Rohingya Women’s Experiences and Feminist Perspectives on War and Genocide

A discussion with Rohingya women and Women, Peace and Security scholars on feminist perspectives on war, genocide and displacement.

Rohingya Women’s Experiences and Feminist Perspectives on War, Genocide and Displacement

Wednesday March 4, 2026 | 5-6:30pm | C.K. Choi, Room 120

Presented by the Centre for Southeast Asia Research

This event will bring together Rohingya women and Women, Peace and Security (WPS) scholars to centre feminist perspectives on war, genocide, and displacement. It will feature a keynote address by Rohingya student Farhana Roshan, who will share lived experiences of persecution, forced migration, and resilience. Her testimony highlights the essential nature of women’s narratives to understanding the ongoing impacts of the Rohingya genocide and the gendered dimensions of displacement. An all-women panel of speakers from advocacy, academic, and community spaces will discuss how Rohingya women navigate violence, statelessness, and humanitarian systems while shaping transnational feminist responses and community-led resistance. By placing personal testimony alongside critical analysis, this event aims to challenge dominant humanitarian and policy narratives, highlight the political agency of Rohingya women, and foster engagement with feminist approaches to justice, solidarity, and accountability in contexts of mass atrocity and protracted displacement.

Speaker Information:

Farhana Roshan is a Rohingya activist and third-year student at the University of British Columbia (UBC), pursuing a Bachelor of Arts with a major in Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice (GRSJ). She is a Duolingo Access and UNHCR program scholar, committed to advancing education and leadership within displaced communities. Alongside her studies, Farhana actively collaborates with organizations that support marginalized populations, particularly the Rohingya community. She is a member of the Rohingya Maìyafuìnor Collaborative Network (RMCN), where she serves as a Women’s Specialist and Community Mobilizer. Through her advocacy and grassroots engagement, she works to amplify underrepresented voices and promote equity, empowerment, and social justice.

Isabella Aung is a research fellow affiliated with the Myanmar Policy and Community Knowledge (MyPACK) Hub at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, University of Toronto. She has also been a UBC Myanmar Initiative Fellow since 2021. She is a Shangri-La Dialogue Young Leader and a Network Expert with the Network for Strategic Analysis (RAS-NSA). She was a Civil War Paths fellow (2023-2024) at the University of York and an inaugural Public Scholarship Fellow (2023-2024) at Queen's University. In 2024 and 2025, she served as the Head of the Comparative Politics Diploma Program at Spring University Myanmar, providing higher education access to refugee and displaced youths. Her research interests include Women, Peace, and Security (WPS), women's political activism and participation, migrant rights, and digital authoritarianism. Her regional expertise is Canada and Southeast Asia, with a focus on Myanmar.

Katrina Leclerc is a part-time professor in Conflict Studies at Saint-Paul University and a sessional lecturer at the University of Winnipeg, where her research focuses on gender- and age-sensitive peacebuilding, youth engagement, and inclusive policy in conflict-affected contexts. She has advised governments and UN agencies on the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) and Youth, Peace and Security (YPS) agendas in 30+ countries, and her work was cited as a best practice in several UN Security Council reports. She is co-editor of the volume Youth Leading Change: Emerging Sites of Knowledge in Peace and Conflict (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025), and is widely recognised for bridging academic and practitioner spaces.

Yasmin Ullah is a Rohingya feminist, author, poet, and a social justice activist. She was born in the Northern Arakan state of Burma/Myanmar. Her family fled to Thailand in 1995 when she was a child and she remained a refugee until moving to Canada in 2011.Yasmin is the founder and the executive director of the Rohingya Maìyafuìnor Collaborative Network which is a women-led, Rohingya-led and refugee-led organization working on Rohingya human rights issues, SGBV, education and translocal solidarity with a focus on women, peace and security as well as intersectionality framework. She previously served as the President of the Rohingya Human Rights Network (2018-2020), a non-profit group led by activists across Canada advocating and raising public awareness of the Rohingya genocide. Since Yasmin began her work as an advocate for the Rohingya community, she has been involved in many processes of advocacy for the rights of Rohingya in exile and at home in Burma/Myanmar namely the genocide determination in various countries like Canada and the United States. Her works span across the globe in a few short years through various facets of consciousness raising.

Yasmin also serves as a board member of the ALTSEAN-Burma, and US Campaign for Burma, and a member of the steering committee in Bridges MM-Myanmar Youth Dialogue project.Among the projects she has worked on are, Time to Act: Rohingya Voices exhibition with the Canadian Museum for Human Rights and the Genocide Learning Tool: Us vs. Them with the Montréal Holocaust Museum. Her poetry is published in the anthology, I Am A Rohingya along with other Rohingya poets from the refugee camps and beyond. Her creative writing encompasses other genres of writing including the recently published children's book called Hafsa and the Magical Ring which encapsulates the experience of Rohingya children living in the camps after fleeing a 2017 genocidal campaign in Myanmar while reconciling current displacement and loss of culture.Yasmin has been a UN Minority Fellow since 2023. In 2021, she was named on the FemiList100, the Gender Security Project list of 100 women from the Global South, working in foreign policy, peacebuilding, law, activism, development.