Description
How do minorities (re)establish their identity at a time of crisis? This research explores the question in the context of the Rohingya refugee crisis. Since August 2017 Bangladesh is hosting one million Rohingyas, a Muslim ethnic minority from Myanmar who fled from neighbouring Myanmar when the Burmese military launched a clearance operation. The Bangladesh-Myanmar borderland is also home to Bangladesh’s small but culturally significant Buddhist population and has been a scene of both anti-Buddhist and anti-indigenous violence in previous decades. However, despite the proximity and intensity of the ongoing anti-Muslim violence across the border and the presence of large Rohingya refugee population, any major anti-Buddhist violence has not been reported on the Bangladesh side of the border since the beginning of the Rohingya crisis. Based on fieldwork conducted in the Bangladesh-Myanmar borderland, this paper shows that during the height of the 2017 Rohingya crisis, Buddhist-Muslim relations in the Bangladesh-Myanmar borderlands remained peaceful due to strategic measures taken by both Buddhist civil society and Bangladeshi government to de-escalate communal tensions. These measures, ranging from community driven activities to state level initiatives, were instrumental in maintaining peaceful communal coexistence on the Bangladesh side of the border.
