Rohingya as "Homines Sacri": The Statelessness Conundrum
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Abstract
Since the outburst of the Rohingya crisis in Myanmar, the people of the latter have widely and quite light-heartedly been depicted as refugees and it is no coincidence that such depictions often result in simply calling for Myanmar’s responsibility to protect (R2P). At a closer look though, the sole status of refugees is debatable and there appears to be much more than the mere R2P (ICISS 2001). Actually, what is happening at the Bangladesh-Burmese border is the recurrence of Hannah Arendt’s 1943 scenario, in which it was not possible to be simply a refugee. In Agamben’s words, a refugee’s temporary state of exception has to be resolved through either nationalization or repatriation. But how come that a WWII’s allegedly resolved situation still haunts us, notwithstanding even the most thorough legislative attempts to tackle the issue? Has the Universal Declaration of Human Rights really brought any improvement of the matter and what might be its drawbacks? Is it a void tautology? This paper aims at some responses also by examining whether the state of exception is actually the possibility of each and every sovereignty (Derrida 2009).
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