Denationalisation, Statelessness, and Refugeehood: A Case of the Rohingya “Subhuman” Life

The Rohingya, known as the world’s most persecuted minority, went through an unprecedented genocidal campaign marked by brutal atrocities carried out by Myanmar’s security forces in 2017. The attack, called clearance operations, forcibly displaced over 725,000 Rohingya civilians, killed an estimated 10,000 people, sexually abused 1900 women/girls and fully or partially destroyed 392 villages as per the UN Fact-Finding Mission 2018. The UN Human Rights Council described it as “a textbook example of ethnic cleansing,” with many scholars identifying it as genocide. Combined with the new arrivals and earlier influxes, Bangladesh now hosts over 1.3 million Rohingya in the world’s largest refugee settlement, Cox’s Bazar. Despite commendable efforts by Bangladesh and its humanitarian partners, refugees face food crisis, inadequate healthcare and education, poor housing and water access, rising insecurity, human trafficking, and shortages of necessities. Tensions with host communities have intensified as competition over limited resources grows. While Myanmar’s ongoing civil war and the rise of the Arakan Army put repatriation’s hope in trouble, local integration and third-country resettlement options find no light at the end of the tunnel, and thereby, the Rohingya remain stateless and marginalized. Drawing on empirically grounded evidence, this talk examines the process of how the Rohingya people were first denationalized, which rendered them stateless and then refugees. The way the state dealt with the Rohingya people as if they were lesser than human beings, what Uddin called ‘Subhuman’ Life. The talk presents their lived experiences in Myanmar and refugee camps in Bangladesh, arguing their condition as “subhuman life” within the broader framework of denationalization, statelessness and protracted refugeehood.

Professor Dr. Nasir Uddin is a Visiting Professor in the Department of Anthropology at SAI, Heidelberg University and Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chittagong. Professor Uddin has held Visiting Fellow/Visiting Scholar/Visiting Professor positions at Harvard University, Oxford University, the University of Sydney, the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), the London School of Economics and Political Sciences (LSE), Johns Hopkins University, East-West Center, Washington DC, Heidelberg University, VU University Amsterdam, Ruhr-University Bochum, the University of Hull, and Kyoto University. His latest books/edited books include “The Rohingya Crisis: Human Rights Issues, Policy Concerns and Burden Sharing” (SAGE, 2021), “Scattered Lives of Stateless People: The Rohingyas in SAARC and ASEAN Countries” (Springer, 2025), “The Rohingya: An Ethnography of ‘Subhuman’ Life” (The Oxford University Press, 2020), “Voices of the Rohingya People: A Case of Genocide, Ethnocide and ‘Subhuman’ Life” (Palgrave, 2022) and “Indigeneity, Marginality and the State in Bangladesh: Homeless at Home” (Routledge, 2024). His book (The Rohingya: An Ethnography of ‘Subhuman’ Life) was short-listed as the best book in social sciences published in 2020-2021 & 2021-2022 by the International Convention of Asian Scholars (ICAS). Professor Uddin’s theory of “Subhuman” life is widely discussed in the area of scholarship on refugees, migrants, non-citizens, asylum seekers, stateless people, IDPs and forcibly displaced people.