The Grimshaw Review of International Affairs Vol. 2, No. 1 In the post-independence period, the Burmese nationalist project sought to construct a homogenous national identity centred on the Buddhist majority, systematically excluding minority groups like the Rohingya, who were not only deemed “foreign” but also cast as “existential threats” to the nation’s cohesion, thereby rationalising their marginalisation as a people “worthy of expulsion” (Alam, 2019). Communal violence during World War II, particularly the 1942 massacres between the Rohingya and Buddhist Arakanese, exacerbated ethnic polarisation, which was subsequently institutionalised by the military regime following the 1962 military coup (Leider 2017; Alam, 2019). The population policies of General Ne Win’s nationalist regime – notably the 1973 and 1983 censuses – codified the Rohingya’s erasure by excluding them from newly declared 135 “official” ethnic groups, deliberately situating them outside the bounds of national belonging (Alam, 2019). The 1982 Citizenship Law proved to be a watershed moment in the Rohingya’s descent into statelessness as it formally institutionalised their exclusion and deprived them of fundamental rights, including access to education, healthcare services, legal employment, marriage, and participation in political processes (Ahsan Ullah, 2016). By dividing citizenship into rigidly hierarchical categories – the full, associated, and naturalised – the law effectively excluded the Rohingya from all three by labelling them “resident foreigners” (Ahsan Ullah, 2016). Subsequent policies, such as the introduction of colour-coded identity cards in 1989, visually reinforced their outsider status and left the Rohingya without legal recourse to lay claim to their rights (Ansar, 2020). Even the issuance of temporary ‘white cards’, following international pressure, offered no genuine remedy, functioning instead as hollow tokens of recognition – labels of provisional existence devoid of legal security or permanence (Ansar, 2020). This legal exclusion was accompanied by systematic social and economic marginalisation which permeated every aspect of the Rohingya’s lives. Confined to segregated areas, they were subjected to forced labour, arbitrary arrests, and severe restrictions on mobility (Ahsan Ullah, 2016). These conditions were justified through a narrative shift that reframed colonial-era racialised Indophobia into a broader Islamophobia, perceiving Muslims as a 5