Ustinov Travel Awards Conference Report 6

By Tahura Enam Navile

To conduct my fieldwork for PhD research, I took a 14 hour flight to Dhaka, Bangladesh in late December.

After arriving, I went to the Refugee Relief and Repatriation Commission (RRRC) office of Cox’s Bazar to inform them that I was in Bangladesh and going to start my research. They granted me permission to go inside the camps. At the same time, I was building rapport with the state bureaucrats of the RRRC office as I needed interviews with them for my research too. I met different UN officials and local NGO officials to introduce myself, build rapport and discuss my research.

So far, I have interviewed six state bureaucrats (camp in charge and assistant camp in charge), three NGO legal actors, one activist and lawyer, and two Rohingya persons. I am also conducting participant observation inside the camp Legal Aid Service. Alongside this, I have been participating in various informal meetings and monthly coordination meetings of camp with various actors. My plan for the next few months is to conduct eighteen interviews with the Rohingya community, four interviews with state bureaucrats and six interviews with legal actors and doing participant observation of dealing with legal issues.