954 K. MULAJ has been intertwined with an exclusivist nationalist ideology which has privileged the dominant Buddhist religion and culture, and made war on feared alterity with devastating consequences for the Rohingya survival. This Othering process has opened a space for violence with the view of eliminating the Rohingya as a group. Overall, the analysis offers an optic for understanding aspects of social construction of Rohingya’s insecurity and the ripple effects of their prolonged suffering and neglect. Cascades of violence to the Rohingya genocide Since James Rosenau (1990) first introduced the notion of ‘cascade’ in his study of change and continuity in world politics, the cascade concept has made inroads in the social sciences, via several works on norms cascades (see, for instance, Finnemore and Sikkink 1998; Sikkink 2011). Moreover, the importance of cascade dynamics for the understanding of societies experiencing violence and conflict – with particular reference to South Asia – has been highlighted in the works of John Braithwaite and Bina D’Costa, which hold potential for utilisation and generalisations in other regional contexts (Braithwaite 2020; Braithwaite and D’Costa 2016, 2018). The cascade dynamic is not merely a suggestive metaphor for the escalation of violence. It is – more importantly – an analytical tool that allows for highlighting key empirical points and events inherent to socio-political change with enormous repercussions for lives of individuals and groups. Just like matter cascades in time and space, so do violent actions and violent imaginaries of destabilised societies (Braithwaite and D’Costa 2016, 11) – through the agency of human actors, be they authoritarian leaders, military commanders, soldiers, suicide bombers, maltreated civilians, refugees or internally displaced persons (IDPs). In a basic sense, cascading refers to the ability of phenomena to diffuse themselves – or to mutate themselves – in time and in space, ‘to multiply instances of themselves, or to spread related phenomena’ (Braithwaite 2020, 138). A cascade encompasses the sequences of action and interaction among actors, and also the intervening perceptual steps in the interactions through which actors assess how an action is likely to affect the orientations of others (Rosenau 1990, 175). In a cascade dynamic the action sequences are not necessarily constant; they can ‘gather momentum, stall, reverse course, and resume anew as their repercussions spread among whole systems and subsystems’ (Rosenau 1990, 299). What sustains a cascade, and its patterned ways, is the (relatively) permanent place of its actors, their agendas, and their modes of operations that tend to follow a recurrent design which in turn ensures that the sequence of their actions moves the cascade along recurrent dynamics and patterned paths. Moreover, cascades of violence can be thought as dynamics of interrelated cascades, such as cascades of authoritarianism and militarisation (Braithwaite and D’Costa 2016, 12), and also cascades of domination, corruption, humiliation, suppression, exclusion, state terror, impunity, and criminality. Cascades of violence may include – too – refugees, their traumas, desperation, helplessness, hopelessness, and neglect which in turn can trigger more cascades of violence. High-intensity cascades of violence are characterised by actors who are strongly committed to the outcomes they desire – which may include genocide and other mass atrocities.5 The recurrent violence against the Rohingya in Myanmar manifests a clear cascade dynamic with patterned ways that have involved permanent actors and institutions (such as the military and police forces as well as ultra-nationalist Buddhist organisations), and policies (as explained in the two ensuing sections), which in turn have ensured the long