The research team scoured the Scopus database, one of the largest curated indexes of peer-reviewed literature, for publications on refugee and forced displacement issues in Southeast Asia published between 1975 and 2025. Using a structured search strategy paired with an explicit screening protocol against pre-defined inclusion and exclusion criteria, the authors filtered out records that were only peripherally related to the topic. The final corpus comprised 1,110 publications, a dataset spanning half a century of scholarship on asylum seekers, internally displaced persons, and stateless populations. The analysis was conducted using a combination of bibliometric software: BiblioMagika for data processing, OpenRefine for cleaning and standardising records, and VOSviewer for constructing and visualising co-occurrence networks of author keywords.

Bibliometric analysis is a quantitative science-mapping technique that treats publications, citations, and keywords as data points rather than reading their content in depth. Performance indicators, such as annual publication counts, citation totals, and the productivity of individual authors and countries, describe the volume and impact of a field. Co-occurrence mapping, by contrast, reveals its conceptual anatomy: when two keywords appear together in the same article more often than chance would predict, they are drawn closer together in a network diagram, and dense clusters of connected terms expose the thematic pillars around which a discipline organises itself. This dual approach allowed the researchers to chart both the growth trajectory of Southeast Asian refugee scholarship and the intellectual architecture underpinning it.

The headline finding concerns timing. Publication output remained modest for decades but rose markedly from the 2010s onward, a surge that coincides with the intensifying international visibility of the Rohingya crisis after 2012, when sectarian violence in Rakhine State triggered renewed displacement and drew sustained global media attention. The authors are careful about what this correlation means. Because their data are descriptive, they interpret the association as suggestive rather than causal; the analysis cannot demonstrate that the Rohingya emergency itself drove the increase in publications, only that the two trends unfolded in parallel. Even so, the pattern is striking: a humanitarian catastrophe that unfolded largely within the region appears to have been accompanied by an expansion of the academic literature documenting and analysing displacement.

Equally revealing is what the performance indicators show about who produces this knowledge. Research output is concentrated among a limited group of author affiliations and contributing countries, indicating uneven participation in the indexed literature. This concentration matters for reasons that go beyond bibliometric curiosity. Scholarship on displacement is often produced by institutions far from the displacement itself, and the new study’s evidence of a narrow base of productive affiliations raises familiar questions about whose perspectives shape the research agenda, who has access to publication channels, and how the priorities of international journals interact with the concerns of local communities, host governments, and displaced people themselves.

The thematic mapping is where the study delivers its richest technical contribution. Aggregate author-keyword co-occurrence analysis identified nine coexisting thematic areas. The first cluster concerns refugee health and trauma, a lineage that stretches back to some of the earliest and most highly cited works in the corpus, including studies of trauma and survival among Burmese political dissidents in Thailand published in the mid-1990s and research on the functional health of Cambodians living in border camps. A second cluster addresses Rohingya statelessness and rights, while a third examines legal precarity and access to health services, reflecting the peculiar limbo in which most refugees in Southeast Asia live, since many states in the region are not parties to the 1951 Refugee Convention or its 1967 Protocol.

The remaining clusters extend the map across the full breadth of the displacement experience. One area covers asylum governance in the maritime corridor, evoking the irregular boat movements through the Andaman Sea and the policy responses they provoke. Another addresses camp-based displacement and identity, drawing on decades of research along the Thailand-Myanmar border. A sixth cluster concerns internal displacement, conflict, and disasters, encompassing both war-driven displacement and the upheaval caused by events such as the Aceh tsunami. Two further areas focus on women, children, and reproductive health, including studies of menstrual hygiene management challenges facing displaced girls and women, and on the international protection architecture itself, including legal scholarship on how politics shaped the outcome of the 1967 Protocol. The ninth cluster examines protracted displacement and education, including barriers to higher education faced by Burmese refugees in Thailand.

Together, these clusters suggest clear priorities for future research. The authors argue that the patterns point toward comparative studies that span multiple countries and displacement contexts, longitudinal designs that track displaced populations and policy changes over time, and greater methodological diversity across the field. They are equally candid about the limits of their own analysis: the keyword co-occurrence data do not establish how themes changed over time, and studies that fall below the keyword occurrence threshold are invisible to the network. The reliance on a single database, Scopus, also means that grey literature, non-English publications, and work in regional journals not indexed by Scopus remain outside the picture, a constraint the authors acknowledge given licensing restrictions that prevent public sharing of the raw bibliographic records.

The timing of this mapping exercise could hardly be more consequential. UNHCR’s Global Trends reporting continues to document record levels of forced displacement worldwide, and Southeast Asia remains both a source and a destination region for people fleeing persecution, conflict, and disaster. Recent legal scholarship, cited in the study, analyses Thailand’s national screening mechanism as a case of partial acculturation to international refugee law, illustrating how host states in the region are incrementally, and unevenly, building domestic structures for managing asylum. A consolidated evidence base of the kind this study provides gives policymakers, humanitarian agencies, and researchers a shared map of what is known, and just as importantly, of where the gaps lie.

What makes the study notable within bibliometrics itself is its methodological transparency. The authors describe a structured search strategy, an explicit screening protocol, and a documented pipeline through BiblioMagika, OpenRefine, and VOSviewer, with derived datasets available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request. No custom code was developed, and the study involved no human participants, requiring no ethical approval. By systematically mapping the knowledge structure of refugee and forced displacement scholarship in Southeast Asia, the team has converted five decades of scattered publications into an organised intellectual geography, one that future studies of regional migration governance and protection regimes can navigate, interrogate, and extend as the forces that displace people across the region continue to evolve.

Subject of Research: Bibliometric mapping of refugee and forced displacement research in Southeast Asia from 1975 to 2025

Article Title: Refugee and forced displacement research in Southeast Asia (1975–2025): a bibliometric analysis of trends and future directions

Article References: Muis, A. M. R. A., Hajimin, M. N. H. H., & Paulus, A. A. (2026). Refugee and forced displacement research in Southeast Asia (1975–2025): a bibliometric analysis of trends and future directions. SN Social Sciences, 6(10), Article 542. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-026-01855-1

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43545-026-01855-1

Keywords: refugee studies, forced displacement, Southeast Asia, bibliometric analysis, Rohingya, statelessness, internal displacement, asylum governance, refugee health, VOSviewer, Scopus, migration governance

The study, led by Md Minarul Hoque of the Bangladesh Oceanographic Research Institute, is grounded in the recognition that Bangladesh ranks among the world’s most climate-vulnerable nations. The Global Climate Risk Index 2021 placed it seventh for vulnerability to extreme weather between 2000 and 2019, while the World Risk Index 2023 ranked it ninth for overall disaster risk. The country’s southwestern coast, facing the Bay of Bengal—a basin that generates five to six more tropical cyclones each year than the Arabian Sea—has been battered in recent decades by Cyclones Sidr, Aila, Amphan and Yaas. Sidr alone affected more than eight million people and caused over 3,400 deaths and USD 1.7 billion in damage; Aila displaced three million; Amphan touched ten million lives and inflicted USD 131 million in losses.

To understand how these shocks translate into human movement, the researchers surveyed 60 households and conducted eight focus group discussions across Gabura’s villages, complementing their fieldwork with meteorological records from the Bangladesh Meteorological Department covering 2000 to 2020. The team deliberately adopted an exploratory, perception-based design, documenting how affected households themselves articulate the drivers of mobility rather than attempting to establish formal causal mechanisms. Respondents were selected through simple random sampling, and thematic saturation—repetition and consistency across accounts—was reached within the sample, consistent with methodological guidance for qualitative migration research.

The environmental picture that emerged is unambiguous. All respondents reported year-round exposure to salinity intrusion, alongside recurrent cyclones, tidal surges, flooding and waterlogging. Sea level in the region is rising at an estimated 5 to 7.5 millimeters per year, and salinity-affected land in coastal Bangladesh expanded from 8,330 to 10,560 square kilometers between 1973 and 2009. Saltwater encroachment has degraded soil fertility, reduced crop yields and compromised drinking water, while the mangrove ecosystems that buffer cyclones and sustain fisheries are themselves under threat. Meteorological records confirmed an upward trend in cyclone frequency and tidal flooding intensity over the past two decades, matching residents’ accounts that major migration waves followed Sidr in 2007, Aila in 2009 and Amphan in 2020.

But the socioeconomic data reveal why climate alone does not explain who leaves. Seventy-three percent of households were classified as poor and 10 percent as very poor, with 56.7 percent dependent on a single income earner. Half of respondents had no formal education and only 3.3 percent had completed higher education. Occupational transformation was striking: just 10 percent still fished, while 43.3 percent had turned to woodcutting—known locally as Bawali—and 23.3 percent to day labor, reflecting the collapse of traditional fishing viability under resource depletion, rising costs and repeated disasters. The population is also markedly older than in other coastal communities studied in Teknaf, Cox’s Bazar and along the Padma and Meghna rivers, a pattern the authors interpret as evidence of selective out-migration of the young and economically active, leaving behind an aging population with reduced adaptive capacity.

The statistical analysis sharpened this picture. Chi-square tests found a significant association between livelihood category and migration decision, with people in environmentally sensitive occupations such as fishing and woodcutting more likely to move, while gender showed no significant effect. Pearson correlations revealed a moderate positive relationship between salinity exposure and migration frequency and a negative relationship between income change and migration, meaning households facing income losses were more likely to migrate. A binary logistic regression model, statistically significant and correctly classifying 78.3 percent of cases, identified salinity exposure as the most influential predictor, roughly doubling the odds of migration, while higher household income significantly reduced the likelihood of leaving. The authors stress these inferential results are exploratory indicators of association within a small, case-based sample rather than generalizable causal proof.

Migration from Gabura, the study concludes, is best described as climate-linked rather than purely climate-induced. Environmental shocks—cyclones, surges, salinity—act as triggers that destroy assets and undermine livelihoods, but the decision to move is ultimately driven by the search for income, security and services, filtered through poverty, indebtedness and limited local employment. Most movement is internal and often temporary, with migrants seeking work in nearby districts such as Jashore, Satkhira and Khulna, typically leaving dependents behind. Male wage earners usually decide on migration while women follow or stay, reinforcing traditional household power dynamics. Meanwhile, 53.3 percent of respondents preferred to stay despite hardship, reflecting a deep emotional and cultural attachment to place that the authors frame as voluntary immobility—a form of cultural continuity rather than a failure to adapt.

The broader national context amplifies the stakes. Between 2008 and 2014, 4.7 million Bangladeshis were displaced, and 7.1 million were displaced in 2022 alone. The World Bank estimates South Asia may see 17 to 36 million internal climate migrants by 2050, one-third of them potentially in Bangladesh, and warns that 13.3 million Bangladeshis could be displaced over the next three decades through the combined effects of sea level rise, water scarcity and agricultural decline. Up to 70 percent of slum dwellers in Dhaka are already considered climate migrants, making environmental displacement what the study calls a silent urban crisis. Comparable dynamics are visible globally, from seasonal labor migration in Vietnam’s salinity-stricken Mekong Delta to relocation pressures in Kiribati and Tuvalu, though Gabura’s weaker institutional support and stronger place attachment constrain adaptive mobility in distinctive ways.

From these findings the authors derive a set of exploratory policy directions: establishing a national database on climate migrants to replace unrecorded movement with proactive planning; investing in climate-resilient infrastructure, including embankments, cyclone shelters, early-warning systems and community desalination or rainwater harvesting to counter salinity; and developing localized adaptation strategies such as salt-tolerant crops, aquaculture training and livelihood diversification for single-earner households. They argue such measures could be operationalized through existing frameworks like the Bangladesh Delta Plan 2100 and the National Adaptation Plan, and that early-warning and embankment investments are cost-effective relative to future disaster recovery and displacement costs.

The study acknowledges its limitations—a single union, a small sample dominated by male household heads, reliance on retrospective self-reports, and a cross-sectional design that cannot track change over time—and calls for longitudinal, gender-balanced and spatially explicit follow-up research. Its central message, however, is clear: effective policy must address environmental risk and socioeconomic vulnerability together, recognizing both the right of coastal communities to remain in safety and the right of those who must move to do so with dignity. In Gabura, climate change operates not as a solitary force but as a powerful catalyst within a wider web of poverty, livelihood insecurity and cultural attachment—and it is that web, the authors contend, that ultimately determines who stays and who goes.

Subject of Research: Climate-induced migration and its socioeconomic drivers in coastal Bangladesh

Article Title: Causes, consequences and processes of climate induced coastal migration in Bangladesh

Article References: Hoque, M. M., Ahmed, N., Khan, M. A. I., & Bhuyan, M. S. (2026). Causes, consequences and processes of climate induced coastal migration in Bangladesh. Discover Oceans, 3(1), Article 10. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44289-026-00126-4

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44289-026-00126-4

Keywords: climate-induced migration, Bangladesh, coastal communities, salinity intrusion, tropical cyclones, sea level rise, livelihood insecurity, internal displacement, climate adaptation, Gabura Union, Satkhira, place attachment