Abstract
This chapter is about the plight of “stateless” people, not recognised as nationals by any state, albeit the state in various forms regulates their everyday life committing severe injustice and practicing various inequalities by producing illegibility in state structure. In fact, the structure of modern nation-state has produced the concept of statelessness and non-citizens though the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) confirms that “everyone has the right to a nationality.” Since the state of statelessness confirms people belonging to no state, they cannot claim any rights from states though the International Refugee Convention (1951), the Convention relating to the Status of Stateless People (1954) and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966) confirm the rights of even non-citizens. Nonetheless, the lives of stateless people that include non-citizens, refugees or asylum seekers can easily become subject to injustice, inequality, discrimination and illegibility and is even subject to death. The treatment of stateless people as “illegal” human bodies is as what George Agamben termed “bare life”; a life is “bare” because it does not exist “before the law”. This chapter examines such a group of stateless people known as the Rohingya living in Myanmand and Bangladesh beneath the intricate relations of migration, statelessness and vulnerability.
The Rohingya people became stateless soon after Myanmar in 1982 enacted its Citizenship Law which conferred to 135 nationals as its citizens excluding the Rohingya. Since then many Rohingya people migrated to Bangladesh in large scale though the influx started from 1978. The Rohingya people in Bangladesh are now under “biometric” database officially termed as “forcibly displaced Myanmar nationals” but not even refugees due mainly to their state of statelessness as they do not belong to any state. In the framework of modern nation-state, the Rohingya people are non-existent human beings as they are in nowhere in the legal framework of both Bangladesh and Myanmar. However, the Rohingya people experience persecution, atrocities and everyday forms of discrimination committed by the state despite their stateless identity. With empirically informed analysis, this chapter explains how the vulnerability is (re)produced in the lives of refugees due to their statelessness when transborder movement has become the general features of twenty-first-century state system in the name of “global society.”
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Notes
- 1.
I have used the age of every informants throughout so that it helps understand the gravity and intensity of the fact and event used in an attempt to substantiate the argument of this chapter.
- 2.
The Rohingyas whom I met always term Myanmar as Borma. Therefore, I have been using Borma when I quote them, but Myanmar in my discussion and analysis since it is an official name.
- 3.
By the theory of “Geontologies”, Elizabeth Povinelli talks about the mechanism of power that makes distinction between “lives” and “non-lives” where non-lives are dealt with differently unlike the “lives” are treated. The Rohingyas are apparently “non-lives” and therefore dealt with accordingly from the statist perspective. See, for details, Povinelli (2016).
- 4.
The paper is based on ethnographic fieldwork undertaken for over two years intermittantly between 2001 and 2018 in different phases in two villages, namely, Vasan Para (pseudonym) located in Teknaf and Pasan Para (pseudonym) located in Ukhia of Cox’s Bazar the southwestern part of Bangladesh. This empirical experience has been supplemented by my close observation as a local resident of Cox’s Bazar for more than two decades and a half of the flow of Rohingya migrations, the process of their temporary settlements, the attempts of permanent social integration and the roles of state and non-state actors in dealing with the Rohingya peoples in the south-eastern part of Bangladesh. The data used here are comprehensive and descriptive in nature which render the methodology of the research qualitative and ethnographic.
- 5.
Lewa, Chris. 2008. “Asia’s New Boat People”. Available at http://www.fmreview.org/sites/fmr/files/FMRdownloads/en/burma/lewa.pdf (accessed on January 02, 2018).
- 6.
Those who are officially registered and live in official camps under the supervision of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) are “Rohingya refugees”.
- 7.
The rest who are not officially registered and live either in makeshift camps or in other localities are known as “illegal migrants”.
- 8.
This is indeed an approximate estimate of the number of unregistered refuges since there is no official record of them. But, the actual number of unregistered Rohingya refugees is many more than what is estimated since the flow of migration is still continued.
- 9.
Professional contact means a kind of contact with the corrupted official to get Bangladeshi passport in exchange of bribery, working contact with the local people by selling the cheap labour and moving to big cities like Chittagong and Dhaka to work as construction workers, rickshaw pullers, venders and day labourers. Through these processes, some Rohingyas are gradually integrating in the Bangladeshi society.
- 10.
Muntaha, Sadia. 2018. “Expatriate minister: 250,000 Rohingyas went abroad with Bangladeshi passports”. Available at https://www.dhakatribune.com/bangladesh/2018/04/28/expatriate-minister-250000-rohingyas-went-abroad-bangladeshi-passports/ (accessed on June 02, 2018).
- 11.
See also Das, V.; Poole, D. (eds.) 2004. Anthropology in the Margins of the State. New Delhi: Oxford University Press; Gupta, A. 1995. Blurred Boundaries: The Discourse of Corruption, the Culture of Politics and the Imagined State. American Ethnologist 22(2):375–402; Gupta, Akhi. 2012. Red Tape: Bureaucracy, Structural Violence and Poverty in India. Durham: Duke University Press; Sharma, Aradhana and Gupta, Akhil (eds.). 2006. The Anthropology of the State: A Reader. USA, UK and Australia: Blackwell Publishing.
- 12.
Yaba is a kind of tablets which are used to increase human sexuality. Myanmar is the largest Yaba-producing country in the world, and as a borderland Teknaf and Ukhia are popularly known as Yaba trading zones.
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Uddin, N. (2019). The State, Vulnerability, and Transborder Movements: The Rohingya People in Myanmar and Bangladesh. In: Uddin, N., Chowdhory, N. (eds) Deterritorialised Identity and Transborder Movement in South Asia. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-2778-0_5
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