ABSTRACT

This chapter explores displacement as an essential constituent of the dominant mode of political and economic relations in the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT). The only passenger boat to Bilaichari, a shanty town in the remote south of CHT of Bangladesh, leaves the district town of Rangamati. The chapter recounts how displacement in the CHT is a historical legacy of the colonial and postcolonial state formation that enclaved distinct minority cultures in this territorial margin of the Bangladeshi state. It outlines how the author differ from the implicit assumption that displacement is essentially the temporal consequence of particular political conflict or development project and can be effectively mitigated by moral, or legal responses to particular cases. The chapter offers a generic political economy of displacement that suggests displacement is an essential constituent of the political order the state enforces on its margins to sustain specific political and economic relations and any solution to it requires greater political consensus to become sustainable.