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 authors ground their analysis in three theoretical traditions that have gained considerable traction in decolonial scholarship. Decolonial thought interrogates the coloniality of knowledge, the idea that political independence did not dismantle the underlying hierarchies of what counts as legitimate expertise. Postcolonial theory examines how those hierarchies persist in institutions, languages, and credentialing systems long after formal rule ends. Ubuntu philosophy, rooted in southern African thought and often summarized as the principle that a person is a person through other persons, offers a relational ethic in which knowledge is communal, contextual, and bound to collective wellbeing rather than individual accumulation. Together, these frameworks provide the analytical lens through which the researchers read decades of literature on African education, asking not only what is taught but whose knowledge is authorized to appear in the curriculum at all.

Methodologically, the study is a systematic analysis of literature rather than a new empirical survey, a design choice that carries both strengths and constraints. By aggregating peer-reviewed findings across five national contexts, the authors can identify patterns that no single-country study could reveal, such as the recurring gap between policy rhetoric and classroom practice. The trade-off is that the review inherits the limitations of its source material: uneven documentation, variable definitions of what constitutes indigenous knowledge, and the persistent underreporting of oral traditions that resist easy codification. The authors are candid about this gap, noting that existing literature frequently celebrates the value of IKS in the abstract while failing to investigate its practical integration within the varied contexts across the continent. Their review is explicitly an attempt to move the conversation from principle to implementation.

What the analysis found is a consistent architecture of obstruction. Five barriers recur across the case countries with striking regularity. The first is the persistence of Eurocentric curricula, in which African history, science, and ecology appear, if at all, as footnotes to a European narrative. The second is language: instruction delivered in English, French, or Arabic often severs children from the languages in which their communities encode agricultural, medicinal, and ecological knowledge. The third is institutional resistance, as universities and ministries built on colonial templates treat indigenous epistemologies as folklore rather than scholarship. The fourth is inadequate policy support, with governments issuing symbolic endorsements of local knowledge without budget lines, teacher training, or assessment reform to back them. The fifth is the challenge of meeting global academic standards, a structural bind in which internationally benchmarked examinations and accreditation regimes penalize curricula that deviate from metropolitan norms.

Against this bleak backdrop, the case findings offer concrete evidence that integration can work. Ghana’s mother-tongue education initiatives, which deliver early literacy instruction in local languages rather than English, have yielded measurable improvements in reading outcomes while strengthening children’s connection to community knowledge. The mechanism is well understood in literacy research: phonological awareness and comprehension develop fastest in a language a child already speaks, so mother-tongue instruction is not a sentimental concession but a cognitive advantage. South Africa’s formal IKS policy frameworks, among the most developed on the continent, have created institutional channels through which indigenous knowledge can be documented, protected, and incorporated into research and teaching, with reported gains in cultural identity alongside academic outcomes. These are not peripheral experiments; they are national-scale demonstrations that decolonized curricula can be both culturally grounded and pedagogically effective.

The Kenyan and Tanzanian cases illustrate a different dynamic, one in which policy ambition collides with implementation reality. Both countries have experimented with incorporating local content and languages into schooling, yet the review documents how examination pressure, teacher shortages, and centralized curriculum control repeatedly pull practice back toward the colonial-era default. In the North African comparative sub-case of Morocco and Algeria, the picture is complicated by the region’s layered linguistic history, where Amazigh indigenous knowledge and language have had to negotiate space within education systems dominated by Arabic and French legacies. The comparison underscores a key analytical point of the study: there is no single African template for decolonizing education. The colonial encounter differed profoundly across the continent, and so must the pathways out of it.

From these findings the authors derive a three-part prescription. First, localized curriculum reform: national curricula should be redesigned so that indigenous ecological knowledge, oral histories, and local problem-solving traditions are treated as core content rather than enrichment material. Second, community-driven teacher training: because most teachers were themselves educated within colonial epistemologies, professional development must be co-designed with elders, knowledge holders, and local communities rather than imposed from ministry headquarters. Third, national legislation to institutionalize IKS, giving indigenous knowledge the same legal and structural protection that formal disciplines enjoy. The argument here is essentially institutional: without statutory anchoring, IKS integration remains hostage to political cycles and administrative discretion, vulnerable to reversal with each change of government.

The implications extend well beyond the five countries studied. Education for sustainable development has become a global policy orthodoxy, enshrined in United Nations frameworks and national strategies alike, yet the review suggests that sustainability education imported wholesale from external models risks reproducing the very epistemic dependencies it claims to overcome. Indigenous knowledge systems, by contrast, often encode precisely the relational, place-based understanding of ecosystems that sustainability science now champions, from rotational farming practices to community water governance. The study’s contribution is to show that recognizing this is not enough; the mechanisms of schooling, including language policy, teacher certification, assessment design, and legislative frameworks, must be restructured to carry that knowledge. Sustainability, in this reading, is as much an epistemological project as an environmental one.

For policymakers and development practitioners, the review functions as both a diagnosis and a roadmap. Its evidence base, drawn from published literature rather than new fieldwork, means that the reported outcomes, such as improved literacy in Ghana and strengthened cultural identity in South Africa, should be read as promising signals warranting rigorous longitudinal evaluation rather than settled proof. The authors themselves frame the findings as significant implications for those seeking to build culturally grounded and socially relevant education systems across post-colonial Africa, a formulation that invites further empirical testing. What the study establishes firmly is the shape of the problem: five interlocking barriers, documented across multiple national contexts, that will not dissolve through goodwill or symbolic policy alone.

The deeper stakes of the research are captured in its attention to post-colonial identity. Education does not merely transmit skills; it tells young people who they are and whose knowledge matters. When a Kenyan student learns ecology only through European case studies, or a Ghanaian child is punished for speaking her mother tongue at school, the curriculum performs a quiet erasure that no amount of technical training can offset. The review’s most consequential argument may be that sustainable education and epistemic justice are inseparable: a system that devalues the knowledge of the communities it serves will struggle to secure their trust, participation, or long-term engagement. Reimagining African education through decolonial pathways, the authors suggest, is therefore not a retreat from global standards but a demand that those standards make room for the intellectual traditions of the continent’s own people, and a demonstration, through cases from Accra to Cape Town, that when they do, learning improves.

Subject of Research: Integration of Indigenous Knowledge Systems into sustainable education reform in post-colonial Africa

Article Title: Reimagining sustainable education in Africa through decolonial pathways and indigenous knowledge systems

Article References: Shah, N., Akram, H., & Abdelrady, A. H. (2026). Reimagining sustainable education in Africa through decolonial pathways and indigenous knowledge systems. Discover Sustainability. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43621-026-04596-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43621-026-04596-6

Keywords: Indigenous Knowledge Systems, decolonisation, African education, sustainable education, education for sustainable development, postcolonial theory, Ubuntu philosophy, curriculum reform, mother-tongue education, Ghana, South Africa, language policy