960 K. MULAJ nationalism serves as the engine of nation-building, cementing ‘together a centralised state and an atomised society’ (Arendt 1958, 231). Nation-state building and construction of ethnic nationalism are political processes that have utilised practices of discrimination, marginalisation and banishment of targeted groups – particularly religious minorities because of their ethno-national identity and religious affiliation, and lack of command of dominant languages (D’Costa 2011, 10).9 Indeed, as shown in the previous section, the Rohingya have suffered from several forms of discrimination and socio-political marginalisation such as lack of access to government services, political office, social welfare, higher education and land ownership, which have ensured comprehensive exclusion of this ethnic group from the state. Myanmar’s official policy documents, state media and school textbooks do not recognise the term ‘Rohingya’. Instead, the Rohingya are referred to – in racist terms – as Bengali illegal migrants from colonial times, as non-Indigenous (not a ‘national race’ or ‘taingyintha’, meaning original children of the soil) and therefore ineligible for citizenship rights as is indeed legislated in the Citizen Act of 1983 (Diamond and MacLean 2022, 205; Zarni and Cowley 2014, 685, 691, 699). Crucial to the formation of a political community are actions of differentiation that establish a relationship of difference, theorised in the writings of Carl Schmitt, who posited that the coming into being of a political community is grounded on a distinction between friend and enemy, and that the entity which decides such a distinction is the sovereign state (Schmitt 1976, 26). Such an understanding of the political designates ‘a certain economy of differentiation, designed, indeed obliged, to make war on alterity, difference, and hybridity’ (Dillon 1999, 129). The political enemy is ‘the very heterogeneity, difference and otherness – radical alterity that … will not be assimilated … – that threatens the knowledgeably-secure self-possession which is the idea of the sovereign subject’ (Campbell and Dillon 1993, 30). According to Schmitt’s proposition, it is necessary to eliminate ‘unwanted perturbations’ – and hence to review alien life, both without and within, as a source of otherness, particularly in the form of a threat to the political subject. ‘The political enemy need not be morally evil …’. Nonetheless, he is ‘the other, the stranger; and it is sufficient for his nature that he is, in a specially intense way, existentially something different and alien, so that in the extreme case conflicts with him are possible’ (Schmitt 1976, 27, 48). The (possibility of ) intense, radical difference threatens a community conceived as an ‘organised political entity, territorially enclosed and impenetrable to aliens’ (Schmitt 1976, 47). Therefore, the Other is other only in terms of its relation to the subject. ‘It is a mortal threat to identity because of the way identity is conceived and that understanding is privileged’ (Dillon 1999, 129). From the sovereign’s point of view, it is this kind of understanding of the privileged identity – such as national identity – that urges a continuous review of alien life in order to decide when it poses a threat and becomes the enemy. The sovereign’s decisions that antagonise the Other are not, however, taken in a vacuum. Below the authority of the sovereign, enabling and confirming it, are specific beliefs and traditions infused in the people. It is the interplay between the people and tradition that helps relay the ethos in which official sovereignty is set and sovereign decisions are taken – including those pertaining to ‘Othering’, i.e. the framing of a targeted group as an essentialist enemy; an antagonism frequently grounded on a religious rhetoric that opens a space for (recurrent) violence. One of the most embedded traditions that infuses the ethos of sovereignty has proven to be religion. The sovereign majority – the nation – infused with a sense of religious