Sovereign Exclusion of the Rohingya

How does sovereignty affect exclusion from the political community? The waves of genocides and ethnic cleansing, past and present, call for attention to this question which remains inadequately addressed in political science literature, including IR. This paper will unpack the above question in the setting of the genocide against the Rohingya minority in Myanmar—a tragedy neglected by the international community and rarely considered by academics. The paper (1) lays out a framework of sovereignty that exposes its intimate connection with human victimisation and exclusion; (2) contextualises key concepts and dynamics of sovereign exclusion designed to actively combat the Rohingya Other; and (3) shows how sovereignty politicises and undermines Rohingya survival, after they are uprooted and forced into refugee camps. In doing so, the paper contributes to reversing a noticeable neglect of the Rohingya crisis in political science and mitigate a disciplinary tendency to only sporadically engage with the study of genocide.