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Paper short abstract

Drawing on ethnography with Rohingya diaspora, I trace a genocidal continuum beyond 2017, foregrounding regenerative antigenocidal practices through hospitality, micro-charity, self-education, and self-recognition projects: costly yet vital amid protracted genocidal risk.

Paper long abstract

While international recognition often centres on 2017, Rohingya qom (“people”) narrate longer histories: accumulations of undoing that have severed kinship relations and belonging (to Arakanese land and to the Burmese polity) alongside the denial of Rohingya ethnicity, and refusals to recognise a variegated portrait of Rohingya suffering as such. For those chronically displaced, immobilisation, illegalisation, and the unrealities of UN-touted “durable solutions” permeate the everyday.

Drawing on two years of doctoral ethnographic fieldwork with Rohingya in diaspora (UK/US), I trace, through oral histories, photographs, and a collaborative embroidered (fultola) cartographic project, multi-generational family trajectories across serial expulsions (1940s/1970s/1990s/2010s) from Arakan/Rakhine to Bangladesh, India/Pakistan, the Gulf, and onward to the Global North. Across these routes, close kin remain in camps, disappear in Myanmar, or are lost at sea; ocánti (ongoing unrest) is experienced relationally, and family reunification remains structurally foreclosed, rendering “healing” suspended.

This continuum of genocidal violence operates by eroding not only bodies and relations, but the imaginability and doability of relations themselves – debilitating capacities for caring for self-and-others and for producing authorised knowledge of self-history/ identity (along with recognition of Rohingya as capable carers/knowers). Against these foreclosures, I foreground cross-border regenerative labours: reversals of care’s directionality via hospitality/foodways; redistributive micro-charities that scaffold other Rohingya care projects; diaspora-led education to salvage a ‘lost generation’; and portable infrastructures of self-recognition (via self-sovereign identity systems). Yet these quieter infrastructures are costly: under scarcity, those sustaining regeneration face depletion. I argue for urgently resourcing these labours of regeneration amid enduring genocidal risk.