Counterinsurgency, Ethnic Cleansing & Democratization: Violence Against Rohingya

• In Event: Understanding Counterinsurgency

Abstract

In August 2017, the Myanmar military began "clearance operations" in Northern Rakhine state in response to insurgent attacks on local security posts. Though the government claimed it was targeting militants as part of a counterinsurgency campaign, the scale, pace, and nature of discriminate and indiscriminate state-led violence against the Rohingya -- an ethnic, religious, and linguistic minority group -- led to widespread denunciation, which the UN categorized as "ethnic cleansing." Why would an ostensibly democratizing country respond to an insurgent threat with ethnic cleansing? This puzzle motivates the paper presented here. Based on process tracing using approximately 50 semi-structured interviews, participant observation, ethnographic fieldwork, archival sources, descriptive statistics, and spatial analysis, this paper makes three key contributions. First, it identifies the proximate and deep-set drivers of violence against the Rohingya by analyzing the political, economic, social, and historical forces at play. In doing so, the paper examines conflict processes at the state, national, and regional levels, and grapples with long-debated issues in political science such as colonial legacies, citizenship and minority rights, modernization, and democratic transition. Second, it characterizes the patterns of state-led violence against the Rohingya and situates these in a broader literature on the logic of violence and civilian victimization in conflict. Third, it explores the conditions under which counterinsurgency and ethnic cleansing converge. I argue the mass expulsion of the Rohingya is the result of a combination of ethno-religious nationalism fueled by powerful and well-organized monks, and the military’s desire to secure territorial control in the resource-rich but conflict-prone border region. Through the case of the Rohingya, I show that recent democratic reforms in Myanmar are nascent and largely superficial. The paper at once makes a timely contribution to knowledge on an under-researched case and adds to a growing body of scholarship on intra-state conflict processes.

Author

• Mayesha Alam, Yale University