2026/07/29 by Mohammad Ibrahim Khalad
paper · doi:10.1111/taja.70092
Abstract This article traces how masculine authority is assembled and evaluated in the everyday life of Rohingya refugee camps in Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh. Drawing on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork, it follows two young men, a volunteer mediator and a community school founder, to show how authority emerges not through formal roles or institutional power, but through practices of discernment and obligation that make camp life navigable under conditions of uncertainty. Rather than restoring pre‐displacement hierarchies or consolidating new leadership positions, young men's visibility is characterised by fragility, exposure and moral strain. This article foregrounds two Rohingya moral terms, elem and zimmadari , to show how such authority is named and judged. Elem refers to practical discernment in navigating opaque systems, while zimmadari names responsibility understood as answerability to others despite uncertain outcomes. Together, these concepts illuminate masculinity as moral labour that is unevenly distributed and persistently open to challenge and failure.