The second panel “Development, Urbanization and Climate Change” examines application and impact of specific development policies (e.g., poverty reduction, livelihood promotion) on vulnerable communities in both urban and rural settings.

• Borderlands, Hinterlands and (Re)Formation of the State

Panelists: Anders Bjornberg | Saad Quasem | Kimberley Thomas

Moderator: Prof. C.R. Abrar

From Migrant Laborers to Stateless People: The Historical Reconstitution of Rohingya Identity

Anders Bjornberg, Binghamton University

An estimated two million Muslim Rohingya live in the region surrounding the 200km-long border between Bangladesh and Burma. Neither of the two countries claims them as citizens, and they are in a constant state of being displaced from one country into the other. Their locations within the socio-economic and labor hierarchies of both states provide insight into their contemporary and historical exclusion from citizenship.

Debates that seek to explain the Rohingya’s constitution and ethnicization over history are illuminative of their marginalization. Many of these accounts fallaciously superimpose the contemporary border, ethnic groups and national projects backwards through time, papering over the fluidity and dynamism that in fact defined this region, and the Rohingya’s location within it. These debates take a central role in discussions locating the Rohingya’s “homeland,” whether in Burma’s Arakan state or the Chittagong state of Bangladesh.

New denationalized historical accounts suggest that the Rohingya have historically been a subaltern class that has migrated throughout the region to find work and only relatively recently have they been ‘caught’ by the border and postcolonial notions of fixity. To this day, the Rohingya are defined by their position within the labor system: in Burma they are forced to labor for the regime on a large scale, while in Bangladesh discussions on their resettlement take place around livelihood, home, and the distribution of scarce resources and labor opportunities. Moreover, the conditions of integration of the Rakhaine ethnic group, who have also migrated from Burma into Bangladesh, stand in stark contradistinction to those of the Rohingya; their socio-economic status and location within labor hierarchies in Bangladesh (as predominantly smallholders and small entrepreneurs) might provide some hint as to the two groups’ comparative integration into the Bangladeshi nation-state. Historicizing the conflict over the Rohingya and exploring its class dynamics provides a way to think past the national and communal discourses that threaten to overdetermine this conflict.