The Rohingya: An Ethnography of ‘Subhuman’ Life

The Rohingya are known as the most persecuted minority population in the world. They do not belong to any state as Myanmar striped of the citizenship rendering them stateless and Bangladesh does not recognise them even as refugees. With the case of Rohingya people, the book offers a comprehensive portrait of the hidden transcript of statelessness, non-citizenship, transborder movements and refugee-hood in the legal structure of modern nation-state. It illuminates pains, sufferings, and struggle of carrying out the state of statelessness and refugee-hood at home-state and host-state across the world in general and the Rohingya people in the borderland of Bangladesh and Myanmar in particular. The book with ethnographically informed analysis critically engages with the existing scholarship on migration and refugee studies, asylum seekers and camp-people, and citizenship and human-rights issue with proposing a new theoretical perspective called subhuman life. It could be used for a better understanding of an extreme vulnerability and deep uncertainty of human life apart from the broad spectrum of genocide, ethnocide, ethnic cleansing, homicide and domicide. The idea of subhuman life offers a new frame of thought towards an understanding of the life in the struggle for existence and the process of extinction. The book thus offers both an appealing theoretical potential and a solid piece of ethnography regarding refugee situation, stateless people, asylum seekers, transborder movements, and camp people with the case of Rohingya.