Identity and Territory Grievances in Rakhine State

This chapter explores the nature of Myanmar’s ‘Rohingya’ conflict against the two most common non-material ‘grievance’ explanations in the literature, with the aim to highlight how their interplay shapes and reshapes the trajectories of the conflict: grievance based around identity (or ethnicity) and territory. The chapter highlights how the importance of issues of identity driving this conflict helps explain the resistance to the name ‘Rohingya’ within Myanmar, and discusses the reification of ethnic political identities in Myanmar. It argues that the politicization of ethnicity has led to a politics of ethnicity in Myanmar, and now a politics of indigeneity (taing-yin-tha) as a means of projecting control, through domination over the ‘national race’ minorities by instrumentalizing exclusion of other races, like the Rohingya. The chapter then discusses the framing of violence, and the danger of collectivization in conflicts labelled as ‘ethnic, discussing their complexity, fluidity and propensity to reframe micro-level crime or violence as ‘ethnic’. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the importance of territory to this conflict, in the light of the emphasis on territorial control as a marker of legitimacy in international politics.