Bangladesh Interior Minister Salahuddin Ahmed plans announced to fence off parts of the 270-kilometer border with Myanmar. To understand why Dhaka has reached this point, one must go back to December 8, 2024, when the Arakan Army (AA) completed its capture of Maungdaw and took full control of the border between northern Rakhine State and Bangladesh.
For most international observers, Maungdaw’s fall marked a milestone in Myanmar’s civil war – another indication of the military junta’s shrinking territorial control.
For Dhaka, however, this meant the disappearance of effective Myanmar state authority over much of its southeastern border. Today, Bangladesh no longer faces a functioning state on large stretches of this border.
The Myanmar government maintains little significant presence in northern Rakhine. In its place is the AA, an armed ethnic organization that now exercises de facto control over much of Rakhine State, administering territory, collecting taxes, regulating movement, and increasingly performing the characteristic functions of a governmental authority.
This transformation has upended Bangladesh’s border security environment and exposed the fragility of the institutions that once managed it.
The main problem facing Dhaka is a deep structural asymmetry. The Myanmar government, despite its historical shortcomings and systemic failures, has remained formally bound by bilateral agreements, diplomatic protocols and international commitments. The Arakan Army is not.
The AA increasingly behaves like a governmental authority – enforcing regulations, administering local affairs, and asserting jurisdiction over border areas – but it is not a sovereign state and escapes the mechanisms by which states are usually held accountable to each other.
For Bangladesh, this means that the familiar instruments of statecraft have been made largely unreliable.
Communication with AA is not impossible; Dhaka has already engaged through informal channels, local intermediaries and international organizations to secure the release of detained civilians and manage urgent border incidents.
But these interactions occur without the predictability, institutional guarantees, and reciprocal obligations that normally accompany relations between recognized states. Diplomatic engagement between Bangladesh and the AA, when it occurs, remains entirely reactive and ad hoc.
The consequences of this institutional void have become very visible. Over the past year and a half, hundreds of Bangladeshi fishermen and Rohingya residents were detained by the A.A. in the Naf River and the waters adjacent to it. These incidents reflect both the AA’s unilateral assertion of control over previously ambiguous waterways and the complete absence of formal protocols by which such disputes would normally be resolved.
Simultaneously, in Bandarban, Bangladeshi residents continue to encounter landmines and unexploded ordnance near farmland – deadly remnants of fighting just across the border. The border has also hardened to become a main transit route for methamphetamine and other illicit narcotics, with law enforcement reporting record seizures. Regional assessments indicate that trafficking networks have grown despite pressure from authorities, changing their routes with remarkable adaptability as Myanmar’s post-coup fragmentation continues to entrench the conflict economy along the border.
The proposed fence must be understood in this light. This is an attempt by Bangladesh to regain some unilateral control over a border where traditional coordination mechanisms have completely broken down.
Of course, this approach has considerable limitations. A fence cannot eliminate the economic incentives that support the narcotics trade, resolve complex maritime jurisdictional disputes in the Naf River, or address the underlying political conditions that lead to instability in Rakhine State. But evaluating the fence solely on its ability to solve these problems misses part of its purpose. Governments facing insurmountable external pressures must demonstrate visible and tangible actions to the public, even when no single measure can eliminate the underlying threat. In this sense, fences serve a crucial domestic political function alongside their security role. This shows that the state is responding to growing public concern over cross-border crime and lawlessness.
More to the point, the fence sends a message that goes beyond the borders of Bangladesh. This signals to the region and the international community that Dhaka does not intend to indefinitely absorb the costs of a crisis generated entirely outside its borders, and that responsibility for the consequences of Myanmar’s structural collapse cannot fall solely on Bangladesh.
Bangladesh already manages around 1.2 million Rohingya refugees, many of whom have been in the country for almost a decade. Bangladesh’s long-term plan for the Rohingya has always been repatriation, and Dhaka has formal agreements with the state of Myanmar for this purpose. Yet much of the territory to which Rohingya refugees would return is now controlled by the AA – an organization itself accused of genocidal violence against the Rohingya population. A.A. hostility towards the Rohingyas is well documented.
Questions regarding the basic rights, security and political status of the Rohingya under any future agreement administered by the AA remain unresolved. The advance of the AA in Rakhine State could well push back the already interminable timetable for the repatriation of the Rohingya. Meanwhile, fighting in Rakhine state has pushed new waves of refugees across the border – an added burden for which Bangladesh is ill-equipped.
The planned border fence may not deter future refugees, but it symbolizes Bangladesh’s sovereign position: the refugee crisis remains a consequence of Myanmar’s internal instability requiring resolution from within Myanmar.
Bangladesh is not alone in facing these pressures. Thailand, India and China all share borders with Myanmar territories where armed ethnic organizations now exercise varying degrees of authority. None of these states has found a definitive answer to the governance problems created by Myanmar’s fragmentation, largely because the broader conflict remains unresolved.
However, Bangladesh’s situation is unique. Welcoming more than a million displaced people while managing a border where state authority has collapsed creates a dual humanitarian and security crisis that its regional neighbors do not face in comparable form.
Ultimately, Bangladesh’s decision to fence its border is a telling indication of the geopolitical transformation taking place across the border. It is a risk management tool – one part of a broader effort to contain the ripple effects of a conflict that Bangladesh did not create and cannot easily influence. Without a comprehensive political settlement inside Myanmar, no barrier will be able to replace the bilateral institutions that once managed this border. But in their absence, Bangladesh has no choice but to try.