Stateless Rohingya build ‘digital homeland’ across borders

DHAKA, Bangladesh (MNTV) — Stateless and scattered across several countries after decades of persecution in Burma, Rohingya are increasingly using social media, smartphones and digital archives to preserve family histories, cultural memory and a collective identity fragmented by forced displacement.

The phenomenon is creating what researchers describe as a “digital homeland” — spaces where Rohingya separated across Bangladesh, Malaysia and elsewhere can maintain family relationships, document memories and articulate an identity despite being denied citizenship and access to their ancestral homeland.

According to digital news outlet Rohingya Khobor, research presented at the University of Chittagong by Suruchi Mazumdar, an associate professor at the University of Nottingham Malaysia, examined how geographically dispersed Rohingya communities use digital platforms, artificial intelligence and data-driven technologies. 

The research explored how these technologies shape their negotiations over citizenship and national belonging.

Photographs stored on phones, videos exchanged between relatives and conversations connecting families across national borders can become informal archives for people whose communities have been physically fragmented. 

Rohingya-produced digital content also allows refugees themselves to document their histories rather than leaving their identity to be defined solely through governments and humanitarian institutions.

For the Rohingya, that carries particular political significance. Burma has systematically denied the predominantly Muslim minority citizenship and imposed severe restrictions on movement and other basic rights. 

A genocidal military campaign in 2017 drove more than 700,000 Rohingya into neighboring Bangladesh, while subsequent violence has caused further displacement.

But the growing digital lives of refugees carry a profound contradiction.

The same technologies allowing Rohingya to preserve memories and sustain communities are increasingly part of systems used by governments and humanitarian agencies to identify, categorize and manage displaced populations.

Biometric registration, digital identification, databases and emerging AI-driven systems can make humanitarian assistance more efficient, but they also raise questions about surveillance, consent, privacy and who ultimately controls refugees’ personal data. 

Mazumdar’s earlier research has documented Rohingya resistance to biometric registration and concerns over how their information could be used.

That leaves displaced Rohingya navigating two very different digital worlds: one they create themselves and another constructed around them by institutions.

In the first, refugees use technology to maintain kinship, preserve culture, mourn people and places they have lost and tell their own stories. 

In the second, they can become fingerprints, iris scans, identification numbers and entries in databases used to administer refugee populations.

A digital homeland, however, cannot substitute for the political rights Rohingya have been denied. Online archives cannot restore confiscated land, confer citizenship, guarantee freedom of movement or establish the conditions for a safe return to Burma.

Instead, the emerging digital homeland demonstrates how a stateless population is preserving collective life across borders even as its political future remains unresolved — using technology both to resist the erasure of its identity and navigate increasingly data-driven systems of refugee control.