Third World Quarterly 965 Acknowledgements For very helpful feedback, the author is grateful to the anonymous reviewers and the editors of Third World Quarterly. Notes on contributor Klejda Mulaj is Associate Professor of international relations in the Department of Social and Political Sciences, Philosophy, and Anthropology at the University of Exeter, United Kingdom. She is the author or editor of three books: Politics of Ethnic Cleansing (Lanham: Lexington Books/Rowman & Littlefield, 2008); Violent Non-State Actors in World Politics (London: Hurst and New York: Columbia University Press, 2010); and Postgenocide: Interdisciplinary Reflections on the Effects of Genocide (Oxford University Press, 2021). She has published 18 peer-reviewed articles on the topics of mass atrocity crimes, war and nationalism, military intervention, and internationally led state-building in journals such as Security Dialogue; Review of International Studies; International Migration; Studies in Conflict and Terrorism; International Affairs; Journal of Human Rights; Nationality Papers; Peace & Change; and Contemporary Justice Review. She obtained her PhD from the London School of Economics and Political Science. Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. The kingdom of Arakan was conquered by Burma’s Buddhist King in 1784, which in turn was conquered by the British Empire in 1824 which ruled the country until its independence in 1948 (Smith 2019). Due to space restriction, this contribution does not consider directly how crimes against the Rohingya meet the requirements of genocide. It concurs with the abovementioned literature – referenced in the text – which suggests that genocide has been carried out against the Rohingya. Genocide is a crime that incurs some overlap with crimes against humanity, including ethnic cleansing – a deliberate policy designed with the view of forcefully removing an ‘undesirable’ population from a given territory (Mulaj 2008, 4). Both genocide and ethnic cleansing are international, group crimes. The main differentiation between the two consists in the nature of intent: whilst the intent of genocidaires is the destruction of the targeted group in whole or in part, the intent of ethnic cleansers is – primarily – the forced displacement/uprooting and dispossession of the targeted group. However, the International Court of Justice has concluded that notwithstanding this difference, there exist cases where ethnic cleansing may form part of the material element of the crime of genocide when violence against the targeted group is part of a systematic and widespread organised campaign (International Court of Justice 2007, 122–123). Whilst records show Rohingya presence in Arakan since at least the thirteenth century (Alam 2019, 3) – the official view, which does not recognise the term Rohingya, is that they are migrants from Bengal who settled in Myanmar following the British colonisation in 1824 (Wade 2017, 47–52). According to this Burmese official view, the Rohingya are not Indigenous and not entitled to citizenship rights. It is not only military leaders who deny the existence of the Rohingya. Former presidents Thein Sein and Aung San Suu Kyi have done so, too (Zarni and Cowley 2014, 738, 748–749; Ring 2023). The latter earned international condemnation speaking at the International Court of Justice when she defended Myanmar against Rohingya genocide accusations (Simons and Beech 2019; Ellis-Petersen 2018). World War II is an example of war that included cascades of violence to genocide (the Holocaust), as did the civil war in Rwanda in 1994 to genocide against the Tutsis, and the Bosnian War in 1995 to genocide against Bosnian Muslims.