Treading the border of (il)legality: statelessness, “amphibian life,” and the Rohingya “boat people” of Asia

In Myanmar, the state and the Buddhist-majority civil society have long been hostile to the people known as the Rohingya. The Muslim Rohingya have lived in Rakhine state for centuries, but the Myanmar government, labelling them “illegal Bengali migrants,” has rendered them stateless under the 1982 Citizenship Law. The recent “democratisation” of Myanmar facilitated neoliberal expansion in the resource-rich Rakhine and intensified discrimination and violence, and the Rohingyas have been forced to flee in large numbers. They leave Myanmar on fishing boats and trawlers and attempt to enter countries like Bangladesh, Thailand, and Malaysia, “illegally” aided by smugglers. The boat people travel from marginality to ever-prevailing precarity and liminality; en route through the seas and lands of their host countries, they experience further monstrosities perpetrated by state and non-state actors. The judiciary, state, and capital together produce categories of “legality and illegality” that constitute the “amphibian life” of the “boat people” and create for them an ambivalent identity of “refugee-hood” and/or “statelessness.” Here we present our ethnographic study of this violence-laced field of forced migration, situated at the cusp of South Asia and Southeast Asia. We critically extend Agamben’s theory of “state of exception” and “bare life” to elaborate upon the “spaces of exception” experienced by the “boat people” and conceptualise the notion of “amphibian life” by analysing their agentic capability, after and beyond “bare life.”