The COVID-19 Pandemic’s Impact on the Health of Rohingya Refugees

The flows of COVID-19 across global terrains work unequally, impacting disproportionately the margins of global spaces. Refugees constitute the “margins of the margins” of globalization, constituted in spaces without access to rights and pathways of citizenship, and living through the effects of violence targeted at them (Dutta & Zoller, 2009, Dutta, 2021; Dutta et al., 2020). Systematically erased from the infrastructures of claiming the “rights to have rights,” refugees negotiate the challenges of health and well-being amidst crowded living arrangements, lack of adequate sanitation, and lack of access to healthcare, often living lives that bear the burdens of traumas inflicted by violence and yet disconnected from structures for addressing the effects of violence (Elers et al., 2021). This essay draws on the culture-centered approach (CCA) to theorize the negotiations of health among Rohingya refugees in Aotearoa New Zealand, depicting the interplays of communicative inequality and structural inequalities of health. We note that Rohingya refugees constitute the extremes of marginalization in the contemporary context of global organizing, having been subject to over six decades of violence organized by the infrastructures of hate, and violently erased from the infrastructures of recognition in modern democracies.