Racial Exclusion by Bureaucratic Omission: Non-Enumeration, Documentary Dispossession, and the Rohingya Crisis in Myanmar

Abstract

This article traces the bureaucratic bases of the Rohingya crisis in Myanmar. I draw on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with Rohingya activists to elucidate the political struggles and competing archival logics surrounding their disenfranchisement and displacement. I explain a curious shift in the past decade in Myanmar’s approach to managing the Rohingya population, whereby longstanding strategies of legally-encoded racial exclusion gave way to moves to withhold and contract the state’s administrative reach: 1) the repudiation of the Rohingya category in the 2014 census; and 2) the dispossession of documents leading up to the 2015 elections. I develop the concept of “bureaucratic omission” to reveal an alternative mode by which the state’s symbolic power can be accumulated and exercised. In the wake of new claims-making pressures during Myanmar’s short-lived democratic opening, state officials nullified Rohingyas’ claims for recognition as citizens by depriving them of the material evidence to support these claims. In response, Rohingya activists invoked this same epistemic power of documents, leveraging archival sources and documentary vestiges to build their own historical counternarratives of indigenous belonging. By protagonizing stateless Rohingyas, I provide insight into top-down administrative efforts to un-make race and into how minorities can contest these omissions.