At the very end of April 2015, an unspecified number Rohingya Muslims, members of what many have called the “world’s most persecuted people,” began to receive disturbing text messages on their mobile phones. The messages implied that if their home region, Rakhine State, were made...
Civil war and ethnic cleansing have marred Burma’s ostensible transformation from Junta to democracy. In Rakhine State, the new era has been heralded by periodic outbreaks of mass violence involving mobs of Buddhist civilians waging pogroms on Muslim Rohingya villagers and forcing them into...
Introduction Genocide is widely seen as the world’s most serious crime. Consequently, it possesses a normative weight surpassing any other crime and victims often seek to define their collective suffering as being genocidal. The case of Burma provides an interesting case study of the boundaries of...
Kjell Anderson is a researcher and lecturer at the Netherlands Institute for War, Holocaust, and Genocide Studies. He is also a member of the Council of Advisors of the Sentinel Project. The Dynamics of Mass Violence Mass violence, such as genocide and crimes against humanity, involves numerous...
Hate speech is a grave social harm. Even where it fails to provoke violence or immediate discrimination it can have the effect of deepening social divisions and creating the conditions necessary for future persecution and violence. It moves societies away from universal social bonds towards...
Dr. Kjell Anderson is a member of the Council of Advisors for the Sentinel Project. Additionally, he is a lecturer and researcher at the Netherlands Institute for War, Holocaust, and Genocide Studies (NIOD). This commentary is partly based on research conducted for a forthcoming work of fiction on...
March saw more flare-ups of violence and attacks directed toward the Rohingya. On March 10, 113 homes in Maungdaw Township were burned down, leaving over 300 people homeless. Though this has happened in the past, villagers reported that these fires were different. They spread more quickly than in...
It is often noted by observers of the continued violence in Burma that the crippling poverty in the country’s western-most Rakhine State is part of the root cause of the anti-Rohingya campaign. Lack of hope, historical animosity, and other grim conditions in Burma are exacerbated in its...
In the month of December 2013, Reuters revealed shocking details about the system of human trafficking created to handle the expulsion of Rohingya and other Muslims from Burma, also known as Myanmar. The agency discovered that the Thailand government was selling Rohingya refugees to human...
The Rohingyas have been subjugated to mistreatment for years, but a recent wave of targeted ethnic violence towards the community has led to a humanitarian crisis in Rakhine. Since the unrest began in June, thousands of Rohingyas have been forcibly relocated to refugee camps, hundreds have been...
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