Rohingyas the ‘Racialized Other’: Creation of the Biopolitical State

• In Event: 3520 - Section on Race, Gender, and Class Refereed Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: 6. Politics and the State

Abstract

In this paper, I argue that state identification system in Myanmar stem from racialized nationalism and continues recreating the racialized categories of exclusion. In relation to this argument, I discuss the case of Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh and Myanmar, who have fled from the persecution in Myanmar to the neighboring country, Bangladesh. Currently, around 1000,000 Rohingyas are taking refuge in the camps of Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh (UNHCR, 2018). During my study at the Kutupalong camp in Ukhiya in Bangladesh, I found the identity of Rohingyas are constructed as ‘other’ to the nation-body of Myanmar, as well as they have held a deep seeded notion of racialized ‘self’ among them. I argue, this self-racialized Rohingyas or racialized otherness is a creation of Myanmar state which emerged through the constant attempts of the biopolitical state in shaping the ‘nation-body.’ From civilian to democratic government, every regime and every ruler, employed varied projects of creating and shaping the ‘nation-body’ (Aung-Thwin, 2005; Ibrahim, 2017). I947 Panglong agreement, 1974 constitutional changes, Na-Ga- Min immigration project, and finally, 1982 citizenship law all are mechanisms employed by the state to simultaneously prescribe the definition of the ‘nation’ of Myanmar and created a racialized ‘nation-body’, which was built up against the ‘other races.’ The Panglong agreement in 1947 was an attempt to unite different ethnic group in one union of nation, as it is called the “foundation of the tyingyintha (indigenous races) unity” (Cheeseman, 2017, p. 464). I argue, ‘idea of race’ is deep inserted in the ‘idea of nation’ in Myanmar, which has reflected through the state’s various identification system or biopolitical mechanisms and implied to create racialized categories of exclusion. In the subsequent years, through different laws and policies, Myanmar continued producing a racialized notion of Burmeseness, a reified distinctive culture, and an ethnicized notion of religion. Consequently, the Rohingyas became the excluded ‘other’ from the nation-body, as a I called them the ‘racialized other’.

Author

• Morsaline Mojid, Department of Sociology