TERRORISM DILEMMAS AND DEMOCRACY influenced by its coverage and how they might otherwise view Rohingya refugees. In doing so, two other significant segments of the Banagaldeshi news media are deliberately omitted in this study—the vernacular press, and a small number of Cox’s Bazaar and Rohingya-focused alternative media, such as coxsbazarvision and Rohingya Vision. While such omission reduces the generalisability of findings to the entirety of the Bangadeshi press, it presents an opportunity for an in-depth discussion of the narrowly defined media space at the core of this investigation. This study also acknowledges the growing Buddhist-Muslim fault line, with the spread of chauvinistic religio-nationalism in the three Theravada Buddhist counties in the region: Sri Lanka, Thailand and Myanmar; and its coverage in respective local media. While acknowledging the need to further explore the mediatisation of this fault-line, both within the respective national spheres and within the transnational space where news media and ideas are shared, such deliberations are also deemed to be beyond the scope of this study, which is positioned outside of the Myanmarese news media space, and as such, the political sphere of its Buddhist-Muslim fault line. Arakan: The people of the frontier state. The othering of the Rohingya must be understood through the misrepresentation of the nation state as historically enduring sovereign land linked to an unchanging religio-cultural identity, when in fact identities change, boundaries shift and people move. The people and their identity in the Rakhine are no different. It was this understanding of identity as transitional that led to Krishna’s assertion for the ‘need to conceive South Asia as a space marked by highly decentralised nation-states with substantial degrees of provincial or regional autonomy and a pluralist sense of national identity’ (1999, p. xviii). Separated from central Myanmar by the Arakan mountains, Rakhine, or Arakan as it was formerly known, has long remained the frontier between Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism. Kyaw Minn Htin (2011) claims Buddhism had reached early Arakanese kingdoms, especially Dhaññavatī and Vesālī, as early as the fifth century, well before Theravada Buddhism was officially installed as the state religion of the Burmese court during the reign of King Anawrahta (pp. 1044-1077) of the Pagan Dynasty (Schober, 2006, pp. 75-76). Eaton (1993) notes Islam reached Arakan though Turkic general Muhammad Bakhtiyar’s invasion of north-western Bengal in 1204, but Islamic jurisprudence written by Iranian jurists following the invasion had negotiated between state authority and theological power resulting in a quasi-separation of power—where political and administrative authority was decentralised among numerous regional chiefs, while the symbolic primacy of the caliph in Baghdad was preserved through perceived religious power which was wielded, in reality, by living Sufi ‘saints’. Such decentralisation of authority enabled a complex power dynamic 262 PACIFIC JOURNALISM REVIEW 25 (1 & 2) 2019