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A long way to peace: identities, genocide, and state preservation in Burma, 1948–2018

Introduction
On the morning of 23 October 2012, thousands of Arakanese ad-hoc “militia” men wielding
small arms and homemade Molotov cocktails, launched a coordinated attack on
Muslim communities across Arakan State (Human Rights Watch 2013, 7). For nearly
11 hours, these mobs, supported by local police and army personnel, disarmed Rohingya
Muslims, looted and burned houses, beat and macheted entire families, and proceeded to
enact vigilante “justice” throughout the province (10). These acts, though instigated by
local political entrepreneurs, are but a piece of the Burmese state’s genocidal policies
directed toward sub-national ethno-religious groups like the Rohingya, who are perceived
as an existential threat to both Burmese culture and the Tatmadaw’s (Burmese Armed
Forces) power.
© 2018 Western Political Science Association
CONTACT Adam E. Howe ahowe015@fiu.edu
POLITICS, GROUPS, AND IDENTITIES
https://doi.org/10.1080/21565503.2018.1529604
Genocide and genocidal policies in Burma are not the product of a “master plan” developed
in the corridors of power decades ago. They have been contingent upon the variable
strength of domestic opposition. Over the years, several prominent ethno-religious minorities
have exerted varying degrees of civil and militaristic resistance against Burma’s
military junta. In response, the Tatmadaw has engaged in a campaign of genocidal policies
that stiffens or weakens, depending on the threat posed by oppositional forces at a given
moment. In this sense, Burma’s genocides have emerged as a function of its politics and
not from intentionalist actions designed to suppress, coerce, and subdue rival forces. Thus,
eliminationist killings and corollary political violence are instrumental in preserving the
Burmese state and the regime’s control over its subjects. Such hegemonic geno-/politicides
are but one tool by which the Tatmadaw maintains its tenuous grip on power.
Within the interdisciplinary field of Genocide Studies, initially, few scholars focused on
peripheral cases. For most of the 1950s–1980s, theoretical explanations for understanding
why and how genocide occurs, originated from studies of the Holocaust, Armenian and
Rwandan genocides (Hinton, La Pointe, and Irvin-Erickson 2014, 6). This triad represents,
by far, the most “popular” cases and has been the breeding ground of theory-building for
decades. All three genocides feature extreme violence, large body counts, totalitarian or
authoritarian regimes, widespread social support for killing, ideological motivations,
and involve the state as primary perpetrator. Within the past two decades there has
been a well-deserved effort to explain peripheral cases of genocide or widespread group
destruction. While studies on Myanmar (Burma) are still emerging there has been a
wealth of studies addressing previously marginalized episodes.1
The novelty of our study resides in an application of theories developed to explain the
Holocaust, Armenian and Rwandan genocides to lesser-known cases on the periphery of
academic scholarship (e.g. Burma). We offer two methodological and investigative reasons
for this case selection. First, using Burma allows us to qualitatively examine macro-level
theories of genocide, developed to explain large-scale, systematic campaigns of mass
slaughter in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, and apply them to Southeast Asia.
Can these theories stand the test of time and geographic substitution? Second, by exploring
genocidal violence against three sub-national populations – the Karen, Kachin, and Rohingya
– this study unpacks domestic, country-level variables to observe variation in genocidal
acts perpetrated by the government and its agents. By transcending country-level
analysis, we find distinct variation in how the Tatmadaw’s threat perceptions differ by
group, which in turn shapes the severity of genocidal policies enacted. Together, these
two features allow us to develop a more nuanced approach to the study of genocide,
which can further refine our theoretical insights at a macro-level.
What follows next is a discussion of genocide writ large, and some problems with our
political and legal understandings of this crime. Section three reviews the logic of genocide
with an analysis of precipitating factors, including the application of prospect theory. In
section four, we unveil our theory of state preservation as the driving force behind genocidal
onset and magnitude in Burma, which is followed by the case studies of the Karen,
Kachin, and Rohingya populations. Our final section provides the reader with concluding
remarks on the conflict process, the role of the state in implementing genocidal violence in
Burma, and a reflection on the implications of this study for future theory-building
exercises.