Third World Quarterly 957 constitute approximately half of Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh and who have suffered various forms of sexual violence by Tatmadaw in Myanmar – live in perilous conditions and are vulnerable to gender-based violence (Priddy et al. 2022; Tripura 2022). Moreover, turf wars among rival armed groups such as ARSA and the Rohingya Solidarity Organisation (RSO) and criminal activity have left a great many refugees dead, whilst the number of abductions increased almost fourfold in 2023 from the previous year.8 There is a real risk that violence will intensify both in areas where Rohingya live in Rakhine and in their refugee camps in Bangladesh (International Crisis Group 2023). The systematic policy of dehumanisation of the Rohingya is one of the greatest tragedies of our time. The history of their institutionalised repression over the past six decades shows that it is the central role of state policies, official agendas, and intense violent operations of the military and the police that have sustained the prolonged genocidal violence against this minority group. The ensuing analysis will unpack more fully the role of the state in the destruction of the Rohingya, with a view to offering a conceptual framework showing that cascades of violence against this targeted group have been enabled by negative expression of state sovereignty and a state-sponsored exclusivist nationalist ideology which has informed the nation-state building process and has cast the Rohingya as a threatening Other which ought to be extirpated. The sovereign ban Exclusionary practices of sovereignty which manifest themselves in the context of mass atrocity crimes such as genocide and ethnic cleansing receive less attention from political scientists than they merit. Hannah Arendt, one thinker who defied this trend, was right to notice: ‘…sovereignty is nowhere more absolute than in [the] matter of … expulsion’ (Arendt 1958, 278). Yet little explicit consideration has been given to developing and contextualising this claim in the existing literature. The Rohingya are a pertinent case for examining – in an authoritarian setting – sovereignty’s intimate connection with exclusion or banishment, which in turn reveals hidden power relations invested in law and violence that ground a frame of life conducive to the production of human victimisation. The idea of sovereignty can be elusive. However, there is realisation that sovereignty signifies ‘a final and absolute political authority in the political community’ (Hinsley 1986, 1). By establishing a frontier that separates the inside from the outside, sovereignty frames the polity into a distinct territorial unit. Central to this understanding of sovereignty is the notion of a boundary within which the political community resides, over which (community) the supreme authority of the sovereign ruler is exercised. Of relevance for this discussion is the question of sovereign jurisdiction, namely the people and territory over which sovereignty holds sway. The issue of jurisdiction matters because it dwells not only on strategies of inclusion that ground the life of the political community but, significantly in the context of this contribution, also techniques of exclusion of those deemed to threaten that community. And it is only the sovereign who ‘has the monopoly over the final decision’ (of exclusion). ‘Therein consists the essence of State sovereignty, which must therefore be properly juridically defined not as the monopoly to sanction or to rule but as the monopoly to decide …’ (Agamben 1998, 15). The sovereign has the monopoly on the decision to exclude targeted Others who are considered a threat to the dominant nation. The crux of the matter in the sovereign exclusion is the ordering of space – that is,