Blockchain Reactions: The Peril and Promise of Techno-Governance for Stateless Rohingya
While Myanmar’s recent ethnic cleansing of its Rohingya minority, which saw 800,000 people driven into Bangladesh, has brought the community’s oppression to the world’s attention, it has also masked a longer term project of exclusion in which the state has been denying the Rohingya their ethnic name and forcing them from their homes since the 1970s.
Not only are there now more Rohingya living outside Myanmar than within, but entire generations are being brought up in exile. Critically, many host communities institute ambiguous regimes of il/legality, defined by intertwining inclusions and prohibitions, which keep Rohingya in perpetual limbo, caught between integration and expulsion.
A Rohingya-led NGO based in Kuala Lumpur (KL), has proposed a novel, even radical, solution: to use blockchain, the technology that enables cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, to circumvent the state exclusion that has long put things such as bank accounts out of reach for Rohingya. At first glance this sounds farfetched, even absurd. But the Rohingya Project (RP) is not suggesting that Rohingya speculate in volatile crypto markets. Rather, it proposes to create an assemblage out of blockchain, biometrics, and fin-tech to generate new forms of both individual and collective subjectivity, enabling Rohingya to take control of their identities and futures.
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