The (Re)production of Vulnerability

Chapter 5 focuses on the vulnerable conditions of stateless people because the state regulates their everyday lives in various forms, committing severe injustices and producing various inequalities by yielding illegibility in the state structure. The modern nation-state has produced the concept of citizenship rendering some stateless. Since the state of statelessness sanctions that some people do not belong to any state, they cannot claim any rights from any state and therefore easily become subject to injustice, inequality, and discrimination and are even subjected to death. The treatment of stateless people as illegal human bodies and as animals can be termed as ‘bare life’, as Agamben would argue. A life is ‘bare’ because it can be taken by anyone without any legal intercession, as this life does not exist ‘before the law’. This chapter depicts a vivid picture of the Rohingyas, where the state intervenes in their everyday lives amid the reproduction of vulnerabilities in order to reconfirm their statelessness.

Introduction

Chapter 1 grounds a foundation to enter into the realm of the Rohingyas with a critical reconsideration of the ethnic, regional, and political history of the Arakan/Rakhine State across time. It lays down the central argument of the book with an extensive literature review on the Rohingyas in particular and the stateless people, refugees, asylum seekers, and transborder mobility in general. It critically discusses the theoretical and scholarly contributions to the field of refugee, stateless, and citizenship studies and finds that there is a theoretical inadequacy and academic vacuum in understanding the critical conditionalities of what the Rohingyas have been living through for decades. In order to fill up this vacuum and meet the scholarly needs, this chapter proposes a new theoretical alternative along with an empirically informed analysis which has been substantiated by rich ethnographic details and solid logical analysis in the following chapters to establish the idea of ‘subhuman’ life.

Theorizing ‘Subhuman’

Chapter 7 discusses people’s critical ‘living conditionality’ created by the state. Besides, rather than looking at such vulnerable conditions as taken for granted for the stateless people, this chapter critically engages with the body of scholarship on citizenship, asylum seekers, stateless people and refugees, arguing whether these theories generated by academics otherwise are legitimizing the dehumanization process perpetrated by the states in various forms. This chapter offers a new perspective to contribute theoretically to the scholarship on the stateless, non-citizens, asylum seekers, and refugees by critical engagement with the idea of ‘bare life’, ‘rejected people’, ‘precarious life’ and so on, introducing a new concept—‘subhuman’. This chapter argues that ‘subhuman’ is a category of people who are born in the human society but have no space in the human community; they are born in the world, but the world doesn’t own them in any state structure, and they always live on the borderline of ‘life’ and ‘death’.

Of Hurting and Hosting

Chapter 3 discusses the crises of social integration of Rohingya refugees in the host societies of south-eastern Bangladesh. It argues that hosting the refugees is always problematic and troublesome from the perspective of the host society, whereas refugees think of it as hurting. State-level perception and local-level realities are strikingly different when it comes to hosting refugees. Local society always encounters the problems in the periphery more directly and explicitly than the state in the centre. This chapter merely focuses on the dynamics of interaction between the host society and migrated refugees at the grassroot level through the metaphor of ‘hosting’ and ‘hurting’. Though hosting and hurting are perceived from subjective interpretations, the chapter attempts to unveil the objective reality in the context of the quandary of integration between the refugees and the host society in case of the Rohingyas in Bangladesh.

Who Are the Rohingya?

Chapter 2 places the Rohingyas in the historical, political, and cultural context of Burma/Myanmar. Who they are, where did they come from, and how did they appear in the demographic composition of Burma, now Myanmar; and the human geography of Arakan or what is now called the Rakhine State. It brings in the historical trajectory of Muslim settlements in this region dating back to the eighth century when Arab traders first anchored in the northern Arakan state and settled down there. Among other things, it also critically engages in the debate on whether the emergence of Muslims in Arakan laid down the foundation of Rohingya ethnicity or whether becoming Rohingya was tied to their distinctive social practices, cultural heritage, and continuity of a particular ethnicity. Towards this objective, this chapter explores the historical chronology of different political upheavals that have gradually pushed them to the margin of the state.

Conclusion

The concluding chapter discusses the existing scholarship on the potential solution of the Rohingya problem with a critical examination of the roles of regional political dynamics, South and Southeast Asian geopolitics, bilateral and multilateral interstate relations, and the roles of the global communities such as the United Nations (UN) (and its organs like the UNHCR and United Nations International Children’s Education Fund [UNICEF]), IOM, International Labour Organization (ILO), European Union (EU), Amnesty International (AI), Human Rights Watch (HRW), Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), the United Kingdom, the United States of America, and the Arab League. This chapter attempts to explain some practical issues stemming from the field through ethnographic studies regarding how the Rohingyas think of changing their vulnerable and miserable lives in Bangladesh and Myanmar. It ends with a practical proposal, echoing what the author has learned on the ground from his interaction with hundreds of Rohingyas, that is, repatriation could be the enduring and sustainable solution of the Rohingya crisis, but it should be done following three conditions: legal recognition, social safety, and human dignity.

The Story of the ‘Subhuman’ Life

Chapter 6 presents 10 fresh ethnographic details that contain the personal narratives of the recently arrived Rohingyas in Bangladesh, following the horrifying campaign by the Myanmar security forces and vigilantes. This chapter builds on the 10 representative cases that unfold the ground reality of what is happening with the Rohingyas in Rakhine State and Bangladesh. These personal narratives reveal the degree of cruelty, the level of atrocities, and the nature of brutality perpetrated by the Myanmar security forces, ethnic extremists, and Buddhist fundamentalists, experiences that are good enough to render the Rohingyas—a group of people lesser than human beings—‘subhuman’. Presenting the atrocious condition of the Rohingyas, their existence in Rakhine State as illegal bodies, their extreme uncertainty regarding what to do and whom to complain to, their lived memories of being raped, punished, and killed, this chapter brings out how their lives are ‘subhuman’.

State of Stateless People

Chapter 4 examines the state of stateless people who are born in one state but live in another, neither of which recognizes them as full citizens. This practice is in sharp contrast with the individual right to citizenship. In an era characterized by people’s increasing mobility, while moving across borders is becoming a universal right, albeit slowly, legal implications of the individual right to citizenship require that globally, citizenship should not be limited within territorial boundaries and nation states. The individual right to citizenship instead could even be de-territorialized and seen in a post-national framework, where border crossers could have the right to citizenship. This may open roads to resolving many looming issues of illegal migration, refugee conflicts, and complexities of interstate border crossing. This chapter particularly discusses the plight of Rohingyas living in the borderland of Myanmar and Bangladesh both as non-citizens and refugees beneath the complex notions of citizenship.