The Political Economy of the Protracted Rohingya Genocide

The authoritarianism deployed by Myanmar’s military state over the past 60 years is often identified as the root cause of the country’s various political conflicts. Not only is authoritarianism meant to spur the polity’s resistance to military rule, but also to generate intra-polity divisions, particularly the inter-ethnic animosity ascribed to the military’s putative “divide-and-rule” tactics. And yet, recent research has illuminated the desultory nature of state formation practices orchestrated by this military, suggesting its inability to enact any intended divisive tactics with any sophistication. This fact compels an incorporation of additional variables. While some analysts have reduced conflict entirely to political economic motivations, this paper’s analysis employs a model in which authoritarianism and political economy are linked. Based on 93 focus group discussions with elderly Rohingya individuals living in Bangladesh’s refugee camps, the paper conducts a political economic analysis of the dynamics leading to Rohingya ethnic cleansing (bouts of which occurred in 1978, 1992-94, and 2017). It explores how authoritarian state formation processes (particularly the expansion of immigration, security, and population relocation institutions) provided a backdrop for an internecine conflict over scarce land resources between Rohingya and members of the Buddhist Rakhine ethnicity. Critically, the military state, while racist and bigoted, did not take Rohingya expulsion as its only goal; instead, by seeking security and rent-seeking objectives, it created variegated expulsive pressures: e.g. poor Rohingya who could not bribe immigration officials (thereby ‘proving’ their citizenship) or military commanders (thereby buying themselves out of forced labor) fled the country, while those who could purchase security did so. This protracted extrusion of Rohingya gave way to the mass violence of 2017’s expulsion of 800,000 Rohingya - a campaign that did not differentiate by class, and which, consequently, led to massive ethnogenetic consequences: Rohingya coming to identify as such, given their killability as tokens of that common type.  

Elliott Prasse-Freeman, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the National University of Singapore, has conducted long-term fieldwork in Myanmar and its environs. His first book (Rights Refused, Stanford University Press, 2023) focuses on political activism in Burma, while his current book project examines Rohingya ethnogenesis amidst dislocation and mass violence. His work has appeared in American Ethnologist, Current Anthropology, Journal of Peasant Studies, Public Culture, and Comparative Studies in Society and History, and he's the co-editor of Anthropological Theory Commons.