Third World Quarterly 953 Despite their prolonged and intense suffering, the Rohingya genocide is not fully explored in the existing literature although helpful accounts of mass atrocities have been published recently (Ahmed 2023; Ibrahim 2018; Lee 2021). How genocidal violence against the Rohingya might be interpreted – conceptually – as a function of state policy and state sovereignty has not been made explicit, notwithstanding the centrality of the state in the Rohingya tragedy. Whilst the Rohingya’s existence continues to be imperilled, other conflict areas emerge and compete for the attention of states, state organisations and their resources. The need to highlight the plight of the Rohingya and understand their predicament is ever greater given that their tragedy remains unaddressed by Great Powers, the United Nations (UN), and regional countries and humanitarian organisations operating in Myanmar and the surrounding region. Now that the Great Powers’ attention is focused on other conflict zones, from Gaza to Ukraine to the Horn of Africa, there is a risk that the Rohingya predicament may be neglected indefinitely. This paper resists the risk of such neglect for the sake of massive suffering of the victims; for the need to understand the historical intensification of the repression against the Rohingya people in successive cascades of violence for more than half a century; and for the important scholarly and policy questions raised by the institutionalised maltreatment of this minority group. The paper contributes to existing debates by unpacking the role of the state in the destruction of the Rohingya, with a view to a deeper understanding of their prolonged suffering in the face of international neglect. It addresses the question of how state policies and a state-sponsored exclusivist nationalist ideology have conditioned repetitive, deadly violence against the Rohingya people. This main question is intertwined with other salient, subsidiary questions such as how state sovereignty affects exclusion from the political community, the role of violence in the constitution of the political community and privileging of national identity, and the subservient role of law in exclusivist politics. The consideration of these questions is grounded in an analytical eclecticism that is problem-driven and informed by a wide range of interdisciplinary sources from political science, history, law, philosophy, sociology, policy reports, and popular press written by authors within and without the region. Addressing a critical gap, the interpretative analysis builds upon the nodal notions of ‘cascades of violence’, ‘the sovereign ban’ and ‘Othering’ to cast light on the dispossession and exclusion of the Rohingya from Myanmar. The analysis proceeds as follows. The ensuing section foregrounds the analysis by providing a succinct overview of cascades of state-led violence which since the late 1970s have subjected the Rohingya to systematic marginalisation, dispossession, and mass expulsion – and hence exclusion from the polity. The subsequent section lays out a conceptual framework of sovereignty that exposes its intimate connection with exclusion, which grounds a frame of life conducive to the production of human victimisation. It interprets exclusion as a set of state policies entered into by way of a sovereign decision, which locks in the sovereign ban on human victims – the expelled, the dispossessed. Specifically, the analysis shows that Rohingya’s marginalisation and exclusion are inscribed by the very writ of law – both the country’s constitution and the 1982 Citizenship Law (currently in force) – which, depriving the Rohingya of citizenship, renders them stateless and thus cast out of the polity. The final section shows that cascades of violence against the Rohingya have been predicated on an official ideology of exclusivist nationalism, which has informed the nation-state building process, casting the Rohingya as the Other – i.e. casting them as an enemy, radically different from the Buddhist majority. Indeed, the process of construction of Burmese national identity