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ABSTRACT
In Myanmar, the state and the Buddhist-majority civil society have long been hostile to the people known as the Rohingya. The Muslim Rohingya have lived in Rakhine state for centuries, but the Myanmar government, labelling them “illegal Bengali migrants,” has rendered them stateless under the 1982 Citizenship Law. The recent “democratisation” of Myanmar facilitated neoliberal expansion in the resource-rich Rakhine and intensified discrimination and violence, and the Rohingyas have been forced to flee in large numbers. They leave Myanmar on fishing boats and trawlers and attempt to enter countries like Bangladesh, Thailand, and Malaysia, “illegally” aided by smugglers. The boat people travel from marginality to ever-prevailing precarity and liminality; en route through the seas and lands of their host countries, they experience further monstrosities perpetrated by state and non-state actors. The judiciary, state, and capital together produce categories of “legality and illegality” that constitute the “amphibian life” of the “boat people” and create for them an ambivalent identity of “refugee-hood” and/or “statelessness.” Here we present our ethnographic study of this violence-laced field of forced migration, situated at the cusp of South Asia and Southeast Asia. We critically extend Agamben’s theory of “state of exception” and “bare life” to elaborate upon the “spaces of exception” experienced by the “boat people” and conceptualise the notion of “amphibian life” by analysing their agentic capability, after and beyond “bare life.”
Notes
1 The term “boat people” was first used in the context of the China–Vietnam war in 1978, when large numbers of Chinese and Vietnamese refugees fled using boats (Hasan Citation2019).
2 Interview with Veerawit Tianchainan, the founder and Executive Director of the Thai Committee for Refugees Foundation, 10 July 2016, Bangkok, Thailand.
3 The second author visited this place again in June 2007 and carried on his work with the communities here, before we visited it together in 2016.
4 It is a long, narrow strip of land along Myanmar’s coast with the Bay of Bengal. Its border with Bangladesh is 176 miles long, and about 48 miles of it is the River Naf (Khairi Citation2016, 482). The terms “Arakan” and “Rakhine” used in this paper describe the region during the appropriate temporal phase.
5 This “ceasefire capitalism” (Woods Citation2011) began when the military, business, and ethnic political elites colluded to exploit periods of calm during the ceasefire in the mid-1990s to assert control over resources and accumulate wealth.
6 Interview with a Rohingya woman, 11 August 2017, Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh.
7 Yaba is an addictive drug, extremely popular among the locals. It is a mixture of methamphetamine and caffeine from Myanmar (Hasan Citation2019).
8 Interview with Parvez Siddiqui, Executive Director, Film4Peace Foundation, 10 May 2018, Dhaka, Bangladesh.
9 Interview with Md. Abdus Sabur, Asia Resource Foundation, 8 July 2016, Bangkok, Thailand.
10 Interview with an ex-smuggler, 12 August 2017, Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh.
11 Interview with a Rohingya man, 5 May 2018, Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh. Many Rohingya in Bangladesh can speak Bengali fluently.
12 Interview with a Rohingya Man, 6 July 2016, Bangkok, Thailand.
13 Interview with an ex-smuggler, 23 March 2018, Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh.
14 The US Department report on monitoring global efforts to combat slavery Trafficking in Persons (TIPs) kept Thailand in the Tier 2 watch list, from 2012 to 2017 (Szep and Grudgings Citation2013).
15 Interview with a rescued Bangladeshi man, 4 April 2018, Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh.
16 Interview with Dr. Adisak Asmimana, Thailand National Islamic Committee of Tak Province and his elder brother local leader Haji Abdul Wadud Imam of Answar mosque, 4 July 2016, Mae Sot, Thailand.
17 Interview with a Rohingya man who worked in Thai fishing boats, 7 July 2016, Bangkok, Thailand.
18 Interview with Phil Robertson, Deputy Director, Asia Division, Human RightsWatch, and Jim Pollard, journalist, The Nation, 9 July 2016, Bangkok, Thailand.
19 Sic interview note 6.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Arnab Roy Chowdhury
Arnab Roy Chowdhury is an Assistant Professor in the school of sociology at the Higher School of Economics, Moscow, in the Russian Federation. Prior to this he was an Assistant Professor in the Public Policy and Management Group at the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta (IIMC). He received his PhD in Sociology from the National University of Singapore (NUS) in 2014. His research and teaching interests include Forced Migration and Refugee Studies, Social Movements Studies, Ethnicity and Nationalism, Natural Resources Extraction and Labour, and Postcolonial & Subaltern Studies.
Ahmed Abid
Ahmed Abidur Razzaque Khan, alias Ahmed Abid is a filmmaker and Assistant Professor of Development Studies at the Asian University for Women, Chattogram, Bangladesh. He did his Ph.D. in Human Rights, Society, and Multi-level Governance from the Western Sydney University, Australia. He has more than fifteen years’ experience in academic and development work around Asia and the Pacific. His research disciplines focus on – Cultural Studies, Documentary Film, New and Alternative Media, Migration, Refugees and Labour Trafficking and Subaltern Narrative, and Postcolonial Studies. Email: [email protected]