Statelessness and 'Bare-life': The Rohingya 'Boat People'of Asia

Each year, huge numbers of poor Rohingya Muslims from Myanmar fry to migrate illegally to countries like Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines, and Indonesia on 'boats' through sea routes mediated by human traffickers. They are intensely hapless people fleeing from torture and persecution, in a typical case of forced migration'. They were made officially 'stateless' by the Myanmar government through the mooting of the 1982 citizenship law, which derecognised their ethnicity and labelled them as outsiders. They pay a disproportionate sum of money to human trafficking agents just to find their way through in the 'host' countries, and instead end up being slaves, or face gruesome death. This paper is the result of the authors "ethnographic ' involvement with these 'boat people' in Bangladesh and Thailand as part of a two-year project. The paper discusses what leads these poor people to embark on such insecure and dangerous journeys. It talks about the precariousness and liminality of their lives in and outside Myanmar. It engages with issues of forced migration, statelessness, 'human rights discourse', and Giorgio Agamben's notion of 'bare life' in which the stateless are stripped of legal rights and exposed to the vagaries and monstrosities of various state and non-state actors.