Displacement places marginalised communities in a precarious social position that eventually forces displaced people to migrate either within or beyond geopolitical boundaries. This is usually a migration from a physical location to a "violent process of land expropriation" for mega-development projects, large-scale agricultural operations and infrastructural installations.

This exodus of displaced people is currently receiving more attention and becoming the focus of migration literature. However, the changes in the socio-political structure caused by displacement are largely ignored. In the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) in particular, 'in-situ displacement', where people are progressively excluded from security, identity and rights within their place of origin, as a result of coercion such as land confiscation, enclosure and war, dominates.

As this has not received attention in research on displacement in the CHT, my ethnographic study aims to analyse the social transformations of the CHT resulting from in situ displacement and contemporary migration flows in terms of development, nation-building, ethnicity, conflict and their particular geographical and social characteristic as borderlands.

Approach and milestones:
Field research was conducted in the Chittagong Hill Tracts (Rangamati, Bandarban and Khagrachari) (CHT) in Bangladesh between October 2019 and mid-March 2020.