The Pulse | Security | South Asia

Why Bangladesh Is Fencing Its Border With Myanmar

A non-state actor – the Arakan Army – now controls Myanmar’s side of the border. That forces Bangladesh to rely more on unilateral forms of border management.

Border Guard Bangladesh (BGB) personnel detain Myanmar’s Border Guard Police (BGP) and security forces personnel seeking refuge in Bangladesh’s Ukhia along the Bangladesh-Myanmar border, in Cox’s Bazar district in Bangladesh, on February 6, 2024.

Bangladesh’s Home Minister Salahuddin Ahmed has announced plans to fence parts of the country’s 270-kilometer border with Myanmar. To understand why Dhaka has arrived at this point, one must look back to December 8, 2024, when the Arakan Army (AA) completed its capture of Maungdaw and assumed full control of northern Rakhine State’s border with Bangladesh.

For most international observers, the fall of Maungdaw marked a milestone in Myanmar’s civil war – another indication of the military junta’s shrinking territorial control.

For Dhaka, however, it meant the disappearance of effective Myanmar state authority along much of its southeastern frontier. Today, Bangladesh no longer faces a functioning state across large stretches of that border.

The Myanmar government retains little meaningful presence in northern Rakhine. In its place stands the AA, an ethnic armed organization that now exercises de facto control over much of Rakhine State, administers territory, collects taxes, regulates movement, and increasingly performs functions characteristic of a governing authority.

This transformation has upended Bangladesh’s border security environment — and exposed the fragility of the institutions that once managed it.

The core problem facing Dhaka is a profound structural asymmetry. Myanmar’s government, despite its historical shortcomings and systemic failures, remained formally bound by bilateral agreements, diplomatic protocols, and international commitments. The Arakan Army is not.

The AA behaves increasingly like a governing authority — enforcing regulations, administering local affairs, and asserting jurisdiction over border areas — yet it is not a sovereign state and falls outside the mechanisms through which states are ordinarily held accountable to one another.

For Bangladesh, this means that familiar instruments of statecraft have been rendered largely unreliable.

Communication with the 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 safeguards, and reciprocal obligations that normally accompany relations between recognized states. Diplomatic engagement between Bangladesh and the AA, when it happens, remains entirely reactive and ad hoc.

The consequences of this institutional void have become starkly visible. Over the past year and a half, hundreds of Bangladeshi fishermen and Rohingya residents have been detained by the AA in the Naf River and the waters adjoining it. These incidents reflect both the AA’s unilateral assertion of control over previously ambiguous waterways and the complete absence of formal protocols through which such disputes would normally be resolved.

Simultaneously, in Bandarban, Bangladeshi residents continue to encounter landmines and unexploded ordnance near agricultural land — deadly remnants of fighting taking place just across the border. The frontier has also hardened into a principal transit route for methamphetamine and other illicit narcotics, with law enforcement agencies reporting record seizures. Regional assessments indicate that trafficking networks have expanded despite enforcement pressure, shifting their routes with remarkable adaptability as Myanmar’s post-coup........

© The Diplomat