Email: V.Prasad2@lse.ac.uk

Affiliation: London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE)

Nationality: Indian

The Land Dispossession of the Rohingya Community in Myanmar: A Spatial Process

Abstract

In August 2017, over 725,000 Rohingya were violently expelled from Myanmar's Rakhine state to Bangladesh through what the United Nations deemed as "genocidal acts". A telling aspect of the violence that unfolded was the widespread targeting and destruction of Rohingya land and property. It is estimated that the violence caused the destruction of approximately 40 per cent of all villages in the northern part of Rakhine state bordering Bangladesh. Since 2017, the Myanmar Government has embarked on a large-scale grab of Rohingya lands including through legislation related to vacant property, the 'clearing' of Rohingya villages, the construction of military infrastructure, and the harvesting of abandoned paddy fields. While most accounts of the Rohingya genocide revolve around the contentious issue of their citizenship in Myanmar, this paper attempts to center the question of land dispossession of the Rohingya community.

The central argument of the paper is that the genocide against the Rohingya community in Myanmar can be understood primarily as a spatial process, unfolding through decades of land dispossession. I rely on 63 oral history interviews conducted with displaced Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh and Japan and archival work conducted at the India Office Records of the British Library and the National Archives at Kew in London. My argument proceeds in three parts- first, my archival research examines the colonial roots of the violence against the Rohingya community by tracing how changes in land and property laws during the British colonial era emerged as a key arena through which the project of racialization of communities in Rakhine state unfolded. I outline how a focus on colonial era land and property laws, particularly the Wasteland Rules, offers a way to understand the lasting impact of the processes of racialization in Rakhine state.

Second, I examine interventions in land and property by the postcolonial Myanmar state to argue that these interventions were not incidental to the violence that unfolded against the Rohingya community but central to rendering their life and its social reproduction impossible. I pay attention to a state-initiated model village program which aimed to change the demographic structure of northern Rakhine by settling the Myanmar-Bangladesh borderlands with primarily Buddhist communities. Through oral history interviews, I show how the program led to widespread dispossession and a redistribution of land and property away from the Rohingya community and turned Rohingya landowners into tenants in their own ancestral land.

Third, I focus on the shrinking access of the Rohingya community to commons including forests, pastureland, and marine commons. I argue that combined with dispossession of private land and property, restrictions on customary access to the commons served as a primary conduit of impoverishing and displacing Rohingya communities.

My arguments offer new perspectives on the spatial roots of the making of the Rohingya genocide wrought through spatial erasure and violent dispossession of land and property. In this, I attempt to foreground the voices of displaced Rohingya themselves, particularly farmers and fisherfolk. The paper speaks to larger concerns in critical agrarian studies including how projects of land grabbing and large-scale violence are intimately tied to each other.

Bio

Vishnu Prasad is a fourth year PhD candidate at the Department of Geography and Environment at the LSE (London School of Economics & Political Science). He has an Integrated Masters in Economics from IIT-Madras in India, his home country, and a Masters in International Development from MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology). Vishnu's PhD dissertation examines the Rohingya genocide as a spatial process focusing on the fragmented history of land dispossession of the Rohingya community. He has conducted over 75 oral history interviews with displaced Rohingya in Bangladesh and Japan and undertaken archival research in London, Geneva, and Tokyo.

Vishnu works with civil society organizations and community activists on a variety of projects. In August 2024, he co-curated the exhibition "Remembering 1978-79: Archival Photographs of Rohingya displacement" in collaboration with the Burmese Rohingya Association in Japan. Coinciding with the seventh Rohingya Genocide Remembrance Day, the exhibition brought to a public audience for the first time audio-visual archival material relating to the displacement of the Rohingya from Burma to Bangladesh in 1978. Vishnu maintains a keen interest in refugee education stemming from his experience of teaching at the Myanmar Displaced Scholars in Mizoram Program at Mizoram University, India.

Vishnu's forthcoming publications include "Enemy Property: Violence, dispossession and citizenship in South Asia", a co-authored article accepted for publication in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies and a co-authored book chapter on housing, land, and property rights in the Handbook of Internal Displacement published by Oxford University Press. He previously worked as Head of Office for UN-Habitat in Rakhine state.