This study aims to search for patterns that demonstrate power relations. It specifically seeks to identify patterns in the power relations in the Rohingya conflict and understand the established power relations at different levels in society, which could provide a picture of the social world within the context of historical, ethnic, cultural, religious and political circumstances. Moreover, this study illustrates the Rohingya population’s experience with relations of power. The ongoing conflict in Myanmar, which is based on religion, ethnicity and politics, is seemingly without any solution. Myanmar is depicted as a country that has lost both hope and legitimacy for the political system and has reduced chances to establish a society in which all the minorities are included across the spheres of society. Finding a bright future for the Rohingya population might be difficult; nevertheless, this study seeks to enhance the understanding of the ongoing conflict and the underlying power relations.

The aim of this study is to understand the situation of Rohingya through the concept of statelessness and to illustrate the importance of citizenship in relation to human rights. The Rohingya minority has for a long period of time been victims of violence and discrimination by the Myanmar government and military. In 1982, all Rohingyas were deprived their Myanmar citizenship through a domestic law, which is in conflict with international human rights law. Various military operations, attacks, and attempts have been made to drive the Rohingya population out of the country. Consequently, as of 2019, nearly one million stateless Rohingyas are living in overcrowded camps in neighbouring Bangladesh. By applying the philosophical understandings and conceptualisations of Hannah Arendt and Giorgio Agamben, this study seeks answers to how it is possible to perform such acts of breaching human rights. Furthermore, a number of official conventions and principles are analysed to seek answers to how the international community are obligated to act prior, during, and after atrocities on humanity are performed. The main findings of this study are that these acts of violence have been possible due to the Rohingya populations’ statelessness. The sustainable development goals aim to ‘leave no one behind’ and several universal documents and principles are in place to protect humanity from such atrocities. Nevertheless, the international community has clearly failed when it comes to protect the Rohingya population. One important and significant step towards preventing future genocides and ethnic cleansings has been identified through this study – all individuals need to be ensured their fundamental human rights.

Why do some political parties in Bangladesh discriminate against the Rohingya, while some do not? Much has been written about the conflict in Myanmar, but the plight of Rohingya in Bangladesh remains understudied. This lack of understanding is underscored by the five million Syrian refugees fleeing their own civil war that dominates the news and the attention of scholars. The Rohingya, however, are stateless: they are denied citizenship in their native Myanmar and are forced to find refuge in whichever country will take them. Much has been published that links immigration policy to security considerations and the national identity and ethnic homogeneity of the host country. I argue that it is the domestic politics of Bangladesh that directly influences the policies concerning, and subsequent treatment of, the Rohingya migrants. This leads back to the question I pose: why is it that some political parties in Bangladesh actively support the ethnic group while others actively discriminate against the Rohingya? I argue that it is the individual ideologies of that party that can be directly attributed to their stance on Rohingya. Using qualitative analysis, I measure how a party's foreign policy, social policy, and political ideology affects that organization's attitude toward Rohingya refugees. Understanding the largely political nature of refugee policy will allow policy-makers, intergovernmental organizations, and human rights groups to be better equipped to improve the conditions of, not only the Rohingya population, but other vulnerable refugee groups that seek safety in foreign states.

This thesis aims to reveal the underlying reason behind the recent Rohingya conflict. This paper argues that, instead of only focusing on the ethnic and religious view of the Rohingya conflict, the geopolitical economic view of the conflict also needs to be addressed sincerely as the conflict has a long history and occurred in different political and economic conditions. From that purpose, this research analyses the recent Rohingya conflict from the perspective of the geopolitical economy of resources. It examines the role and activities of the Government of Myanmar and military force concerning the recent conflict. Besides that, this paper also examines the geopolitical economic interests of China and India in Rakhine state regards to their unwillingness to stop the conflict. In this study, secondary sources such as books, academic articles, reports of government and non-government organisations and the UCDP database have mainly been used for data collection, which is based on textual analysis. This thesis applies the concept of Resource, Resource curse, Resource war and Intrastate conflict along with the analytical framework ‘Vulnerability, risk and opportunity’ by Philippe Le Billon as a tool to explain and analyse the conflict. The research shows that the recent violent conflicts which forcedly displaced hundreds of thousands of the Rohingyas from their houses and destroyed many Rohingya villages in Rakhine state have a possible connection with the resources and economic opportunities that are present in the Rakhine state. There is a strong possibility that the resource and economic opportunities influence the GoM and military force to become involved in this conflict. Also, the resource and economic opportunities might prevent China and India from playing an active role to stop the conflict. The Rohingya crisis has been going on for decades now, yet it has not been solved. Also, there is no sign of solving the crisis soon. The geopolitical economic perspective of the conflict might be the answer to why the Rohingya crisis has not yet been solved.

This thesis will focus on the oppression and genocide towards the ethnic minority of the Rohingya in Rakhine state of Myanmar. The interest is upon the ways in which Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) utilizes discourse around national liberation, security and vulnerability to communicate with the international community about the oppression that the ethnic minority in Myanmar faces. In order to explore and understand the ways in which ARSA has communicated with the international community the social media platform X is utilised for a discourse analysis. The findings of the thesis are that the most common discourses that can be found in ARSA’s X output is connected to national liberation and identity.

This study aims to analyse how the stateless Muslim minority Rohingya from Myanmar are represented in Burmese media. Progress towards democracy has been made in Myanmar since the end of the dictatorship, making it possible for private newspapers to publish in Myanmar and increased the access to rights. However, this positive development has not affected all habitants in Myanmar. The UN still considers Rohingya to be one of the most persecuted people in the world. In this study, the material consists of articles from The Myanmar Times, Mizzima Business Weekly and The New Light of Myanmar. After assessing Hannah Arendt’s theory about the dependency on citizenship for human rights, and Steve Luke’s theory of power, this study uses the method systematic qualitative text analysis to sort the material. In addition, a critical text analysis inspired by critical discourse analysis is carried out. As a complement, photos are studied using visual text analysis. The main focus is on how Rohingya are represented in the material, and what can be said about Rohingya’s exclusion based on the findings in the material. The study shows that the name Rohingya is avoided in The Global New Light of Myanmar, who uses “Muslim Minority” as well as in The Myanmar Times, where group is often called “Bengali”. However, in Mizzima Business Weekly “Rohingya” is the most common name when describing the group. A key finding is that suppression, i.e. to silence issues concerning Rohingya, to deny their identity and ties to Myanmar, and to not acknowledge that Rohingya are affected by an event in the news, appears to various extents in all three newspapers, which shows how Rohingya are excluded and are often portrayed as “the others”. The study shows that the media is affected by “the power of the thought” and that the inherent paradox of the human rights can be applied in this case, and that in a society a stateless person is rightless and becomes completely excluded from the society. This is manifested to some extent in Mizzima Business Weekly and consistently in The Myanmar Times and The Global New Light of Myanmar.

Syftet med den här uppsatsen är att analysera Rohingya konflikten utifrån maktrelationer, genom att tillämpa Diskursanalysen och Foucaults makt begrepp. Vidare har syftet varit att undersöka på vilket sätt maktrelationer bidragit till konflikten, genom att tillämpa följande frågeställningar Vilka strukturella maktstrukturer blir synliga i diskursen? Vilka normer och värden som styr kunskapssynen samt bidrar till upprätthållande av maktrelationerna? Slutsatsen av analysen är att Myanmars juridiska instanser inte kan förse människor med det skydd som är önskvärt av en stat. Även om militären anses överlämnat makten till politiska företrädare, så innehar de fortfarande den egentliga makten över rättsväsendet, vilket därmed resulterar i att de kontrollerar informationsflöde och har rättigheten att utföra säkerhetsoperationer. Fortsättningsvis har år av diskriminering resulterat i ett apartheid liknande utanförskap där Rohingya således nekats tillträde till publika sfärer, som skola och utbildning samt sjukvård. Ett resultat av det är stigmatisering och utanförskap. Gruppen saknar därmed medborgerliga rättigheter. Ett resultat av det är således att gruppen kan betraktas utifrån att vara i ett konstant underläge och maktrelationen mellan å ena sidan staten och andra etniska grupper bidrar till att upprätthållas. Normer och värden inom landet har även bidragit till synen på gruppen och därmed även maktrelationer upprätthållits och även maktstrukturer som bidragit till att den etniska gruppen Rohingya inte kan påverka sin situation.

The role of religion in conflict and peacebuilding has mostly been depicted in binary terms: either as a source of violence or of reconciliation. The Government of Myanmar facing serious challenges to resolve between the conflicting demands and aspirations of the Rakhine Buddhist and the Muslim communities. The Government of Myanmar trying to show Rohingya community as a whole as violent extremists – ignoring the historical fact that the Rohingya themselves are one of the most-oppressed minority group in the world. The problems faced by Rohingya are implanted in decades of authoritarian rule, violence, and mistrust among different religious groups. Pre-empting deep-seated violence could be eliminated by showing a credible process that can demonstrate to the Buddhist and Muslim communities that political avenues exist and multi-religious dialogue could facilitate peaceful co-existence. This study will employ critical discourse analysis and doctrinal analysis on the existing literature, news reports and reports of the local bodies and international organizations followed by a case study to analyze how religion played a role in unrest and violence in Rakhine State in Myanmar and how multifaith dialogue and cooperation could contribute towards reconciliation process for peaceful coexistence of Rohingya and other religious and ethnic groups. The case study is to be conducted using semi-structured interviews among persons fleeing from violence and took shelter in Bangladesh and also participants residing in conflict zone including individuals from majority and minority religious and ethnic groups and other relevant stakeholders. While identifying potential solutions or way outs for the Rakhine State, this study will also show how religion played either positive or negative role and lessons need to be learned for long-term peacebuilding.

Within the last two decades, social media has grown to becoming an integrated part of everyday life and along with it profound changes to how audiences can interact with news. Prior to web 2.0, audiences had limited selections when consuming news through their medium of choice and little possibility to interact with news organisations directly. With the advent of social media, audience are now able to personally curate their media consumption and fully interact with news organisations and the articles they post online. Because of this increased influence, audiences can now impose their agency on published new stories by liking, retweet, and discuss current new stories. This paper offers an in-depth study of how audiences can exert their agency over news publishing during September 2017. Utilizing the spread of the Rohingya Crisis of 2017 as a case study, this paper analyses in what ways audience agency influenced the new cycle during September 2017. This said, research conducted will utilise a two-step process for analysing the causes and effects of this phenomenon; a content analysis and an audience analysis; thus, a focus will be placed on understanding shifts in newspaper publishing in relation to audience engagement.

Community-based public art education in emergencies is an emerging transdisciplinary field that exists at the crossroads of art education and education in emergencies. The Rohingya refugee camp is the largest refugee camp in the history of the world, on the border of Myanmar in Southern Bangladesh. As a response to the 2017 Rohingya refugee influx crisis, the international NGO Artolution started the first locally led collaborative public art education program in the refugee camps by selecting and educating individuals fleeing the Rohingya genocide. My research examines the learning that occurred throughout three years of teaching artist education programs with 14 Rohingya refugee and Bangladeshi women and men, through their journey to lead independent art education programs. This research employs a performance-based ethnographic data collection methodology, with qualitative interviews, focus groups, and narratives collected from the teaching artists and participating learners over three phases of data collection that took place from 2018-2019 in collaboration with UNHCR, UNICEF, IFRC, et al. The findings of the study suggest that the Rohingya Artolution teaching artist team is a living model for building a durable approach for emergency responses and humanizing a resilient future where history is defined by the voices that establish their own roles and identities in the world. The findings were presented through interweaving personal narratives and testimonials of the displaced and host teaching artists with supporting thinkers and commentary, in order to accurately link the stories of their learning and experiences by tracking the evolving teaching artist education process of cultivating creativity, curiosity, and expression in crisis-affected populations, and what that means for the future of their communities.