The armed conflict that commenced on August 25, 2017 in northern Rakhine State, Myanmar, and the subsequent exodus of refugees attracted global attention. The Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army, an armed group comprising Muslims mainly from northern Rakhine State, launched an attack on military and police facilities, enlisting the support of religious leaders and the general public. The Tatmadaw, Myanmar’s Armed Forces, responded with a “clearance operation” that resulted in significant devastation to the area. The precise number of casualties remains unknown, although Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar of United Nations Human Rights Council has suggested that the death toll may exceed 10,000. In the space of half a year, approximately 700,000 individuals sought refuge in neighboring Bangladesh. The fact that this many stateless religious minorities were compelled to seek refuge in a neighboring country was sufficient to indicate the violent persecution of certain groups, which could be described as ethnic cleansing. In the meantime, our understanding of the circumstances that gave rise to the crisis remains incomplete. There are several conflicting values, sentiments, political motivations, and historical perceptions that appear to impede a thorough examination. In order to address this crisis in its full complexity, it is necessary to reframe the problem from a broader perspective. This special feature brings together five papers that recognize the value of a multifaceted approach in developing a more fundamental understanding of and solution to the problem.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the characteristics of the Buddhist nationalist movement behind the recent Rohingya crisis. The movement began in 2012 with the 969 Movement, an anti-Muslim boycott movement, which was succeeded by the Association for the Patriotic Association of Myanmar (commonly known as MaBaTha), in which many prominent monks participate. The Buddhist nationalist movement was criticized within the Buddhist community from its very inception, but it was the general election in November 2015 and the subsequent formation of the National League for Democracy government that changed the course of the movement. As a result, in 2017 MaBaTha was renamed the Buddha Dhamma Parahita Foundation, and its advocacy of ethnic and religious protection receded into the background. Despite these ups and downs, however, Buddhist nationalistic ideology persists among ordained practitioners. Most previous studies have tended to view the connection between Buddhism and violence as an enigma. In contrast, this paper points out that the Buddhist state model based on Buddhist chronicles is an important justification for the movement.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the historical transformation of the Myanmar military’s threat perception of northern Rakhine State. The 2016 and 2017 violent conflicts in northern Rakhine State and the Rohingya refugee crisis may be understood as a consequence of the Buddhist-centered nationalism and anti-Muslim sentiments that have long been entrenched in Myanmar society. However, such a view does not provide a sufficient explanation for the cause and context of the violence. It fails to address the military’s threat perception, which does not always align with the dominant Buddhist-centered nationalism and society’s widely shared anti-Muslim sentiment. We need to understand the autonomous nature of threat perception in the military as it has developed while fighting “security threats” since the chaotic years immediately after independence in 1948. The military’s perception and strategic culture, born out of its selective adoption of ideas and concepts, strongly influence its operations and tactics on the ground even today. Through an analysis of internal military documents, military leaders’ speeches, and laws and regulations imposed on the Rohingya communities, this paper offers a preliminary overview of the development of the Myanmar military’s threat perception regarding northern Rakhine State from the late 1940s to the 2000s.

It is widely known that the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army’s attacks on Myanmar border guard posts in 2016 and 2017, and the Myanmar military’s clearance operations in response, resulted in a large number of Rohingya—estimated at 800,000 in total—crossing the border into Bangladesh’s southeastern border zone.

The Bangladesh government came up with a plan to relocate some of the refugees to an island (Char) in the Bay of Bengal. This plan has been the subject of much debate both within and outside Bangladesh.

To date, the Bangladesh government maintains that its sheltering of Rohingyas in the country is temporary and that the refugees’ return to Myanmar is the only solution. However, the relocation plan seems to contradict the Bangladesh government’s position. If so, has Bangladesh made a major policy shift from return (“repatriation” from the Bangladesh government’s point of view) to settlement of the Rohingya?

This essay attempts to answer this question through a detailed examination of the “Char relocation.”

Moreover, conventional discussions on the “Rohingya issue” have tended to focus exclusively on the Rohingya as victims while neglecting the host government and people of Bangladesh. This essay will address this point as well.

While keeping in mind the Rohingya issue, this article aims to answer two research questions: Why do nation-states perpetuate serious human rights abuses in the name of national security? And why do international judicial interventions trigger backlashes from the countries concerned? The interpretive and tentative diagnosis is as follows. As a nation-state tends to exclude the other (them) excessively in order to protect its own collective identity (us), the Rohingya could be situated as the constitutive outside that plays a crucial role in constructing and maintaining a political community such as Myanmar. As is clear from the country’s continuing armed separatism, Myanmar seriously lacks national integration. And so it needs the constitutive outside much more in order to construct its fictive national identity alongside Buddhism. The increasing political instability brought about by Myanmar’s transition to democracy forced the military (Tatmadaw) to target “illegal” Muslim migrants from Bengal—the Rohingya—in order to protect its vested interests as well as its organizational identity. Following military-led human rights abuses against the Rohingya, the international community tried to implement a judicial intervention. However, this intervention triggered a strong reaction—with exclusive identity politics in the form of excessive self-immunity against the other, such as the denial of human rights abuses—rather than an amelioration of the human rights abuses.

Military persecution of the Rohingya, a Muslim minority in the southern part of Buddhist-majority Myanmar, has continued for years. And the beginning of democratization in the 2010s did not decrease the intensity of persecution. In response, Rohingya militant groups have fought back against the Myanmar military, deepening the religious antagonism between Buddhists and Muslims. Persecuted Rohingya refugees flooded into neighboring countries such as Bangladesh, Thailand, and Malaysia in May 2015, November 2016, August 2017, and April 2020. This paper investigates the issue by analyzing the Malay narrative of Rohingya on the social media platform Twitter (now X) in Malaysia, a country that has taken on more than 100,000 Rohingya refugees. Unlike conventional media in Malaysia, which has focused only on the rapid spread of anti-Rohingya sentiment on social media since the beginning of 2020, this paper contains a rather long-term analysis of the quantitative evolution of Malay-language tweets regarding Rohingya from 2015 to 2022. The focus is on what was being said during the above four peak periods. Positive sentiment toward Rohingya was dominant in the first three peaks, but negative sentiment became quite evident in the last peak of April 2020. A closer analysis of Malay tweets from April 2020, however, shows that even when anti-Rohingya sentiment was at its highest, tweets on the Rohingya issue were still diverse in content. Focusing solely on the anti-Rohingya sentiment might misrepresent the diverse opinions in Malaysia.