My current research project has developed out of my previous engagement and encounter with Rohingya refugee communities in South and Southeast Asia. My project at CSEAS is a forced migration study of family (re-)making, or ‘doing’ in the context of continued displacement and unsettledness. More specifically, I investigate the transformation of the family and gender relations of the Rohingya people in refugee camps and self-settlements along South and Southeast Asia’s borderlands. I ask: How is family as a social unit restructured in spaces of displacement that are defined by sovereign exclusion? Or, in other words: How does sovereign power affect the making of family through exclusion? Conversely, do refugees and their ‘re-making’ of family affect sovereign power in nation-states’ border regions? If so, how? I trace these questions among Rohingya refugees living along the Thailand-Myanmar border in comparison to those living in the Thailand-Malaysia and the Myanmar-Bangladesh borderland. All three borderlands are marked by violent conflicts and communal tensions, yet they represent very different spaces in terms of their ethnic and religious demographics and their socio-economic and legal conditions for settlement. The similarities and differences across these regions allow for a fruitful evaluation of how spaces of exception influence refugees’ re-making of family.