962 K. MULAJ Rakhine officials have been eager to project the Rohingya as alien invaders and keen to implement an official vision whereby the State belongs to Buddhists alone. This view was stated explicitly in an interview that two Burma experts conducted with Mr Aye Maung, an influential Rakhine Member of Parliament, and Chairman of the RNDP, who articulated the vision of this state as follows: ‘We need to rebuild the Rakhine State only for the Rakhine who alone are the indigenous on the soil’ (cited in Zarni and Cowley 2014, 694). Not only has the exclusion of the Rohingya been a systematic state-sanctioned policy supported by state propaganda, but it has been accompanied, too, by hate campaigns (Green, et al. 2015). Key to the latter have been monks’ associations, political parties, and civic groups which have publicly aired their hatred and have issued pamphlets that urge the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya (Stoakes 2015; Walton 2015). As a result the Burmese public have become increasingly intolerant towards the Rohingya, even condoning violence against them. Two national Buddhist organisations, which took shape in the early 2010s, can be mentioned as examples in this regard: Movement 969 and the Organisation for the Protection of Nationalism and Religion (Ma Ba Tha in Burmese), which have campaigned for a nationwide boycott of Muslim businesses, have launched local development programmes, and have founded thousands of religious schools nationwide indoctrinating hundreds of thousands of students (Diamond and MacLean 2022, 209). In December 2014 Ma Ba Tha submitted to Parliament four laws to protect ‘race and religion’, which were passed into law with some modifications in spring 2015 – strengthening the xenophobic and violent role that members of this organisation have played in securitising the perceived Muslim threat and in mobilising the majority Buddhist population against the marginalised Rohingya minority (Diamond and MacLean 2022, 209). Whilst MaBaTha has been nominally disbanded, its successors continue to benefit from regime support (UNHRC 2018, para. 13). Similarly, the 969 Movement orchestrated an intense campaign of Islamophobia which has made its Buddhist audience believe that ‘Buddhism and Buddhists in Myanmar are under threat from Islam and Muslims in Myanmar and elsewhere’ (Nyi Nyi 2016, 185). The growth of the 969 campaign across the country is ‘due to tacit official approval, if not outright support’ (Nyi Nyi 2016, 185). Since the 2021 coup d’état, in the name of ‘race and religion’, MaBaTha monks have formed militias called Pyu Saw Htee to fight revolutionary forces who have promised a reversal of the repression of the Rohingya (Ring 2023). The recurring violence against the Rohingya in the course of the nation-state building process – at both Republic and state levels – has been enabled by an exclusivist nationalist ideology and an Othering process predicated on religious differentiation. Instituting the primacy of the nation has required political, social and cultural processes of homogenisation that are aligned with violence. The implied meaning of violence against the Rohingya in Myanmar is that it is the necessary cost for constituting a desired polity, untraversable by the Other. This meaning is projected amidst explicit, flagrant official denial of ongoing mass atrocity crimes against humanity – and ultimately genocide – strongly condemned by human rights organisations and civil society activists (International Crisis Group 2023; Irish Centre for Human Rights 2010; Simons and Beech 2019; The New York Times 2020). Messages of violence are communicated via a continuum of surfaces: from the violence of speech (including denial and hate speech), to the violence on bodies of individuals who form the othered community, to the scorched earth policy of territory. The subaltern Rohingya community is the site and target of violence, the body to be ‘conquered … on which national and community boundaries [are] marked’ (D’Costa 2011, 10). Subjected to socio-political