Third World Quarterly 963 marginalisation through which transformation of Myanmar is effected, the Rohingya body is also the primary site for visualising their collective passage into historical alterity, as the dominance of the hegemonic Buddhist identity is enshrined in the nation-state building process. Conclusion This contribution has shed light on one of the greatest tragedies of our time: the systematic policy of the destruction of the Rohingya people in Myanmar. Despite carrying on for over six decades – and being recognised as genocide – violent repression of the Rohingya attracts less and less attention in policy and academic circles as other humanitarian crises take precedence. Yet the protracted nature of the Rohingya exclusion from Myanmar and their forced displacement in the surrounding region – primarily in Bangladesh – coupled with dwindling aid, increased insecurity both in Rakhine and refugee camps, and the persistent international neglect mark a ‘critical moment’ (International Crisis Group 2023, 29) for the Rohingya predicament. ‘Educating the world community’ (Braithwaite and D’Costa 2018, 537) on the Rohingya expulsion is a starting point for resisting their international neglect and drawing attention to the urgent need to stop the cascades of violence against them. Interpreting the violence against the Rohingya as a function of state policy, the paper has emphasised practices of banishment of this minority group in Myanmar, in the course of which sovereignty operates as a strategy of power and exclusion of the designated Other. The analysis has suggested that cascades of violence against the Rohingya since the 1970s – culminating in genocide in the 2010s – have been predicated on the negative expression of sovereignty in a totalitarian setting and an exclusivist nationalist ideology that has grounded the nation-state building process and has framed the Rohingya as outcast, primarily on the basis of their religious differentiation. Shedding light on the Rohingya’s predicament, the paper has underscored crucial questions that this case raises regarding the correlation of state sovereignty with exclusion, coercive construction of nation-state building and national identity which have utilised an Othering process that in turn has opened a space for violence intended to obliterate the Rohingya as a group. In the Buddhist-majority Myanmar, lacking Buddhism and cultural affinity with it, the Rohingya have become the fearsome Other – the (non)people – to be excluded from the polity. Successive Burmese/Myanmar regimes have isolated, marginalised, deprived, maltreated and expelled the Rohingya since the 1970s via a wide range of targeted, chauvinistic state policies, which have been inscribed by the very writ of state laws. Sovereignty in Myanmar has been exercised in coercive ways, in the process using discriminatory legislation that has led to abrogation of rights and repudiation of citizenship, providing a framework for the comprehensive exclusion of the Rohingya. This process of institutionalised exclusion has been grounded on a direct relation between law and violence: a symbiotic relation that has enabled the systematic reification of discrimination, insecurity and coercive removal of the Rohingya people. Prolonged violence against the Rohingya has permutated to violence against other Muslim communities in Myanmar (UNHRC 2018, para. 27; Fiskesjö 2023, 131). Moreover, the 2021 military coup d’état suggests that protracted violence against targeted Others in Myanmar may have facilitated violence against Self, as the military junta – Tatmadaw – now openly fights against Buddhist (and other) opponents, plunging the country into a