Islamophobia in Myanmar: the Rohingya genocide and the ‘war on terror’

Abstract

This article analyses the Rohingya genocide of August 2017. The accusation of genocide has been denied by the state of Myanmar, but what is demonstrated here is how the phenomenon of Islamophobia – anti-Muslim racism – informed, sanctioned and culminated in a genocide whose consequences are ongoing. Islamophobia has generally been understood to relate to the ‘othering’ of Muslims in settler societies and the nations of the global North, as documented by critical race, postcolonial and feminist scholars, with much of the current discourse on it structured around the ‘war on terror’. But increasingly, it has also come to encompass systemic racism and anti-Muslim violence in the global South, with, in Myanmar, the ‘war on terror’ used to sanitise more recent violence against the Rohingya. This article examines both structural Islamophobia, and the Islamophobia of private actors in Myanmar, in particular the powerful Buddhist extremist movement. It demonstrates that the co-dependent relationship between structural and private Islamophobia since military rule in Myanmar, in the absence of a strong and unified resistance, contributed to the genocide. Moreover, the troubling logic used to defend state-sponsored violence and killing in Myanmar bears a number of similarities to Islamophobic trajectories in other spaces of the global South in the context of the ‘war on terror’.