A Comprehensive Chronological Index of Published Works (2026–2017)
Interdisciplinary researcher & development practitioner at ULAB — covering disinformation, migration, climate, democracy, and digital rights across South Asia.
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Author Profile Overview
Zulker Naeen is an interdisciplinary researcher and development practitioner at the University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh (ULAB). He serves as a Research Coordinator at the Centre for Critical and Qualitative Studies (CQS) and as an Adjunct Faculty member in the Department of Media Studies and Journalism. His research spans Digital Media and Information Studies, Synthetic Media Studies, Digital Literacy, and their intersections with gender, democracy, and civic participation. He is also Research Coordinator at FactWatch and a South Asia Fellow of the Climate Tracker network.
Zulker Naeen is a freelance journalist who usually writes on environmental and climate change issues.
He covers stories of climate change-induced food insecurity, natural disasters, and migration. As a citizen of one of the most climate-vulnerable nations, he works closely with the Climate Tracker to report climate resiliency for children and grassroots women.
He is actively involved with the Climate Tracker South Asia network, which makes him an environmentally conscious youth.
Zulker is also one of the South Asia Fellows under Climate Tracker, a global media network of Climate Change.
Zulker is one of the Train the Trainer Certified Journalists, can offer any effective climate change communication, empower qualified journalists to deliver training on the major climate journalism topics and establish a certification process for journalists.
He has a master’s degree in Communications and a bachelor’s degree in Media Studies and Journalism from the University of Liberal Arts, Bangladesh.
He has contributed to many course developments with the support of other Climate Tracker staff. As a young climate advocate, his fellowship aims to share knowledge of climate change.
Communicating Climate Change is to promote knowledge on climate change issues and to cover journalism skills. We’re opening this extensive course to prepare the next climate journalist.
Zulker Naeen is launching a course to prepare the next generation of journalists to promote Climate Journalism in Bangladesh.
Published Articles by Zulker Naeen
Here are the published stories by Zulker Naeen.
He focuses his writings on renewable energy, climate and health, energy access, energy democracy, climate migration, loss and damage, solar irrigation, and vector-borne disease.
Bridging Research & Practice in Disinformation Studies and Digital Citizenry
Scholarship & Practice — South Asia
When Displacement Moves Online: Zulker Naeen’s Work on Statelessness, Migration, and Refugee Voice in South Asia
For Zulker Naeen, a humanitarian crisis doesn’t end at the border — or at the screen. His interdisciplinary work follows the Rohingya, Bangladeshi migrant workers, and other displaced communities into the digital spaces where their stories are increasingly rewritten without them.
Feature profile · Displacement, Digital Rights & Migration Studies
A Crisis That Moved Online — and Kept Moving
Think about the last viral story you saw about the Rohingya. Where did it come from? Who framed it? And who was missing from it altogether?
These are the questions that shape Zulker Naeen’s research and journalism. When the Rohingya crisis intensified in 2017, the conversation around it didn’t stay in Myanmar or Bangladesh — it spread rapidly across social media platforms, news sites, and messaging apps in India, Indonesia, Pakistan, and beyond. What spread wasn’t always accurate. And what it left behind, in many cases, was something more dangerous than silence: a story told entirely by others, in which the Rohingya were no longer victims fleeing persecution but threats to be managed.
Naeen calls this the victim-to-threat narrative. Understanding how it forms, spreads, and hardens into public opinion has become the central thread running through his body of work — a portfolio that sits at the crossroads of journalism, migration studies, and digital rights research across South and Southeast Asia.
What makes the argument particularly sharp is what it claims about consequences. Naeen doesn’t treat this narrative as merely offensive content. He frames it as a threat multiplier: a set of stories that fuel real diplomatic friction between neighbouring states, provide political cover for harsh border policies, and widen the gaps in digital rights frameworks that were already poorly equipped to protect people with no citizenship to rely on.
This idea, that statelessness has both a physical and an informational dimension, runs through everything Naeen produces. It connects his academic papers to his journalism and his journalism to the training programmes he builds for working media professionals.
From Journal to Newsroom — and Back Again
One of the more striking features of Naeen’s portfolio is how fluidly it moves between theory and practice. His research findings don’t stay locked inside academic journals; they generate reporting, and that reporting generates new questions that feed back into research.
A good example is the phrase “from statelessness to digital voicelessness” itself. Naeen first used it as a conceptual frame in his journalism — specifically in a September 2025 piece for Global Voices that examined how anti-immigrant disinformation actively silences Rohingya communities in online spaces. A few months later, in December 2025, he followed it with a deeper investigation into what drives anti-immigrant discourse targeting stateless Rohingya in India — tracing how footage and images from Cox’s Bazar refugee camps travel across borders and arrive in Indian social media feeds stripped of their original context.
By February 2026, that same phrase had become the title of a hands-on workshop at the Beyond Borders Asia 2.0 conference in Chiang Mai, Thailand — an event supported by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development and hosted through Deutsche Welle Akademie’s Displacement and Dialogue Asia programme. More than seventeen journalists, editors, and media specialists from across the region spent an hour working through concrete verification techniques for covering forced displacement, using the Rohingya case as their primary reference. Together, they drafted practical guidelines for ethical, inclusive reporting on refugee and migrant communities. The session didn’t just present research findings — it turned them into tools that participants could carry back into their newsrooms the following Monday.
Workshop at a GlanceFrom Statelessness to Digital Voicelessness: Fact-Checking Workshop for Media Professionals to Cover Forced Displacement
February 8, 2026 · Beyond Borders Asia 2.0 · Chiang Mai, Thailand
17+ participants from South and Southeast Asia · Co-created verification guidelines for reporting on displacement
Migration, Scams, and the Economics of Desperation
Alongside the Rohingya focus, Naeen maintains a parallel line of inquiry into Bangladeshi labour migration — and specifically into the digital vulnerabilities that trap aspirant workers long before they reach any border.
His study Root Cause Analysis of Digital Vulnerability of Bangladeshi Migrant Workers maps the mechanics of this problem at the village level — how recruitment scams and fraudulent payment platforms target people who are already economically precarious and digitally inexperienced, and how those scams translate into real financial loss, family debt, and in many cases dangerous migration conditions. The study goes further than diagnosing the problem: it proposes a participatory digital-literacy curriculum that could reduce harm at the point where it actually starts.
That academic work connects directly to two pieces of journalism. A feature for The Business Standard brought the scam economy into public view for a Bangladeshi readership. More recently, a Global Voices investigation traced Bangladeshi migrant smuggling networks operating across the Central Mediterranean route, estimating that this shadow economy could generate between two hundred and three hundred and forty million dollars in gross revenue if current patterns hold. The numbers are staggering — and they point toward a migration system that generates enormous profit for intermediaries while exposing migrants themselves to serious danger at every stage.
Regional Conversations — From Manila to Cox’s Bazar
In June 2026, Naeen brought this regional perspective to Manila, joining a panel on Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference at DRAPAC 2026, hosted by Doublethink Lab and Tempo at the University of the Philippines. Alongside researchers from Indonesia, Taiwan, India, and the Philippines, he presented findings on how coordinated disinformation during Bangladesh’s 2026 national election fell heaviest on women voters, religious and ethnic minority communities, and families with ties to labour migration. His published reflection from that event argues that any serious regional response to foreign information manipulation needs to start with fundamental rights — not with new tools that could just as easily restrict legitimate expression as counter harmful campaigns.
Meanwhile, the physical conditions inside displacement itself remain part of the frame. An earlier study on fire incidents in the Rohingya refugee camps of Cox’s Bazar documented 2,425 fires between 2018 and 2025 — events that affected more than one hundred thousand people and repeatedly destroyed whatever shelter and belongings families had managed to hold onto. That research grounds the larger argument in the simplest possible terms: displaced people deserve the right to shelter that doesn’t burn, just as they deserve the right to a story that isn’t distorted.
One Question, Many Fronts
Taken together, the portfolio amounts to a sustained answer to a single question: what happens when displacement leaves a person without a state, and then digital systems leave them without a voice? The answer Naeen builds, piece by piece, is that both losses are connected — that the physical dispossession of statelessness and the informational dispossession of disinformation reinforce each other, and that addressing one without the other leaves the underlying problem intact.
His work spans research papers, long-form journalism, workshop design, conference panels, and fact-checking training — each format finding its own audience and its own way of putting pressure on the same problem. That range is, in itself, an argument: that the communities most affected by displacement deserve more than a single genre of attention.
Explore Zulker Naeen’s Published Work
Find his writing and research across the following platforms:
If the current growth rate of illegal migration continues—from approximately 14,000 arrivals in 2024 to an estimated 20,000 in 2025—and if per-person costs remain between $10,000 and $17,000, the smuggling economy could reach $200 to $340 million in gross revenue.
Author’s own illustration
Three years of construction work in Dhaka had accumulated to $6,500 in savings when the dalal (local broker) approached with a proposition that seemed almost too good to refuse. The route appeared straightforward: Bangladesh through Saudi Arabia to Libya, then a brief Mediterranean crossing to Italian shores, where monthly earnings could exceed what he made annually.
“From Bangladesh through Saudi Arabia to Libya, then from Libya attempting the boat crossing to Greece or Italy,” he recounted months later, describing what he believed would be a well-established pathway used by thousands before him.
However, upon reaching Libya, reality shifted dramatically. He spent three weeks in what smugglers called a “game house”—a holding facility where two hundred migrants waited for weather conditions and boat availability.
The promised boat finally arrived at night, overcrowded beyond any safety margin, with nearly one hundred and fifty people packed into a vessel designed for perhaps forty.
“We went with the hope of reaching Italy for a better future,” he said, remembering the moment the engine started and the Libyan coast began receding. “The boat ran for only twenty minutes before the coast guard caught us.”
Read more by clicking the article’s original link.
Originally published at GlobalVoices on June 6, 2026.
Inside the Training Module Reshaping Journalism Education
By Guest Contributor
When Zulker Naeen stepped away from daily reporting last year to co-author a training module on independent journalism, he carried eight years of field experience that couldn’t be found in any textbook. He is interdisciplinary.
His credentials included investigations into climate, environment, migration, gender, refugees, geopolitics, cricket diplomacy, digital literacy, and cross-border reporting on environmental justice, as well as navigating the pressures and maintaining editorial independence in Bangladesh’s complex media environment.
Now, that experience has been distilled into a structured curriculum. The “Independent Journalism” module, developed under the Journalism of the Future Fellowship Program, launched this month as part of a broader effort to rebuild public trust in media through better-trained practitioners.
“We’re seeing graduates from journalism programs who can write perfectly structured news stories but struggle when sources dry up or when political pressure arrives,” Naeen explains. “This module addresses what happens between the classroom theory and the newsroom reality.”
The initiative emerges from a partnership between the South Asia Centre for Media Development and Deutsche Welle Academy, in response to what media researchers have documented as a decline in confidence in traditional news outlets across the region. A 2023 Reuters Institute study found that trust in news media among Bangladeshi respondents fell to thirty-eight per cent, down from forty-six per cent two years earlier.
The module targets a deliberately broad audience—recent graduates exploring journalism careers, content creators seeking to transition from social media influence to credible reporting, activists wanting to adopt rigorous journalistic methods, and professionals from other fields bringing expertise into media work.
Rezwan Islam, South Asia Editor, Global Voices, points to changing newsroom compositions. “Ten years ago, nearly everyone in our newsroom had a journalism degree. Now our strongest investigators include a former environmental scientist, an economist, and someone who worked in NGO advocacy. They bring domain expertise we desperately need, but they require structured training in journalistic methodology.”
“Independence doesn’t mean isolation,” Naeen emphasises. “It means having the skills and ethical framework to pursue stories regardless of institutional constraints. That requires both technical competence and understanding how to build sustainable practices.”
The module’s development process involved consultations with working journalists, media scholars, and civil society practitioners. This participatory approach aimed to ensure actual practice conditions rather than idealised versions of journalism work.
The module represents one component of the broader Journalism of the Future program, which includes specialised training in data journalism, fact-checking, and multimedia storytelling. Together, these domains respond to documented skills gaps in Bangladesh’s journalism education landscape.
For Zulker, the transition from practising journalist to curriculum developer has meant translating instinctive knowledge into teachable frameworks. “In the field, you develop reflexes—how to verify information quickly, how to protect sources, how to maintain independence under pressure. The challenge was making those reflexes conscious and systematic so they could be taught.”
The module’s completion arrives as Bangladesh’s media sector faces both opportunities and pressures. Digital platforms have lowered barriers to entry, enabling new voices and models.
Whether this curriculum can meaningfully shift journalism practice in Bangladesh remains to be tested. But its existence reflects growing recognition that rebuilding public trust in media requires investing in the skills and ethical frameworks of those producing journalism—regardless of their backgrounds or institutional affiliations.
“We’re not trying to create identical journalists,” Naeen concludes. “We’re trying to establish shared standards for rigour, ethics, and independence that can apply across different types of media work. If we can do that, we strengthen the entire information ecosystem.
Misinformation about Rohingya refugees often starts in Myanmar and Bangladesh, then spreads across borders and shapes public opinion throughout South Asia. Images and videos from refugee camps in Bangladesh are reused in anti-immigrant narratives against the Rohingya, stateless Muslim refugees who have been forced to flee Myanmar due to an ongoing genocide and oppression against them.
Rohingya Protesters pushing for change in Myanmar at the G20 in Brisbane, Australia. Image via Flickr by Andrew Mercer. CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.
Originally published at Global Voices in December 2025.
The migration journey of Bangladeshi workers is increasingly mediated through informal networks that expose prospective migrants to misinformation, deception, and exploitation.
Despite rising reliance on online recruitment and remittance systems, little is known about how misleading information propagates across the migration lifecycle.
Building on recent evidence of digital recruitment scams and pervasive “free-visa” schemes, this study investigates how misinformation is produced and circulated, which actors exploit digital and interpersonal channels, and which digital-literacy deficits most strongly mediate harm.
Importantly, findings will inform policy and practice: strengthening digital literacy curricula, verification mechanisms, and harmonising regulatory oversight across recruitment pipelines can mitigate the harms documented.
Finally, the research calls for rigorous evaluations of digital-literacy interventions and cross-sector collaborations to foster safer migration pathways.
Digital recruitment scams: A nightmare for thousands of Bangladeshi migrants
Migrants’ digital vulnerability—the inability to authenticate online information and verify recruitment legitimacy—now sits at the heart of Bangladesh’s migration crisis
In recent years, the migration dreams of thousands of Bangladeshi workers have turned into digital nightmares. Social platforms that promise safer pathways to overseas employment have instead become primary vectors for recruitment scams, sophisticated fraud, online exploitation, and digital deception.
Digital Battlefield of Statelessness: Disinformation, Hate Speech, and the ‘Victim-to-Threat’ Narrative on Rohingya in South and Southeast Asia
This study explores the digital battlefield where the Rohingya crisis continues to be reframed by disinformation, state-sponsored propaganda, online hate campaigns, and politically driven narratives. While the visible consequences—forced displacement, statelessness, and violence in refugee camps—have drawn significant international attention, the covert spread of anti-immigrant narratives and disinformation against the Rohingya community has remained insufficiently examined.
From viral social media content to misleading headlines in mainstream media, Rohingya identity has been repeatedly weaponised to fuel public fear and reframe humanitarian crises as national security threats. Anti-immigrant narratives and disinformation now demonstrate how the “victim-to-threat” framing of the Rohingya crisis functions not only as a discursive shift but also as a threat multiplier within the security landscape of South and Southeast Asia.
In countries such as Indonesia, India, Bangladesh, Myanmar, and Pakistan, these narratives have not only shaped local attitudes but also fostered regional distrust and diplomatic friction. For instance, false stories about criminal activity and militant affiliations have circulated widely on TikTok, Facebook, and WhatsApp, portraying the Rohingya as a threat. Similarly, unverified claims linking Pakistan’s intelligence agency to armed Rohingya groups in Bangladesh have spread broadly, heightening suspicions between neighbouring states. These cases highlight how disinformation transcends borders, exploits geopolitical divisions, and turns stateless people into targets of manufactured hostility.
Identify how these narratives are shaped and amplified by local political agendas, militarised state media, and digital platforms.
Expose structural gaps in regional digital rights frameworks that often overlook the digital vulnerability of stateless communities.
Drawing on insights from academia, digital rights journalists, fact-checkers, and regional stakeholders, this study will analyse recurring disinformation patterns—depicting the Rohingya as terrorists, criminals, demographic threats, or burdens on host societies. It will further illustrate how disinformation flows influence policy decisions, humanitarian violations, and regional discourse.
This research contributes to digital migration studies by showing how the “victim-to-threat” narrative functions as a threat multiplier in the security nexus of South and Southeast Asia. It also challenges dominant digital rights frameworks in refugee crisis discourse and advocates for a collaborative response that amplifies the voices of stateless and displaced communities online.
Root Cause Analysis of Digital Vulnerability of Bangladeshi Migrant Workers
In recent years, Bangladeshi aspirant migrant workers and immigration seekers have become primary targets of sophisticated online fraud, recruitment scams, and financial deception. These threats — delivered via social media groups, messaging apps, fake mobile apps, online betting traps, and fraudulent payment flows — have reached deep into villages and vulnerable communities.
Map how digital deception reaches aspirant workers at the village level.
Analyse classical cases showing recurring scam modalities using migration networks.
Co-design a practical, low-literacy curriculum and delivery model for digital & financial literacy suited to grassroots contexts.
Outcomes
This study identifies the common digital recruitment scams and fraud techniques that are targeting Bangladeshi aspirants. Which institutional factors drive digital vulnerability? How do aspirant migrant workers’ digital behaviours and financial practices interact with scam vectors?
This initiative will move beyond symptom-spotting to identify root causes and produce practical solutions — an evidence-based curriculum and pilot that can be taken up by BMET, CSOs, and community trainers.
Keywords
Migration Risk, Digital Vulnerability, Digital Literacy, Recruitment Network, Cross-border Syndicates, Digital Scams
Bridging Gaps, Building Understanding: Countering Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference in Asia
Room 404 at the University of the Philippines held something rare on June 10, 2026 — a genuinely cross-regional reckoning with one of democracy’s most invisible threats. As part of DRAPAC 2026, themed “Building the Commons: Scaling Collective Resources for Our Digital Futures,” Doublethink Lab and Tempo co-hosted a landmark panel discussion titled “Bridging Gaps, Building Understanding: Countering Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference in Asia.”
Experts from Bangladesh, Indonesia, Taiwan, India, and the Philippines filled the room — each carrying field evidence that separately alarmed and together confirmed a regional pattern too consistent to dismiss.
Setting the security frame
Retired Rear Admiral Rommel Jude Ong of the Ateneo School of Government opened the security lens decisively. He argued that FIMI is not a communications failure — it is a deliberate, structured attack on national sovereignty. Drawing from his research on Chinese political warfare, he repositioned the conversation firmly within defence and security frameworks rather than media studies alone.
Janina Santos of Doublethink Lab reinforced this framing with operational precision. Her investigations revealed how state-linked actors — primarily China and Russia — deploy coordinated inauthentic behaviour across Asian platforms, timed deliberately around elections and civil unrest to maximise societal disruption.
Voices from the field
Ika Ningtyas of Tempo brought Indonesia’s lived experience into focus. She documented how health and political disinformation mutually reinforce each other, eroding both institutional trust and civic participation. Her decade-long journalism career gave her findings an immediacy that research alone rarely achieves.
From India, Rohit Sharma of ThinkFi demonstrated how AI and open-source intelligence tools now expose influence operations that previously went undetected. He showed concrete examples of fifth-generation warfare tactics targeting South and Southeast Asian democracies simultaneously.
Zulker Naeen from Bangladesh’s Centre for Critical and Qualitative Studies added a dimension others had acknowledged but rarely examined in depth — the disproportionate targeting of women voters, minority communities, and migrant-connected populations during Bangladesh’s 2026 national elections. FIMI, he argued, exploits existing social fractures with surgical precision.
Jerry Yu of Doublethink Lab and Dana Batnag of Democracy.Net.PH then connected individual country findings to a broader architecture of manipulation — one that crosses borders as fluidly as internet traffic does.
Rights at the centre
Throughout the discussion, FactLink’s Lia Peng guided the panel toward a critical conclusion. Countering FIMI cannot justify restricting expression. Every proposed intervention must anchor itself in fundamental freedoms — online and offline — or risk becoming the very threat it opposes.
A shared infrastructure for defence
What DRAPAC 2026 made unmistakably clear is this — no single country can outpace a threat that operates regionally. Cross-border intelligence sharing, whole-of-society coalitions, and rights-based frameworks are not aspirational language. They are operational necessities.
The commons Asia needs to build starts exactly here — with conversations like this one.
When Disinformation Becomes a Security Threat: A Bangladeshi Researcher’s Takeaways from DRAPAC 2026
Manila already carried the weight of history before the delegates arrived. On June 10, 2026, the University of the Philippines became the meeting ground for something urgent — a conversation about how democracies across Asia are losing a war most citizens cannot see. DRAPAC 2026, themed “Building the Commons: Scaling Collective Resources for Our Digital Futures,” brought together researchers, journalists, and security professionals from across the region. Bangladesh had a voice in that room.
As Research Coordinator at the Centre for Critical and Qualitative Studies (CQS), I joined the panel “Bridging Gaps, Building Understanding: Countering Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference in Asia” to represent not just my institution, but the particular vulnerabilities of a country navigating democratic fragility in a high-pressure information environment.
FIMI is not just fake news
Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference — FIMI — is not simply about false stories spreading online. The European Union External Action Service describes it as a security issue involving a structured supply chain. That distinction changes everything about how we respond.
In Bangladesh, the 2026 national election exposed this distinction sharply. Coordinated networks pushed narratives that were not always factually wrong — they were strategically misleading. The goal was not correction but confusion. Voter uncertainty, ethnic tension, and institutional distrust became the intended harvest. This is cognitive security under attack.
What Bangladesh brought to the table
My presentation drew from research at CQS on how FIMI operates at the intersection of migration, gender, and civic participation. Disinformation in Bangladesh does not target all communities equally. Women voters, minority communities, and migrant-connected populations face layered manipulation — content designed to suppress participation rather than simply spread falsehoods.
During the 2026 election cycle, we tracked coordinated inauthentic behaviour that amplified inflammatory content during key voting windows. The timing was not accidental. State-linked actors — operating from outside Bangladesh’s borders — clearly understood the country’s social fault lines better than most domestic observers wanted to admit.
A regional problem needs a regional response
What made this panel distinct was its refusal to treat each country’s FIMI problem as isolated. Researchers from Indonesia, Taiwan, India, and the Philippines brought their own case studies. Patterns emerged quickly. The tactics — platform manipulation, fabricated personas, emotionally charged micro-targeting — transcended national borders. The threat actors frequently did too.
Doublethink Lab’s digital investigations, Tempo’s fact-checking architecture, and ThinkFi’s AI-driven OSINT research all pointed toward the same conclusion: national responses alone are structurally insufficient. Cross-regional intelligence sharing is no longer optional.
Perhaps the most important thread running through our discussion was this — countering FIMI cannot become a justification for restricting expression. Bangladesh is currently navigating proposed disinformation legislation that carries real risks to press freedom. Any intervention must protect the rights it claims to defend.
The DRAPAC conversation reinforced something researchers and civil society across Asia increasingly agree on: a whole-of-society approach, rooted in fundamental freedoms, is the only sustainable path forward.
Leaving Manila with more than notes
Walking out of Room 404 that afternoon, the urgency felt sharper and the path forward slightly clearer. Bangladesh is not peripheral to this conversation — it sits at a critical intersection of Asian information dynamics.
Bringing that perspective into a regional framework is not just academically valuable. Given what is already happening, it is necessary.
How Saudi Arabia’s inspection campaign erased the line between legal and illegal workers
Robiul Hasan stood at the baqalah counter in a quiet Riyadh neighbourhood on an April evening, counting riyals for his iftar purchases. The 42-year-old construction worker had done this hundreds of times during his fifteen years in Saudi Arabia. This time, however, security patrol officers entered, demanded his iqama, without considering its eight-month validity, and arrested him anyway. Two months later, he arrived at the airport in Dhaka and a question that hundreds of deportees were asking: “What was my fault? I showed my iqama. They did not consider it.”
Saudi authorities conducted an inspection campaign between April 23 and 29, 2026, recording 11,300 violations across the kingdom, including 6,244 related to residency issues. Interviews with dozens of returnees arriving in Dhaka during this April reveal something more upsetting than an administrative sweep. They recount a relentless campaign that erased the line between documented and undocumented workers.
The enforcement campaign can’t be separated from the broader geopolitical earthquake that shook the Middle East beginning in late February. Renewed hostilities in Lebanon since March have caused massive civilian displacement and humanitarian needs across the region. Meanwhile, the Strait of Hormuz remained effectively closed to most commercial shipping as Iran’s Defence Council warned that any attack on Iranian coastal territory would trigger mine-laying across Gulf sea lanes.
These regional shocks created an immediate peril for Saudi Arabia’s three million Bangladeshi workers. Security tightened, and Bangladeshi workers became the fastest proof of control as Gulf uncertainty surged. This Middle East crisis threatened remittances, business, and the livelihoods of families everywhere.
Read more by clicking the article’s original link.
Originally published at Dhaka Tribune on May 20, 2026.
A queue of motorcycles extends along the roadside outside a Dhaka fuel station on March 9, 2026. Photo: Zulker Naeen
Morshed Alam, 28, calculates survival in litres and taka now. The ride-sharing motorcycle driver in Bangladesh’s capital, Dhaka, used to refuel two to three times daily, purchasing just enough fuel to keep working because his pockets never held much cash.
On a morning in March, however, he did something different at a fuel station. He scraped together every spare taka he could find and filled his tank completely for a total of BDT 1,060 ($8.83) that represented nearly a full day’s earnings before expenses.
“My livelihood depends entirely on this motorcycle,” Alam explained while waiting in line. “If fuel becomes unavailable and my bike sits idle, how will my family survive?”
His need to keep working is all-consuming. But millions across Bangladesh with the same needs are now making similar decisions to his as the South Asian country faces a gas shortage, which can only worsen as the conflict in Iran drags on.
Read more by clicking the original link of the article.
March 2021 Rohingya refugee camp fire by Rocky Masum is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Abstract
Since August 2017, approximately one million Rohingya refugees fleeing genocidal violence in Myanmar established the world’s largest and most densely populated refugee settlement in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh. Within this protracted displacement context, fire incidents have emerged as a defining humanitarian catastrophe, with 2,425 documented fires between May 2018 and December 2025 affecting over 100,000 individuals and destroying more than 20,000 shelters.
This investigation is structured around a primary research question: What are the root causes of fire incidents in Rohingya refugee camps in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, and how do structural-accidental fires differ from deliberate arson in terms of causation, frequency, and impact?
The primary objective of this research is to systematically document, analyse, and explain the root causes and perpetrators of fire incidents in the Rohingya refugee camps of Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, between 2017 and 2026, with particular emphasis on distinguishing between structural-accidental fires and deliberate arson orchestrated by armed groups.
This research employs a mixed-methods approach combining qualitative systematic literature review of 55 primary and secondary sources, critical discourse analysis of government investigation reports and humanitarian agency assessments, spatial-temporal mapping of fire incidents across camp blocks and seasons, and triangulation of English-language international reporting with Bangla-language national media coverage to capture both external and domestic framings of the crisis.
A sampling strategy utilising purposive and snowball techniques was employed to identify all accessible reports that met the inclusion criteria: direct coverage of fire incidents in Cox’s Bazar camps, published between 2017 and 2026, featuring causal analysis beyond mere incident description.
This research not only extends conflict studies literature on the use of arson as a weapon in contested governance spaces but also provides evidence-based recommendations for humanitarian actors regarding the inadequacy of technical fire safety interventions that have failed to address the governance dimension.
Ultimately, the study highlights the most fundamental protection concern—the right to shelter that does not burn—remains unaddressed after eight years of encampment, severe inadequacies of temporary humanitarian responses to what have become permanent displacement situations.
Bridging Research and Practice: Media Professionals Tackle Cross-Border Misinformation in Forced Displacement Coverage
“From statelessness to digital voicelessness” fact-checking workshop at Beyond Borders Asia 2.0 conference
On February 8, 2026, in the main conference hall of Duangtawan Hotel, more than seventeen media professionals and journalism experts from across South Asia and Southeast Asia gathered for a session that would challenge how they approach one of the region’s most complex humanitarian stories.
Throughout the dedicated one-hour session, facilitator Zulker Naeen guided participants through a journey that began with research findings and evolved into collaborative, hands-on learning.
The Rohingya situation, serving as the session’s focal case study, demonstrates how humanitarian suffering transforms into contested narratives online, with disinformation and propaganda flowing across national boundaries from Myanmar into Bangladesh, India, and other neighbouring countries.
Initially, the facilitators shared research evidence documenting patterns of cross-border misinformation and the mechanisms through which anti-migrant narratives gain traction online. Subsequently, the session shifted into interactive mode, where participants actively engaged with concrete fact-checking techniques tailored specifically to displacement reporting.
The Rohingya crisis is not only unfolding on the ground but also in the digital sphere, where disinformation, propaganda, and hate campaigns migrate across borders—from Myanmar to Bangladesh, India, and beyond—transforming humanitarian suffering into scrutinised fiction.
Using the Rohingya case as a focal example — “From statelessness to digital voicelessness” — participants have learned concrete fact-checking techniques, examined how hate speech and state-led narratives spread online, and co-created a guideline to ensure ethical, inclusive, and impactful journalism across South Asia.
This session developed a context-specific, practical fact-checking guide for journalists, media professionals, content creators, and experts based in Asia who report on forced displacement, refugees, migrants, and host communities. Through a highly interactive workshop, the session addressed one problem: the rise of cross-border misinformation and anti-migrant narratives that silence displaced populations.
By combining evidence from research and collaborative guidelines, this session aims to support media professionals in producing accountable reporting that protects the rights and dignity of the displaced community.
The session’s placement within the broader Beyond Borders Asia 2.0 conference, supported by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development, underscored the international recognition that journalism about refugees, migrants, and host communities requires specialised knowledge and ethical rigour.
By the session’s conclusion, participants possessed not only enhanced technical skills in verification but also a deeper understanding of their role in either amplifying or countering the narratives that shape public attitudes toward displacement.
