Incompatible Identities: Ethnicity, Belonging, and Exclusion in Myanmar’s Democracy

In my paper, I will research feelings of belonging in Myanmar and what has created—or challenged—community-building in a transitional state. I will be examining the “transition” from a military-controlled state to a democracy and the language of ethnicity, religion, and group dynamics that attempted to create the unified state that Myanmar claims to be. I would like to look into the in-group status of taingyintha, or “sons of the soil”, and how it has changed over the years, especially in the way it is now used to exclude and persecute the Rohingya minority. I will be looking at the place of the Rohingya in the changing Myanmar state and I will attempt to examine how their persecution is not seen as a challenge to Myanmar’s new democracy, but rather proof of it as an exercise of government power and security. I will examine government rhetoric, the documentation of ethnicity in Myanmar over time, and, hopefully, statements from the Rohingya themselves. 

Preliminary Bibliography

Cheesman, Nick. “How in Myanmar “national races” came to surpass citizenship and exclude Rohingya.” Journal of Contemporary Asia 47, no. 3 (2017): 461-483

Ferguson, Jane M. “Who’s Counting?: Ethnicity, Belonging, and the National Census in Burma/Myanmar.” Bijdragen tot de taal-, land-en volkenkunde/Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences of Southeast Asia 171, no. 1 (2015): 1-28.

Kipgen, Nehginpao. “Ethnicity in Myanmar and its Importance to the Success of Democracy.” Ethnopolitics 14, no. 1 (2015): 19-31.

Lee, Seo In. “Democratic Changes and the Rohingya in Myanmar.” JATI-JOURNAL OF SOUTHEAST ASIAN STUDIES 20 (2015): 16-35.

Prasse-Freeman, Elliott. 2017. “The Rohingya crisis.” Anthropology Today 33 (6): 1-2.

Wade, Francis. 2017. “Prologue, Chapter 1,and Chapter 4.” In Myanmar’s Enemy Within: Buddhist Violence and the Making of a Muslim ‘Other’. London: Zed.