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Paper short abstract

Based on UN refugee status determination work and ethnography with Rohingya Muslims in India, this paper examines how justice remains deferred after ethnic cleansing, showing how legal recognition coexists with statelessness and moral practices that reimagine justice outside formal legal frameworks.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how ideas and practices of justice are articulated, deferred, and reworked in the aftermath of mass political violence through the case of the Rohingya, a Muslim minority subjected to what the United Nations has described as a “textbook case of ethnic cleansing” in Myanmar. Since the military-led violence of 2017, nearly one million Rohingya have been forcibly displaced, producing the largest stateless refugee population in the world. Drawing on my former role in UN refugee status determination (RSD) procedures and subsequent ethnographic fieldwork with Rohingya Muslims living in Delhi, India, I trace how recognition of persecution as genocide or crimes against humanity does not necessarily bring affected populations closer to justice.

While RSD processes classify Rohingya as refugees fleeing mass violence, these determinations do not translate into meaningful recognition, protection, or redress in host states such as India, a democracy that has neither signed the Refugee Convention nor offers domestic asylum law. Justice, in this context, remains structurally suspended. I show how Rohingya interlocutors nonetheless articulate justice beyond courts and humanitarian regimes—through moral reasoning, collective memory, and Islamic revivalist practices shaped by the Tablighi Jamaat—reframing persecution as racialized, religious, and civilizational rather than confined to Myanmar’s military rule alone.

By following justice as an unfinished and uneven process rather than a post-conflict outcome, this paper contributes an ethnographic account of justice-in-the-making under ongoing political violence, expanding anthropological approaches beyond transitional justice frameworks to include religious, moral, and everyday practices of endurance amid legal abandonment.