Myanmar’s Rohingya Crisis: De/constructing Postcolonial Discourses

Abstract

Perhaps the most widely-known issue pertaining to contemporary Myanmar is that of its military and government’s long-standing persecution of the Rohingya people, a minority Muslim ethnic group living in Myanmar’s western Rakhine State, in a conflict that has become regional with its effects felt in other South and Southeast Asian states (Nawab, 2017). The persecution of the Rohingya people in Myanmar is intrinsically rooted in the institutions, rhetoric, and ethnologies originating from its history as a former British colony. Burmese nationalism, seen during British administration and continuing through postcolonial nation-building to the present, has largely excluded Rohingya people from its aims and narratives by constructing discourses that render them stateless. This polemic seeks to examine the atrocities from a postcolonial and poststructual framework and reconcile the past with the present.