TYPE Conceptual Analysis 28 June 2024 10.3389/fpos.2024.1144493 PUBLISHED DOI OPEN ACCESS Statelessness of an ethnic minority: the case of Rohingya EDITED BY Annekathryn Goodman, Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center, United States REVIEWED BY A. K. M. Ahsan Ullah, Universiti Brunei Darussalam, Brunei Aizat Khairi, University of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia *CORRESPONDENCE Mowsume Bhattacharjee mowsumeccnu@outlook.com RECEIVED 07 March 2023 June 2024 PUBLISHED 28 June 2024 ACCEPTED 03 CITATION Bhattacharjee M (2024) Statelessness of an ethnic minority: the case of Rohingya. Front. Polit. Sci. 6:1144493. doi: 10.3389/fpos.2024.1144493 COPYRIGHT © 2024 Bhattacharjee. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms. Mowsume Bhattacharjee 1,2* Department of Sociology, Jagannath University, Dhaka, Bangladesh, 2 School of Sociology, Central China Normal University, Wuhan, China 1 This paper examines why and how Myanmar makes Rohingyas a stateless community in Southeast Asia, known as one of the most vulnerable human groups in the contemporary world. Based on the secondary evidence, the paper argues that Rohingyas are stateless because they are the victim of four discourses: former Bangladeshi people who illegally entered Myanmar; collaborators to British armies while Myanmar was fighting for its independence from British rule; attachment to Islamic terrorism; and foreign interests in the Rakhine state. The paper draws on a wide range of local and global literature to support its arguments. The paper uses extant sociological approaches to understand why a minority community becomes stateless and experiences genocide in their own country. The researcher developed an analytical framework to answer the research questions. This analytical framework draws on existing literature, recent strategies, theoretical understandings, contemporary data, and government responses to understand the process of Rohingya statelessness. This paper finds that Myanmar not only expelled Rohingyas from their homeland by imposing the blame on them but is also unwilling to return over a million Rohingyas from Bangladesh—a host country for them. The paper also finds that the international community is least concerned about the genocide and expulsion of the Rohingyas because of Myanmar’s communal agenda and foreign countries’ economic interests in the Rakhine state. The paper offers some recommendations to address this unique inhuman condition in its concluding part. KEYWORDS statelessness, Rohingya community, ethnic minority, Myanmar, genocide Introduction Myanmar is a neighboring country of Bangladesh which was previously recognized as Burma. This historically significant state is situated in Southeast Asia and surrounded by Laos, Bangladesh, China, and Thailand. In 1948 Myanmar received freedom from the United Kingdom. It is a Buddhist country formally, but it has around 135 familiar ethnic minorities that reflect an enormous religious variety. Rohingya is a Muslim minority community of Myanmar living in the Rakhine state (western Myanmar) (please see Figure 1) and is also known as Muslim Arakanese. The term “Rohingya” derives from the word “Rohang” and reflects the Rakhine state’s ancient name (Ullah, 2016). An additional expression of this state was “Arakan,” a free empire earlier than the British colonization of Myanmar. Approximately two million Rohingyas reside in Myanmar, and 800,000 of them live in the state of Rakhine (Farzana, 2017: 2). This Muslim minority group claims themselves as the residents of Myanmar, but the authority of Myanmar does not accept it. Rather the authority of Myanmar claimed them as illegal settlers (Albert and Maizland, 2020; Ullah and Chattoraj, 2023). Frontiers in Political Science 01 frontiersin.org