Citizenship and Genocide Cards : IDs, Statelessness and Rohingya Resistance in Myanmar

The book is available open access here. This book draws on Rohingya oral histories and narratives about Myanmar’s genocide and ID schemes to critique prevailing international approaches to legal identities and statelessness. By centring the narratives of survivors of state crimes, collected in the aftermath of the 2017 genocidal violence, this book examines the multiple uses of state-issued ID cards and registration documents in producing statelessness and facilitating genocide. In doing so, it challenges some of the international solutions put forward to resolve statelessness. "IDs for Rohingyas: Pathways to citizenship or instruments of genocide" provides background to these issues. Chapter 7: Genocide Cards Reorganising genocides involve the destruction of the way of life of a particular group, reorganising social relations within society in such a way as to deny the existence of the victim group. Myanmar’s ID schemes were understood by Rohingya research participants as core components of the genocide that led to the symbolic and physical destruction of their group. Chapter 7 explores how registration and identity card schemes in Myanmar feature in Rohingya narratives as attempts to destroy Rohingya identities and impose new exclusionary national identities. Drawing on the phases of genocide framework developed by Daniel Feierstein, it focuses on the role of IDs and registration in stigmatisation, harassment and isolation, policies of systematic weakening, preparation and extermination, and symbolic enactment.