Perilous Homelands: The Rohingya Crisis and The Violence of National Territory

Talk by David Ludden

The Rohingya survival crisis – in borderlands of Myanmar and Bangladesh -- has disappeared from the headlines, but Rohingyas remain one of the largest stateless populations in the world. Their suffering can be understood as an extreme example of the violence inflicted by national territory around the world. In South Asia, "partition" is the keyword in that violent history: it denotes the forced expulsion of people deemed foreign to the nation and the forced inclusion of people living on land claimed by nations during the demolition of British India. Rohingyas are among the latest and most brutalized victims of this imposition of national state boundaries on mobile imperial spaces during the ongoing global process of decolonization.