Through Rohingya Eyes: Storytelling, Memory, Representation
By Maung Emdadul Hasan. Edited by Ahtaram Shin and David Palazón.
October 16, 2026
This article was supported by the Global Statelessness Fund.
For decades, much of the world’s understanding of the Rohingya has been shaped by stories told by people outside the community. Photographs, news reports, documentaries and research have drawn attention to violence, displacement and life in the refugee camps. These accounts have played an important role in documenting persecution and bringing international attention to the situation. At the same time, Rohingya people have often remained the subjects of stories rather than the people producing and shaping them.
The scale of the population makes the question of representation particularly significant. According to the Government of Bangladesh–UNHCR Population Dashboard for Cox’s Bazar,1,184,864 Rohingya refugees were recorded in the camps in February 2026, with women and children accounting for approximately 78% of the population.
Mohammed Raihan (6K), a Rohingya artist and the Managing Director of the Rohingya Art Club (7K), offers one example of this emerging practice. Through murals, live drawing, painting, photography and short documentary videos, he documents not only hardship but also creativity, culture, identity and everyday community life. He describes beginning to use art and storytelling in childhood to express his community’s experiences and preserve Rohingya history and culture.
Raihan’s work reflects a wider development across the refugee camps in Bangladesh. During the COVID-19 pandemic, movement restrictions made it more difficult for journalists from outside the camps to report regularly. At the same time, a large population of young people, many with limited opportunities for work or education, was increasingly using smartphones and social media. Some began taking on roles that had often been filled by outsiders, documenting events, reporting community concerns and producing photographs, videos and other digital content for audiences within and beyond the camps.
A growing number of Rohingya photographers, writers, artists, journalists, filmmakers, researchers, content creators and community organisers began producing work according to their own interests and priorities. Their subjects extend beyond displacement and humanitarian crisis to education, family life, culture, daily experiences, community activities and the concerns shaping their future.
This raises a fundamental question: who has the opportunity to document Rohingya life, and who gets to decide how it is represented?
Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights recognises the freedom to seek, receive and impart information and ideas. The right to express and communicate experiences therefore already belongs to Rohingya people. What remains uneven is the ability to exercise that right: access to equipment, training, income, safe working environments, publication opportunities and platforms all influence who can produce and circulate work, and whose voice reaches wider audiences.
Authorship, therefore, does not end with making an image or telling a story. Who selects, edits, credits, exhibits, publishes and preserves that work also determines how much control the creator retains over it, and how the community is represented through it.
To examine this development, one of Rohingyatographer’s members Maung Emdadul Hasan (25K), conducted a 27-question survey of 250 respondents, alongside 45 in-depth interviews and a mapping exercise covering approximately 80 Rohingya-led or Rohingya-serving initiatives connected to storytelling, photography, research, journalism, education, art and archiving.
A Young Generation of Storytellers
Rohingya visual storytelling has expanded in recent years and has been driven largely by young Rohingya. Of the 250 respondents surveyed, 95.2% were under the age of 35, while 84% were based in refugee camps in Bangladesh. The survey also included respondents living elsewhere, including members of the Rohingya diaspora.
The survey also points to the recent nature of this growth. Some 58.4% of respondents began creating visual content from 2023 onwards, while 92.8% believed that Rohingya visual storytelling had increased over the previous five years.
The survey also reveals a significant gender imbalance: 86% of respondents were male and 14% were female. This is a descriptive finding rather than an explanation of women’s participation. The reasons for the imbalance would need to be examined through the interviews and through further research into access to training, equipment, mobility, safety and opportunities for publication or paid work.
The motivations for entering the field were primarily social rather than financial. Human rights was the most frequently identified motivation, at 36.7%, followed by documenting Rohingya life at 21.8%, personal interest at 16.8% and training at 15.4%. Income accounted for approximately 0.8% of responses. Because respondents could select up to three motivations, these figures describe the frequency with which each option was selected rather than a single motivation assigned to each participant.
The findings suggest that many participants approach visual storytelling as a means of documenting their experiences, communicating with wider audiences and contributing to their communities, rather than as an immediate source of income.
For Maung Sawyeddollah (76K), storytelling is closely connected to truth, dignity and advocacy. His work reflects a progression from documenting and speaking about Rohingya experiences in the refugee camps to engaging with international institutions, higher education and campaigns for accountability. Having fled Myanmar in 2017 and spent years as a refugee in Bangladesh, Sawyeddollah later moved to the United States to study at New York University, while continuing to advocate for Rohingya rights. In January 2025, with the support of Amnesty International, the Open Society Justice Initiative and Victim Advocates International, he submitted a whistleblower complaint to the US Securities and Exchange Commission concerning Meta’s alleged role in the atrocities against the Rohingya. On 15 October 2026, Maung was named the inaugural laureate of the Kofi Annan Geneva Youth Peace Prize, recognising his work for peace, education and Rohingya human rights despite being denied citizenship by his own country.
His concerns sit within a wider, documented history. In 2024, the UN Independent Investigative Mechanism for Myanmar analysed content posted on 43 Facebook pages between July and December 2017, identifying more than 10,000 posts it considered hate speech. The investigation found that the pages formed a network with clear links to the Myanmar military and were part of a coordinated campaign against the Rohingya during the 2017 clearance operations. Amnesty International’s investigation, The Social Atrocity: Meta and the Right to Remedy for the Rohingya, also concluded that Facebook’s ranking and recommendation algorithms amplified anti-Rohingya content, increasing the risk of violence. Together, these findings show how online platforms can become more than channels for communication: they can help organised campaigns spread hatred at scale.
The implications extend beyond social media as it existed in 2017. Rohingya creators are already beginning to experiment with artificial intelligence, opening up possibilities for translation, transcription, research and creative production. But these tools also raise questions about accuracy, cultural bias, ownership and the risk that fabricated or manipulated media could be used to discredit authentic testimony. The underlying lesson remains deeply relevant: technology does not merely distribute a message. Its design can determine how far that message travels, whom it reaches and how much influence it gains. The central question is no longer simply whether AI will affect the Rohingya cause, but whether Rohingya people can help shape the systems that will increasingly influence how they are represented, how their history is preserved and how their future is imagined.
Rohel Khan (260K YouTube / 211K Facebook) offers a different example of Rohingya self-expression through music and digital media. A rapper and online content creator, he has developed a substantial online following. Through rap and other digital formats, Khan demonstrates how Rohingya creators can communicate experiences, identity and community concerns to audiences across geographical boundaries. His case also raises questions about the relationship between digital visibility, public identity and access to opportunity. He has recently resettled in Canada, moving his activities beyond the refugee-camp context.
Roshidullah Kyaw Naing (8K), a Rohingya storyteller and poet, offers another example of how the pursuit of storytelling and education can lead beyond the confines of the camps. He is now based in Malaysia, having travelled there by boat to pursue his studies and develop his skills. His journey reflects the difficult choices some young Rohingya make when opportunities for education and professional development within the camps are limited. In his case, leaving meant taking a considerable personal risk in pursuit of a different future.
Roshidullah approaches storytelling as both a means of documenting experience and a form of collective expression. His understanding of storytelling extends beyond the production of images or information: it is connected to remembrance, resistance, advocacy and communication.
As he puts it, storytelling is “a means of remembrance, resistance, advocacy and communication.” Roshidullah also emphasises the importance of individual voices within this wider process: “Never believe that your voice is unimportant.”
His words highlight how storytelling can serve both personal and collective purposes: recording experiences, preserving memory and communicating with audiences within and beyond the Rohingya community. Together, these examples show how Rohingya self-representation takes different forms, from advocacy and public testimony to music, poetry and digital storytelling, while also showing how individual creators are finding different ways to move beyond the limitations of life in the camps.
Beyond Displacement
The reasons people enter visual storytelling are also reflected in what they choose to document. Rohingya creators are not focused exclusively on persecution, displacement or humanitarian conditions. Their work increasingly records education, family life, culture, childhood, religion, work and the ordinary experiences of life in the camps.
The survey reflects this wider focus. Education accounted for 28.6% of the main content types, followed by photography at 21.7%, documentary at 15.3%, video at 13.5%, journalism at 12.1% and artwork at 8.2%. When asked about subjects, education accounted for 28.4%, human rights for 18.3%, daily life for 17.4% and camp life for 14.3%. The figures suggest that Rohingya storytelling is not simply documenting what happened to the community, but also recording how people live within it.
Arafat Khan(10K), a Rohingya photojournalist and visual storyteller living in the camps, describes this distinction directly. Displaced from Myanmar in 2017, he began developing his storytelling practice from his own experience and from seeing how little the outside world understood about everyday Rohingya life.
Arafat says he wants to show “not only our struggles, but also our dignity, culture, resilience, family life, education, faith, and dreams.”
His photographs cover children, families, women, elders, education, religious and cultural events, community activities, fires, floods and landslides, as well as the wider conditions of camp life. For Arafat, the everyday is not separate from the historical record. He describes himself as someone trying to preserve the visual memory of his community, arguing that personal stories and photographs help document what Rohingya people experience beyond humanitarian statistics.
Showkatara (1K), one of the newest female members of Rohingyatographer, approaches photography from a similar perspective. She began documenting life around her after the 2017 displacement, initially capturing what was happening around her before developing a more deliberate practice of telling Rohingya stories through photography. Her work focuses on everyday life in the camps, including children, elders and community life alongside more difficult realities.
“For too long, outsiders have told our stories, often portraying us solely as victims. I chose this work to reclaim our narrative.”
Her intended audience is both international and Rohingya: she wants to communicate with policymakers and human rights advocates, while also preserving the community’s history for younger generations.
This dual purpose is significant. Rohingya storytellers are communicating outward, seeking recognition and attention from audiences beyond the camps, while also creating a record for people within the community. Their work can therefore function simultaneously as journalism, advocacy, cultural documentation and memory.
The result is a more complicated picture of Rohingya life: one in which displacement and human rights remain important subjects, but where classrooms, families, celebrations, friendships, faith, work and aspirations also become part of what is considered worth recording. The camera, phone or notebook is not only documenting a crisis; it is documenting a society.
From restriction to recognition
The space for Rohingya self-representation has not developed without resistance. For some photographers, documenting life in the camps has at times been treated not simply as creative or journalistic activity, but as a sensitive act of reporting.
Abul Kalam (11K) is a Rohingya photographer with an audience that reflects the public presence he has built through his work. His experience is also an early and particularly clear example of the restrictions Rohingya photographers have faced. In December 2019, Kalam was arrested while photographing buses carrying refugees being transferred from Kutupalong towards Bhasan Char. He was subsequently charged, prompting Reporters Without Borders to call for the charges to be dropped. The episode illustrated the difficult position of Rohingya photographers working inside the camps: documenting their own community could also be interpreted as reporting on a tightly controlled environment.
The boundary between documenting one's own community and reporting on the authorities responsible for managing that community could therefore become politically sensitive. For photographers like Kalam, taking pictures was not necessarily understood as a neutral or private act.
Yet the environment did not remain static. A significant moment came in 2023, when four Rohingya storytellers: Sahat Zia Hero (54K), Shahida Win (10K), Salim Khan (21K) and Abdullah Habib (6K), were jointly named the UNHCR Nansen Refugee Award regional winners for Asia and the Pacific. The award recognised their use of photography, poetry, journalism and audio-visual work to document the experiences and perspectives of Rohingya refugees.
The recognition was notable not only because of the award itself, but because of what was being recognised. Rohingya refugees were not being acknowledged merely as the subjects of humanitarian photography. They were being recognised as storytellers documenting their own community. NPR later followed the four awardees and documented the different paths their lives took after the recognition.
The shift was also visible in exhibitions. In 2022, Rohingyatographer organised its first exhibition Añrá Rohingya (We are Rohingya) at the Liberation War Museum in Dhaka, followed in 2023 by Life through Rohingya Eyes at the same institution, supported by UNHCR. In July 2024, The Rohingya Experience in Jersey brought Rohingya-produced photography to a European audience. The exhibitions placed Rohingya photographers in the position of authors, taking their work beyond the physical boundaries of the refugee camps and into museums, cultural institutions and public spaces.
This mattered because the photographers were not appearing simply as participants in an institutional communication initiative. They were exhibiting their own work, collectively, as authors. The photographs moved from the camps into a national museum in Dhaka and, through subsequent exhibitions and publications, into cultural spaces across Asia, Europe, North America and Australia, including Sydney, Buenos Aires, Leipzig, London, New York and Athens.
Institutional recognition can have a double effect. Organisations and agencies gain visibility by associating themselves with refugee-led work, but their recognition can also help normalise Rohingya self-representation in the eyes of institutions and authorities. When a UN agency, museum or international cultural organisation presents Rohingya-produced work as legitimate photography, journalism or art, it becomes harder to treat the act of documenting Rohingya life as inherently suspicious or exceptional.
The Nansen Award carried another irony. It takes its name from Fridtjof Nansen, whose work for refugees led to the creation of the Nansen passport, introduced in 1922 as an internationally recognised identity and travel document intended to allow refugees without national passports to cross borders.
In 2023, four Rohingya storytellers received recognition carrying that same name. Yet, as refugees living in Bangladesh, they were not able to travel to Geneva to receive the award in person. The contradiction was stark: an award named after a document created to help refugees cross borders was being given to four stateless refugees who could not cross those borders themselves.
This was not simply a matter of convenience. Bangladesh has long imposed significant restrictions on refugee freedom of movement, and UNHCR has documented the wider restrictions affecting Rohingya refugees, including movement, livelihoods, formal education and telecommunications in its 2019 reporting. Bangladesh also remains outside the 1951 Refugee Convention and has no national legislation specifically governing refugees or asylum-seekers. UNHCR's current country overview describes the resulting protection environment and the administrative framework under which refugees are managed.
The episode exposes a wider gap between being recognised internationally and being able to exercise the practical freedoms associated with that recognition. The four were recognised precisely because they had developed the capacity to document, communicate and represent their community for themselves. Yet their ability to travel and participate internationally remained constrained.
For the four recipients, however, recognition became part of different trajectories. Sahat Zia Hero continued to develop his work as a photographer and mentor at Rohingyatographer, while becoming increasingly involved in the emerging Rohingya Gen Z movement (11K), which has created another space for young Rohingya to articulate their views about their community and its future. Shahida Win later resettled in Canada. Salim Khan went on to establish an educational initiative of his own. Abdullah Habib developed his work beyond photography and documentary production, establishing The Rohingya Voice as another platform for Rohingya communication.
These trajectories suggest that self-representation can become more than a means of documenting the present. It can provide skills, networks, recognition and platforms from which young Rohingya can pursue education, develop careers and build new forms of leadership.
The question, then, is no longer simply whether Rohingya people are being seen. It is what becomes possible when they begin to control how they are seen.
From visibility to infrastructure
The growth of Rohingya self-representation is visible not only in the number of people creating work, but in how frequently that work is produced and circulated. 76% of survey respondents said they publish at least weekly, including 39.6% who publish daily. Facebook was the main distribution platform for 53.6% of respondents, followed by Instagram at 18%.
This is no longer occasional documentation. A regular flow of photographs, videos and other forms of content is being produced and circulated through platforms that allow Rohingya creators to reach audiences both within the community and beyond it.
But frequent production does not necessarily provide a livelihood. Some 69.2% reported earning no income from their creative work, while only 2.4% reported earning more than US$50 per month. When asked what opportunities they most needed, respondents identified training at 40.3%, publication opportunities at 19.8% and paid work at 16%. Only 3.2% identified employment.
The challenge, therefore, is not a lack of willingness to create, but the limited opportunities and infrastructure available to sustain the work.
For some, the response has been to build those opportunities themselves. Kaleda Lobi (9K) a recent member of Rohingyatographer, began developing her own community initiative, Young Star Motivation (9K) in 2022, combining photography with education, leadership and advocacy.
“I wanted to raise awareness of refugee issues and encourage young people and women to become active leaders in their communities.” Kaleda explains.
Kaleda has built a direct platform for reaching audiences beyond her immediate surroundings. Her experience also illustrates the practical constraints facing young Rohingya creators: limited financial resources, training opportunities, internet connectivity, equipment and access to wider networks.
Other initiatives have created opportunities specifically for photographers. The Rohingya Photo Competition (5K), initiated by Bangladeshi journalist and filmmaker Shafiur Rahman, provided an early platform for Rohingya photographers to present their work and reach wider audiences. His later reporting for Global Voices documented the wider problem of stolen photographs, missing credit and the difficulties Rohingya photographers faced in securing compensation for their work.
More recently, the Rohingya Photographic Society (1K) founded in summer 2026 by senior Rohingya photographer Yassin Abdumonab (54K) has created another space for photographers to develop and showcase their work. Yassin's progression from fixer and interpreter to photographer, journalist and media contributor reflects the expanding possibilities within the field. He also emphasises the responsibilities that come with documenting others, arguing that photographers should respect their dignity, privacy, safety, and consent when working with vulnerable communities.
Yassin sees today's images as part of a longer historical record: “The images and videos we create today may become part of Rohingya history for future generations.”
Rohingyatographer (8K) was established in January 2022 and has gradually expanded from a photography project into a wider platform for Rohingya-led cultural production and a record of life in the camps. Its first magazine issue published in 2022 dealt with the subject of identity and featured the work of 10 photographers; the second in 2023, about the elements, involved 20 contributors; and the third in 2025, focused on food, brought together 32 photographers. The forthcoming issue on human rights has received more than 2,000 contributions, making it the collective's most extensive publication project to date. Alongside its regular publishing, Rohingyatographer has also produced a special monograph featuring the work of 11 Rohingya women.
Over the years, the collective has trained close to 500 young people through photography, visual storytelling and other workshops. Some have subsequently become active members of the collective, while others have gone on to develop their own initiatives. Its work has also expanded beyond photography, creating space for writers, artists and other contributors through publications, exhibitions, collaborations and cultural projects.
These initiatives can also create spaces for learning. A 2026 doctoral study at University College London on community-led digital learning among Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh documents peer-led instruction, locally developed learning materials and alternative approaches to education operating without formal recognition. It shows how Rohingya learners and educators develop their own ways of sharing knowledge and building skills, even under severe constraints. But such initiatives cannot substitute for recognised educational opportunities or overcome structural exclusion on their own.
Rohingyatographer’s work also serves another purpose: preserving a record of everyday Rohingya life in the camps. Photographs made by refugees are not only circulated as contemporary stories; collectively, they form an archive of a community living through prolonged displacement. By publishing, exhibiting and preserving this material, Rohingyatographer helps ensure that these images remain accessible beyond the moment in which they were made, as a record of people, places, relationships and everyday experiences that might otherwise disappear from the historical record.
The expansion is significant not simply because more people are producing work, but because more Rohingya are creating spaces in which to produce, organise, circulate and preserve it. In the digital era, a photographer can form a collective, a group of young people can establish a society, and a creator can build an audience without waiting for an institution to create the space first. This matters because the opportunity to create an image is only one part of authorship.
The opportunity to publish it, exhibit it, have it commissioned, receive recognition for it and decide how it is presented all shape who controls the story.
The survey suggests that this control remains incomplete. Some 61.2% of respondents said that outside organisations had used their work. Among them, 37.2% said they were always credited, 36.4% sometimes credited and 25.2% never credited.
A 2023 case involving Rohingya photographer Arfat Maung Hla Myint (8K) made this problem particularly visible. After a major fire in Camp 11, photographs he had taken were used and sold without his permission, including through Anadolu Agency and Getty Images. He was initially not credited as the photographer. After he asserted his copyright, Al Jazeera agreed to compensate him for seven images and corrected the credit. The case, reported by Dhaka Tribune,demonstrated that being able to produce and publish an image does not necessarily mean having the power to control its subsequent circulation, or to secure payment when others profit from it. Shafiur Rahman documented the wider problem of stolen photographs, missing credit and the difficulties Rohingya photographers faced in securing compensation in his Global Voices reporting.
Credit, however, is not the same as permission. Some 44.8% of respondents reported that their work had been used without permission or credit. Being named as a photographer does not necessarily mean that the creator agreed to how, where or for what purpose the work would be used. As Rohingya-produced material becomes more visible, questions of consent, licensing, attribution and ownership become increasingly important.
Memorialisation
Some 84.4% of respondents reported storing their photographs and videos primarily on phones, compared with only 6.4% using cloud storage and 3.6% using external hard drives. The survey identifies this as a significant risk to the long-term preservation of Rohingya visual history.
For a community living through prolonged displacement, preservation is not simply a technical question. The photographs and videos being produced today are becoming part of a record of Rohingya life that extends beyond the moment in which they were made. At the same time, much of the community's earlier visual history has been scattered across countries, families and private collections.
Ek Khaale, a projct curated by Canadian documentary photographer Greg Constantine (3K), offers one example of what recovering that history can involve. The project brings together historical photographs, family collections, documents, letters and other material preserved by Rohingya across generations, helping reconnect fragments of a visual history dispersed through displacement.
A different approach can be seen in the Rohingya Cultural Memory Centre (2K) in Cox’s Bazar, established by IOM to preserve and promote Rohingya cultural heritage. In practice, the centre functions as a visitor destination for donors and VIP guests, where Rohingya crafts and cultural objects become part of the institutional experience and provide a backdrop for photo opportunities. Culture thus becomes an asset for fundraising and institutional visibility, while its creators risk being reduced to participants in someone else’s initiative rather than recognised as authors of their own heritage. When cultural production serves institutional visibility more than Rohingya visibility, the relationship begins to resemble cultural appropriation, not necessarily through deliberate exploitation, but through a shift in who controls, presents and benefits from the culture.
The issue is also one of curatorial authority: who selects, interprets and presents the culture? When Rohingya artists are not credited or meaningfully involved in these decisions, their heritage risks becoming a Victorian-era glass-cabinet display, preserved for outside audiences but detached from the people who created it. Preserving Rohingya culture is not the same as giving Rohingya people control over how it is represented.
A newer initiative shows how this impulse is also moving into digital research and knowledge production. Rohingya Research Foundation was created by Abul Kasim (6K), a young Rohingya researcher and university student, bringing together history, research, archives, infographics, opinion and other material. Its significance lies not only in the material it gathers, but in the decision to build a platform through which Rohingya knowledge can be researched, organised and shared by Rohingya themselves.
The significance of these efforts goes beyond digitising old photographs. Such material can preserve evidence of families, places, relationships and everyday life that might otherwise disappear from the historical record.
An archive is not simply a place where images are stored. It determines what remains accessible, what can be remembered and what future generations can recover about their own history.
The same principle applies to the images being produced now. Every photograph made by a Rohingya creator can become part of a future record: of life in the camps, of people who lived there, of changes in the community and of how Rohingya people saw themselves during this period of displacement.
For Rohingyatographer, this is increasingly part of the purpose of publishing and exhibiting the work. The collective is not simply creating new images; through its publications, exhibitions and other projects, it is accumulating a record of Rohingya life through photographs, writing, interviews and artwork. Preserving that material means ensuring that it does not disappear with individual phones, social-media accounts or temporary projects.
Memorialisation, ultimately, is not only about preserving the past. It is about ensuring that a community retains the ability to remember itself, and that future generations have something of their own to look back on.
From telling the story to shaping the future
The growth of Rohingya self-representation is ultimately about more than photography. A generation that has spent much of its life being documented and represented by others is increasingly producing its own record, building its own platforms and developing its own public voices. The same young people who photograph life in the camps are becoming writers, artists, organisers, educators and advocates. Some, like Sahat Zia Hero, have moved from documenting their community as photographers to taking increasingly public roles in discussions about its future, representing Rohingya perspectives in Bangladesh and international forums.
You may have noticed the numbers in brackets — such as (10K) — beside some of the names in this article. They indicate the approximate number of followers these Rohingya creators have built on social media. In a population of more than one million refugees in Bangladesh, these audiences may seem small. But their significance is not simply numerical. There is no reliable figure for how many Rohingya use social media overall, but the survey shows how central these platforms have become to those producing and distributing their own work: Facebook was the main platform for 53.6% of respondents.
What these numbers reveal is the emergence of small Rohingya publics: networks gathered around photographers, artists, journalists, musicians, researchers and community organisers who have built audiences of their own. These networks can help people communicate directly, circulate information, gather support and develop a public voice across camps, diaspora communities and different countries of exile. They are not political parties, and follower numbers do not automatically confer authority. But they can create something that displacement has often denied the Rohingya: a degree of public identity, social capital and narrative capital.
Yet reach is not the same as representation. Someone with 50,000 followers may gain visibility, connections and influence, but that does not mean they speak for 50,000 people, let alone for the Rohingya community as a whole. Those with smaller audiences, less access to technology, fewer international connections or more restricted opportunities — including women — may remain less visible. Research on the Rohingya digital diaspora similarly shows how online networks can foster collective identity, solidarity and political mobilisation while remaining shaped by offline inequalities, including gender, internet access, economic circumstances and geography.
Can a community build the capacity to represent itself without allowing a new hierarchy of visibility to determine whose voice counts?
This matters particularly for a people whose legal identity remains denied. A Rohingya person may not possess the political identity of a citizen, but they can increasingly possess a public identity of their own making. A Facebook page, a YouTube channel, a photographic collective or a research platform cannot substitute for citizenship or political representation. But it can provide some of the infrastructure through which collective identity and agency are built.
This is where self-representation connects to a larger question of self-determination.
The ability to make an image does not itself give a community political power. But the ability to document its experience, preserve its history, build public audiences and speak for itself creates a different position from which to participate in decisions about its future.
For more than one million Rohingya living in Bangladesh, the future remains uncertain. Many still hope to return to Myanmar, while others have begun new lives elsewhere. The conditions for a safe and dignified return do not yet exist, and the political circumstances surrounding their homeland remain profoundly unsettled. Yet the initiatives described here point to a desire among Rohingya to have a voice in what happens next, not only as refugees waiting for decisions made by governments and institutions, but as people with views about their own future.
Photographers form collectives. Young people establish organisations. Researchers build archives. Artists create platforms. Digital practitioners help others publish their work and reach audiences beyond the camps. These are not simply cultural activities. Together, they begin to build some of the social infrastructure of a dispersed people: shared memory, knowledge, skills, relationships and spaces in which people can communicate, learn and debate their future.
Yet these emerging forms of agency exist alongside a political reality in which the Rohingya still have very little control over the decisions that determine their lives. Their future continues to be discussed largely by governments, international agencies and other institutions, while the people most affected remain too often positioned as recipients rather than participants.
Self-representation cannot solve statelessness, displacement or the political crisis in Myanmar. Nor can digital platforms replace education, political rights, justice or the conditions needed for reconciliation. But a community that can document itself, preserve its history, exchange knowledge, develop skills and build its own institutions is better positioned to participate in decisions about its future.
José Martí, the Cuban writer and independence thinker, expressed this relationship between particular belonging and universal humanity in 1895: “Homeland is humanity: that part of humanity we see most closely, and in which we happened to be born.” His words offer a way of holding two ideas together: the importance of preserving a people's identity and history, and the recognition that this belonging exists within a wider humanity. For the Rohingya, asserting their identity and determining their future are not separate from the wider struggle for human rights. They are part of the same claim: to be recognised not only as a people, but as people entitled to shape their own lives.
The journey of the Rohingya has often been described as one of displacement and return. But, as in the Greek myth of Odysseus, returning home is not simply about reaching a place. It is also about carrying what has been remembered, learned and created along the way.
If the Rohingya are able to return, they should be able to bring with them the history they have preserved, the knowledge and skills they have developed, and the relationships and institutions they have built across years of displacement. They should not return simply to recover what was lost, but with the freedom to help shape what comes next, and to decide, for themselves, what kind of future and what kind of society they want to build.
Explore this YouTube playlist, featuring films and videos created by Rohingya participants as part of Human Rights and Human Wrongs, a 30-week course in human rights and visual storytelling, and discover more stories told in their own voices.
Rohingyatographer © 2021–2026 CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
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