Exclusion and persecution: The Rohingya crisis through the lens of nationalism, statelessness, and violence

Abstract The brutal military crackdown in Myanmar's Rakhine state caused more than 1 million Rohingya refugees to flee to Bangladesh. By analyzing the tripartite relationship between nationalism, violence, and statelessness, this commentary examines how Myanmar's political exclusion of the Rohingya contributed to their stateless condition and led to an ongoing humanitarian crisis in the region. The study argues that the Rohingya are stateless because of Myanmar's state‐sanctioned ethnic discrimination premised on nationalist conceptions of the country as a uniquely Burmese and Buddhist nation‐state. The state systematically justifies the Rohingya's precarity within Myanmar society to promote an imagined national homogeneity.