State power and identification schemes in Rakhine 73 and reflection. We visited the sites from which the well-known media photographs were taken a year earlier during the campaign of terror in Myanmar and the resultant exodus: the narrow path beside the flooded river where a continuous line of refugees trudged towards safety; the sandy beach where the washed-up bodies had been lined up; the border guard post from which the images of burning villages across the water were taken. As we travelled by boat, watching ‘Rohingya’ cattle from Rakhine State grazing on the flooded island pastures between the two countries, the two men reflected together on the changing nature of the borders and the refugees who had walked the very same route over centuries. One of the men had arrived in Bangladesh as part of the forced migration from General Ne Win’s Burma in the 1970s, and the other forced from Aung San Suu Kyi’s Myanmar in 2017. One educated in Bengali, the other in Burmese—though they shared friends, leaders, kinships, and histories. As we walked, they made plans to teach one another their languages. A house we visited was run as a halfway house for the Rohingya quietly passing backwards and forwards across the borders until the 1990s. The owner suggested that around 80% of the families that inhabited the island, though now Bangladeshi, had roots on the Myanmar side of today’s borders. He explained that his home became subject to raids since the mass expulsions of approximately 200,000 Rohingya from Myanmar in the early 1990s, which gave rise to increased securitisation of the border areas in Bangladesh. It was not only Rohingya that passed these borderlands but people also fled to Rohingya areas from Bangladesh (then East Pakistan), fleeing persecution by the Pakistani armed forces. Older Rohingya I interviewed recalled sheltering women and children from the Bangladesh side of the border in their homes in Maungdaw, protecting them from the sexual violence that was a feature of the genocide in Bangladesh prior to independence in 1971.17 A local Bangladeshi man explained that his late father, the first MP for his area in independent Bangladesh, had fled to Maungdaw during this time along with 30,000 others, where he was sheltered in Rohingya homes for three months before returning. Seven years later, he explained, when Rohingya fled across into Bangladesh his father had tried his best to persuade the central government in Dhaka to help the refugees more, but according to his telling of the history, the central government had not understood the strength of the local affiliations and shared histories.18 Narratives of the past, then, were related as a core aspect of today’s Rohingya identities. They often reflected current-day interpretations of events and Rohingya identities, whereby state-building projects cut through the middle of Rohingyas’ geographic and social worlds, overwhelming their communities and resulting in forced migrations. This stands in stark contrast to the Myanmar State narratives of Bengalis migrating to a Buddhist region of Arakan during and after the British colonial period; and to the myth of a pre-existing bounded predominantly Buddhist nation under threat from the Muslim migrant ‘other’ at its ‘western gate’ (Zarni and Brinham 2017).