Genoese and British, are characterized by extensive development, while the Dutch and American cycles show intensive development. Over time, hegemonic powers internalize more functions: Genoa remained a purely commercial republic, while later powers secured their own protection, production and transaction costs. Crucially, in each transition the declining hegemon becomes a creditor to its successor, financing with its accumulated capital the very power that will displace it. Arrighi saw exactly this dynamic in the relationship between the United States and China: after China’s entry into the World Trade Organization, its export-led industrial expansion generated financial power sufficient to help finance American external debt.

In Adam Smith in Beijing, published in 2007, Arrighi turned to the shift in the epicenter of capital accumulation toward East Asia. China’s rise, in his reading, was the result of deliberate policies that moved the country from semi-peripheral status toward an economic model capable of challenging American primacy, based on industrial production for export at precisely the moment when Western economies were deindustrializing and offshoring. Trumpism, in Imbriano’s analysis, is best understood as an attempt to interrupt this process: a repositioning of American military and commercial power in the Western hemisphere, an authoritarian shift within the liberal system, and a concerted effort to curb the economic and military ascent of China. Its two key instruments are disengagement from distant conflicts and an intensification of pressure, through NATO’s eastern expansion in Europe and through the trade war against Beijing.

Yet the study finds that this response appears insufficient. The threat of tariffs has not redirected the economic strategies of American competitors, and the attempt to revive industrialization on American soil faces formidable obstacles. The evidence from Latin America illustrates the difficulty: trade between the region and China has grown substantially in recent decades, and China’s Belt and Road Initiative has supported infrastructural development that reduced Latin American dependency on the United States, even if the relationship still reproduces a pattern of raw material exports and manufactured imports that has not always fostered local industry. Meanwhile, European allies bound to Washington find themselves pressured to curtail economic ties with Asian partners and Russia, a course that conflicts with their own development interests.

Arrighi identified two anomalies in the current transition that make it unlike any previous one. First, the economic power of the emerging hegemon is separated from the military power of the declining one, a configuration without precedent in earlier cycles. Second, the new leading power may develop its accumulation in a form that is not capitalist in the conventional sense, opening the possibility, in Arrighi’s optimistic reading, of a system based on mutual respect between civilizations and a genuinely multipolar world order. But this outcome presupposes that the United States accepts its transition peacefully. In Chaos and Governance in the Modern World System, written with Beverly Silver in 1999, Arrighi warned that transitions can stall, degenerate into prolonged systemic chaos, or be governed through war. The study concludes that Trumpism, as a product of hegemonic crisis, leaves both paths open: a negotiated multipolar order of peace, or a new systemic chaos of financial and military tension among competing regional powers. Which of these futures prevails, the analysis insists, is not mechanically determined, and that open question is precisely what makes Arrighi’s long view of capitalism so illuminating for the present.

Subject of Research: Applying Giovanni Arrighi's world-systems theory of hegemonic transitions to Trumpism and the crisis of United States global hegemony

Article Title: Trumpism, the world system and multipolarism: a perspective from Giovanni Arrighi’s thought

Article References: Imbriano, G. (2025). Trumpism, the world system and multipolarism: a perspective from Giovanni Arrighi’s thought. Global Public Policy and Governance, 5(4), 329-339. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43508-025-00135-7

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43508-025-00135-7

Keywords: Giovanni Arrighi, Trumpism, world-systems theory, hegemonic transition, multipolarism, United States, China, dependency theory, Immanuel Wallerstein, global governance, systemic cycles of accumulation, American decline