Deadly sea passages: navigating risks and uncertainties aboard Rohingya refugee boats

Refugee Studies have extensively documented agency and community formation in camps and in urban settings but lack empirical insights into social organisation during dangerous border crossings. This paper addresses this gap by examining social dynamics aboard Rohingya refugee boats crossing the Andaman Sea. Drawing on survivor interviews, we investigate how refugees develop survival strategies and form temporary social arrangements under extreme maritime constraints. We introduce the concept of contingent collectivities to highlight the social formations that emerge from survival imperatives rather than voluntary association, capable of rapid mobilisation yet prone to dissolution when individual survival overrides collective solidarity. The Andaman Sea’s vast distances, unpredictable state responses, and absence of rescue infrastructure create unique conditions where boats avoid authorities, knowing interception often means pushback rather than rescue. Our findings contribute to Refugee Studies in a twofold way: empirically by paying attention to previously ignored survival strategies and theoretically by extending community formation concepts to maritime displacement contexts.