An ‘un-imagined community’: the entangled genealogy of an exclusivist nationalism in Myanmar and the Rohingya refugee crisis

Social Identities. 2020. Vol. 26. No. 5. P. 590–607.

Roy Chowdhury A.

The Rohingya are one of the most persecuted religious ethnic
minorities of the contemporary world. They have been persecuted
in Myanmar since the post-coup military regime came to power in
1962. What explains this brutal pursuit of violence against a
minority? In answering this question, I trace the genealogy and
the ethnogenesis of the Rohingya in Myanmar in a longue durée
through an analysis of extant data, both historical and
contemporary, and I supplement it with an ethnographic study I
conducted in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh. I argue that the emergence
of the Rohingya identity is constitutively related with the stateformation,
war conquest, and power shifts in Myanmar during
precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial times. I demonstrate how
the post-coup state of Myanmar – in association with the religious
civil society, led by a section of the majoritarian Theravada
Buddhist Bamars – provoked religious and exclusivist nationalism
and constructed the ‘Rohingya Muslims’ as the enemy ‘Other’. I
demonstrate also how the democratization of Myanmar ironically
exacerbated the problem. The Rohingya themselves – once
alienated and un-imagined from the national space – embraced
this identity of victimhood to design their resilient and
oppositional disposition against an exclusivist state, which further
politicized and reified the identity.

Keywords: Refugee Studies, Refugee and Migration Studies, refugee policy, refugee crisis