Abu Ammar
In late March 2026, residents of Tharzi village in northern Maungdaw were reportedly gathered under armed supervision, lined up by household, photographed, and recorded one by one. The process, villagers said, resembled earlier “list and check” operations long associated with state control. The details are familiar, almost procedural. What has changed is not the method, but the authority under which it is carried out.
For the Rohingya, documentation has never been a neutral administrative act. It has been a recurring instrument of control, deployed across regimes and contexts, and detached from the basic function that documentation is supposed to serve: recognition of rights. The persistence of these practices, from state-led citizenship verification systems to contemporary population checks under shifting armed authorities, reveals a deeper pattern. Counting the Rohingya has not been about inclusion. It has been about governing a population deliberately kept outside the political community.
This is not a marginal issue. It sits at the center of a protracted crisis of statelessness and displacement. By the end of 2024, more than 1.1 million Rohingya had been forced to flee Myanmar, while around 619,400 remained inside the country, many of them internally displaced. Within this population, documentation is not merely absent or incomplete. It is actively structured in ways that reinforce exclusion.
The core of this system can be traced to the legal architecture that defines citizenship in Myanmar. The 1982 Citizenship Law excludes the Rohingya from recognized national groups, rendering them effectively stateless. Documentation mechanisms that have emerged within this framework have not corrected that exclusion. They have formalized it.
The National Verification Card, or NVC, is the most prominent example. Myanmar authorities have presented the NVC process as a pathway to citizenship, a system designed to “assess, verify and confirm or grant” legal status. But findings by United Nations investigators undermine this claim. The NVC does not recognize Rohingya as citizens. It categorizes them as non-citizens who must apply for status, and even then, at best, it offers access to associate or naturalized citizenship rather than equal membership.
More importantly, the NVC has been tied to coercive conditions. Investigations documented intimidation during registration meetings, including the presence of armed personnel and threats directed at Rohingya individuals. The card itself became a prerequisite for basic activities such as passing checkpoints, accessing farmland, or fishing. In this context, documentation does not enable mobility or rights. It regulates them.
The pattern extends beyond formal state programs. Fortify Rights documented cases in which Rohingya were forced or pressured to accept NVCs, including through directives issued to mobile immigration teams operating in internment settings. These practices indicate that documentation is not simply a bureaucratic requirement. It is enforced through mechanisms of control that blur the line between administration and coercion.
Recent developments suggest that this logic has not disappeared with changes in territorial control. A January 2026 country note from the United Kingdom, drawing on multiple sources, reports that in areas under Arakan Army authority, Rohingya continue to face movement restrictions, arbitrary detention, and demands for payment in exchange for travel permission. The March 2026 population checks in Maungdaw fit within this broader pattern. The actors may differ, but the structure remains intact: documentation tied to surveillance, restriction, and the constant possibility of sanction.
To understand why these practices persist, it is necessary to move beyond individual incidents and examine the underlying system. Documentation for the Rohingya operates within what can be described as a regime of administrative exclusion. In this system, bureaucratic tools are not used to incorporate individuals into a rights-bearing political order. They are used to manage and contain a population that is formally excluded from that order.
This distinction matters. In most contexts, documentation serves as a foundation for legal identity, enabling access to services, mobility, and protection. For the Rohingya, documentation often functions in the opposite direction. It becomes a condition for limited access, granted selectively and withdrawn arbitrarily. It enables surveillance rather than security.
A 2024 analysis in Forced Migration Review captures this dynamic with particular clarity. It describes Myanmar’s identity systems as part of a broader infrastructure of surveillance, persecution, and segregation. Since the 2021 military coup, these systems have become more deeply embedded in a securitized environment, linked to checkpoints and monitoring mechanisms that govern everyday movement.
This securitization is not incidental. It reflects the way in which identity itself has been reframed as a security concern. The Rohingya are not documented as citizens to be protected. They are documented as subjects to be monitored.
The consequences are visible in the continued criminalization of ordinary movement. In 2024, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees reported that more than 400 Rohingya detained under immigration laws for traveling without recognized identity documents received legal or material assistance. This figure does not capture the full scale of enforcement, but it illustrates the underlying logic: the absence or non-recognition of documents becomes grounds for detention.
Even when documentation exists, it does not guarantee protection. It remains contingent, conditional, and embedded within a system that restricts rather than enables.
The implications extend beyond individual rights to questions of land, territory, and historical claims. Documentation is not only about identifying people. It is also about defining what they can claim.
A 2025 public summary by the Independent Investigative Mechanism for Myanmar provides critical evidence in this regard. Investigators found that Rohingya who fled preserved land and property records that could support future claims to restitution. At the same time, they documented systematic destruction of villages and the removal of physical markers that would anchor those claims. Burned land was subsequently reclassified as “Government-managed land,” effectively erasing prior ownership.
This dual process—recording individuals while erasing their claims to land—reveals a deeper dimension of documentation politics. Administrative systems are used not only to monitor bodies but also to reshape the legal and material landscape in which those bodies exist. The result is a form of dispossession that operates through both physical destruction and bureaucratic redefinition.
The politics of documentation also extends across borders. In Bangladesh, where nearly one million Rohingya are registered in camps through a joint government and UNHCR process, documentation is framed as a protective measure. Registration provides a basis for humanitarian assistance, identity maintenance, and potential future repatriation.
These functions are not insignificant. In displacement settings, documentation can be essential for accessing aid and establishing a minimum level of administrative recognition. As of December 2023, approximately 971,904 Rohingya had been registered under this system.
Yet even here, the process is not free from risk. Human Rights Watch reported that data collected during registration, including photographs, biometric information, and personal details, was shared with Myanmar authorities for repatriation purposes in some cases without full informed consent and without comprehensive data impact assessments.
This raises a fundamental question about the political neutrality of humanitarian data practices. Registration is often presented as a technical necessity, a means of organizing aid delivery. But in contexts of statelessness, where individuals lack the protections afforded to citizens, data does not remain confined to humanitarian use. It can move across systems, linking camp management to state-level processes of verification and control.
For the Rohingya, this creates a structural vulnerability. Their data circulates within a transnational network of institutions, including humanitarian agencies, host governments, and the state from which they fled. Without robust safeguards, this circulation can expose them to new forms of risk, including pressure to accept repatriation under conditions that do not guarantee rights.
The issue is not that registration should not occur. It is that registration cannot be understood in isolation from the broader political context in which it operates. When documentation is embedded within a system that denies citizenship and restricts mobility, it becomes part of that system.
This is the central argument that emerges from the evidence. Documentation for the Rohingya is not simply a technical process of recording identity. It is a political technology of governance, one that has been repeatedly used to manage a population without granting it equal status.
This argument also clarifies why the problem has outlived changes in authority. The persistence of documentation-based control across different actors—state institutions, military authorities, and now non-state armed groups—suggests that the issue is not reducible to a single regime. It is embedded in a broader structure that defines how the Rohingya are governed.
That structure is anchored in statelessness. As long as Rohingya remain excluded from citizenship, documentation will continue to function as a substitute for rights rather than a foundation for them. It will remain tied to systems of control, because there is no legal framework within which it can operate as a rights-bearing institution.
The risks associated with this system are intensifying. The expansion of digital and biometric technologies points toward more sophisticated forms of surveillance. Forced Migration Review notes that Myanmar has already piloted biometric systems on displaced and stateless populations. In a context where identity is already securitized, these technologies are likely to deepen existing patterns rather than transform them.
At the same time, the material conditions of displacement are becoming more precarious. Reports of funding shortfalls affecting Rohingya support in Bangladesh in 2025 indicate that humanitarian systems themselves are under strain. As resources decline, the management of refugee populations may become more tightly linked to administrative controls, including registration and monitoring mechanisms.
These developments converge on a single trajectory: a system in which documentation becomes more comprehensive, more technologically advanced, and more deeply integrated into mechanisms of control, while the underlying issue of citizenship remains unresolved.
The consequences are not limited to the present. They shape the possibilities for the future, including any prospect of return. The destruction of villages, the reclassification of land, and the erosion of property records create conditions in which restitution becomes increasingly difficult. At the same time, documentation systems that categorize Rohingya as non-citizens establish a legal framework that can be used to regulate or limit return.
In this sense, the politics of documentation is inseparable from the politics of belonging. It determines not only how the Rohingya are governed today, but also whether they can claim a place within the state in the future.
The current moment demands a clear recognition of this dynamic. The continuation of population checks in Maungdaw is not an isolated development. It is part of a long-standing pattern in which administrative practices are used to sustain a system of exclusion.
Addressing this pattern requires more than technical adjustments to documentation processes. It requires confronting the legal and political structures that define who is recognized as a member of the state and who is not. Without reform of the citizenship framework that underpins these practices, documentation will continue to function as an instrument of control.
This does not diminish the importance of improving data governance, ensuring informed consent, or strengthening safeguards within humanitarian systems. These measures are necessary. But they are not sufficient.
The central issue remains unchanged. The Rohingya are being counted without being recognized. Their identities are recorded, their movements monitored, their data circulated, and their claims to land and belonging systematically undermined.
Until that contradiction is resolved, documentation will not serve as a pathway to rights. It will remain what it has been for decades: a mechanism for managing a population that is visible to the state, but not included within it.
