Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-mlc7c Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-05T08:46:48.562Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

3 - ‘Looking for a Life’: Rohingya Refugee Migration in the Post-Imperial Age

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 January 2021

Get access

Summary

Introduction

A refugee, according to Hannah Arendt, was a person who had no right to rights. Her statement was based on her own experience during the Nazi period of being stripped of German citizenship because she was a Jew. This definition of a refugee no longer holds true. In no small measure due to the lessons learned from that experience, a refugee rights regime – flawed and inadequate though it may be – has been established both at the transnational level and, in many Western liberal states, at the national level. This has enabled and legitimised substantial refugee flows and resettlements in the second half of the twentieth century. Less well known, however, are the substantial population displacements and settlements that are illicit and outside of any formal regulatory framework, which have been sustained not by the assertion of civil rights but by the ‘paper citizenship’ of weak states (Sadiq 2008) and the conditional ‘hospitality’ of shared cultural vernaculars.

In this paper, we draw on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with a refugee group in Malaysia – the Muslim Rohingyas from the province of Arakan in Burma – to make the following arguments. Far from there being a unified and homogenous space of global or transnational migration, represented by the contemporary Western European (and/or US) experience, it would be more appropriate to think of contemporary patterns and practices of border-crossing migration in terms of ‘imagined worlds’ (Appadurai 1990) or ‘overlapping zones’ (Balibar 2003). Bowen (2004) has recently argued for the existence of a discursively constituted ‘transnational Islamic space’. The information gleaned from our interviews with the Rohingya points to the existence of a contemporary transnational Islamic space or zone of migration governed by the practices of illiberal states and shared Muslim hospitality, and of a Muslim migrant world dwelling therein in the interstices of the illegal and the licit.

At the same time, Rohingyas are ‘persons of concern’ to the United National High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and thus clients of a transnational human rights regime. This regime, anchored in the legal norms of the Western liberal state, with its validation of refugees as a legal category, does confer some degree of state-transcending protection to extra-territorial populations that fall under its care.

Type
Chapter
Information
Transnational Flows and Permissive Polities
Ethnographies of Human Mobilities in Asia
, pp. 75 - 90
Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
Print publication year: 2012

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×