From 2012 to 2014, Myanmar experienced recurrent, sporadic, collective acts of lethal violence, realized through repeated public expressions that Muslims constitute an existential threat to Buddhists. In this talk, I draw on scholarship from Indonesia and India to make a case for classing and analyzing the violence as “communal.” I conclude with some tentative remarks on the relationship between communal violence, anti-Muslim sentiment, and the most recent military operations in Myanmar’s west.
Nick Cheesman is a fellow in the Department of Political and Social Change, Australian National University, and in 2016-17 a member at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, where he is working on a political theoretical study about torture. He is the author of Opposing the Rule of Law: How Myanmar’s Courts Make Law and Order (Cambridge UP, 2015).