Abstract
Scholarship on the Rohingya people, a forcefully displaced people from Myanmar, has proliferated over the last five years, especially after the influx of over a million Rohingyas from Myanmar to neighboring Bangladesh in 2017 (Ibrahim 2018; Islam and Siddika 2021). Nasir Uddin's book The Rohingyas: An ethnography of “subhuman” life stands out in this field for drawing a comprehensive picture of the Rohingya crisis. Besides providing an ethnographic portrait of the pain and suffering of the Rohingyas due to their statelessness, the book develops the concept of “subhuman” life (p. 3) to designate the lives of the Rohingyas. The central thesis of this book is that Rohingyas are considered as a class of “subhuman”, as they are not treated as human beings and are denied the right to citizenship both in Myanmar and Bangladesh.
The author develops his argument through eight chapters. Chapter one gives a detailed account of how the Rohingyas became stateless and were forced into a “subhuman” life without access to land and without identity acknowledged by the political elites in Myanmar. Chapter two addresses the popular debate in Myanmar of whether Rohingyas should be treated as a distinct ethnic minority and framed as Bengalis. Uddin suggests that the Rohingyas are a separate ethnic group in Myanmar, but that they are not Bengalis, as neither the historical documents nor the Rohingyas he interviewed claimed that they were Bengalis.
Chapter three sheds light on the contrasting narratives of Rohingyas and their host communities in Bangladesh. While locals initially welcomed the Rohingyas after the influx into Bangladesh in 2017, soon after an antagonistic attitude emerged due to various socioeconomic and security issues. The author pictures the realities on the ground, subtly arguing that local integration of the Rohingyas is not a practical solution, and that unless the Rohingyas are repatriated to Myanmar, local tensions will intensify. Chapter four studies the Rohingyas who were born in Myanmar but live in Bangladesh. As no country offers this group citizenship, the author suggests to study this group through a post-national framework, in which every individual has the right to receive citizenship of a state and the idea of territorial or nation-state citizenship should be removed. Chapter five, then, depicts how the complex nature of global citizenship laws accelerates the suffering of the stateless and in particular of the Rohingyas, as they are reduced to living a “bare life,” that is, a life that has no legal guarantee to live.
Chapter six is the heart of Uddin's book, as it gives voice to the Rohingyas in detailing their suffering and persecution in the 2017 anti-Rohingya operation led by the Myanmar army. Using ethnographic methods, that is, interviews with 500 traumatized Rohingyas over a four-year time period, the author pictures the systematic oppression, cruelty, atrocities, and human rights violations perpetrated by the Myanmar army against the Rohingyas. This chapter leads the author to propose his new theoretical perspective in chapter seven. Uddin's “subhuman” theory, in fact, does not solely speak to the atrocities faced by stateless people like the Rohingyas. According to the author, this theory will also help to study the people who, despite having citizenship, might face brutality due to ethnicity, race, and religion. In the final chapter, the author argues that only repatriation will bring an enduring solution to the Rohingya crisis, but that the process has to comply with three preconditions: legal recognition of the Rohingyas by Myanmar, guaranteed social safety, and human dignity.
In sum, the book has three specific strengths: First, the author provides not only a comprehensive review of the current scholarship around Rohingyas’ displacement, including their ancestral history and identity as a unique ethnic race, but also in-depth, ethnographic insights into how an ethnic group has been marginalized in Myanmar after independence. Second, by introducing the term “subhuman” life, Uddin's book offers a new theoretical lens to study the ostracized Rohingyas who have been stripped of their citizenship rights and are living a destitute life—being unwanted in their home country Myanmar or forcefully displaced into camps in neighboring Bangladesh. However, the book could have more explicitly demonstrated how his proposed theory of subhuman life, which has been developed from the case and perspective of Rohingya displacement, can be applied to other forms of forced migration or statelessness such as those involving people from Palestine, Syria, Afghanistan, or Yemen.
The last strength of the book is that although it has been written primarily for academics and students of forced migration and refugee studies, it is also an incredibly rich primary source of knowledge about the violence, persecution, hate, systematic oppression, and general human rights violation suffered by the Rohingyas that can guide practitioners to integrate realities on the ground in their policy decisions.