Presentation short abstract

The paper examines Rohingya displacement through land and labor rather than ethnic persecution alone. Based on oral histories and archival evidence, it shows how structural violence—subsistence-destroying taxation and forced labor—produces migration, revealing enduring patterns of dispossession.

Presentation long abstract

Between 1991 and 1992, 250,000 Rohingya were forcibly displaced from Rakhine State in Myanmar to refugee camps in Bangladesh. By 1997, approximately 230,000 had been repatriated to Myanmar. Drawing on oral history interviews with refugees who refused repatriation and on archival research, this paper illuminates the underlying causes of this displacement—causes that continue to shape patterns of Rohingya displacement, including the mass exodus of 2017.

First, drawing on property documents and tax receipts shared by informants, I demonstrate how a dramatic escalation in taxation compelled Rohingya farmers to flee to Bangladesh. The increased tax burden on harvests— payable as a percentage or quota of the harvest which the farmers are compelled to sell at a price fixed by the government—left farmers unable to feed their families, pushing them below subsistence levels. Second, intensified military mobilization along the Myanmar-Bangladesh border precipitated a surge in forced labor through the coolie system. The military conscripted Rohingya bodies to act as porters, forest clearers, and road builders, forcing them to construct the very infrastructure that enabled further militarization of the borderlands.

By centering the importance of land and labor, this paper attempts to move beyond narratives of forced displacement centered around ethnic persecution and communal violence. First, the paper seeks to answer how we might understand forced migration when proximate causes are not only spectacular violence but structural. Second, it shows how the making of forced displacement has enduring roots in agricultural surplus extraction and persistent modes of land and bodily dispossession.