Conclusion

The aim of this study is to investigate whether the Biharis have access to important rights associated with citizenship rights that make citizenship meaningful. I interviewed 75 Bihari camp dwellers and 25 Bengalis. Taking a socio-legal approach, and based on the interviews, my book demonstrates that while most Biharis in Bangladesh have been recognized as being legally entitled to citizenship in Bangladesh, they do not have access to many important rights associated with citizenship rights that make citizenship meaningful. I used a socio-legal approach in this book as this approach recognizes both legal and non-legal factors and it narrates “legal phenomena in social terms” (Friedman 1986, 763). It is a scholarly way of examining the relationship between legal and non-legal types of social phenomena (Friedman 1986, 763). This approach suggests that law can be understood by seeing and experiencing it within the social context (Silbey 2002, 860–863). The law and society approach also provides opportunities for undertaking interdisciplinary empirical studies, thereby transcending the limitations of traditional positivist legal scholarship (Silbey 2002, 861). It recognizes diverse methods and methodologies for researching and understanding social problems, including social science research methods such as qualitative and quantitative methods (Chua 2013). The law and society emphasize behavior or attitudes as they affect or reflect behavior (Friedman 1986, 774). Moreover, this tradition is not concerned merely with what the law is but also with what the law does in practice or the impact of law on society (Trubek 1984, 575; Silbey and Sarat 1987, 165).