In ‘The uses of neoliberalism,’ James Ferguson warns that in providing a coherent idea of neoliberalism, one has created a counter-ideology that discursively functions to anchor neoliberalism as the primary point for theoretical and political engagement. Operating within ‘anti’ critiques of (neo)liberalism only gets us so far, as there is never space for being ‘pro’. Furthermore, critical scholars often fail to realize that critiques of (neo)liberalism often work to reinforce masculinist methodologies by prioritizing some forms of knowledge, and specific forms of critique, over others. More specifically, Tim Frewer’s recent polemic against liberalism reproduces the same ways of knowing about Rohingyas that he critiques – namely, a linear progression of points and counterpoints that prioritize elite academic knowledge and genderless analysis without considering the vast body of feminist and subaltern literature and methods that have innovated new approaches to the dilemma of critiquing power structures without reproducing them. By remaining within the terrain of (masculine) liberalism, Frewer does not move beyond a politics of the ‘anti’. This is not to say that I disagree with his critiques of liberalism. On the contrary. Yet operating within masculinist terrains of critique and knowledge production is not useful for building alliances that subvert, rather than shore up, capitalism and the capillary workings of power in Myanmar.

There are limitless possibilities in the radical politics of feminism and feminist methods, which address broader questions of gender, race, class, and power as they relate to knowledge production (see Nagar, 2006).

Where traditional (masculinist) Western science pursues ‘objective’ knowledge about the world, feminist scholars emphasize the fact that the production of knowledge itself is not neutral, but deeply political (Haraway, 1988). As Tim Fresner correctly observes, knowledge about Rohingyas has material consequences as it shapes the understandings of journalists, diplomats, analysts, and state actors.

Feminist scholars have innovated several methods and approaches that resist co-optation by the state, chauvinist political groups, and neo-nazi activists, to name a few.  For example, Elizabeth Povinelli (2012) developed the method of austere ethnography in response to Australian state policymakers’ misuse of a report on aboriginal communities, which mentioned instances of child sex abuse but included no evidence or claims that it was a ‘rampant’ problem. State representatives cited the report to justify draconian restrictions on the finances, movements, and childrearing practices of indigenous Australians. Galvanized by this co-optation, Elizabeth Povinelli’s writings highlight her everyday interactions with aboriginal peoples, but reveal no details about the cultural, economic, or political lives of aboriginal peoples themselves. Instead, her research combines theory with mundane accounts of institutional violence and abandonment. For example, one passage examines ‘economies of abandonment’ through a recollection of the ubiquity of painful staph infections on the skin. Povinelli reflects on inequitable access to resources like clean water, washing machines, or bacterial-resistant wool clothing, which became more difficult after welfare payments were cut and money became accessible only through prepaid debit cards. Povinelli prioritizes her role as a provider of everyday acts of care in a vulnerable community, while considering whether or not she should write about the details of this care and the people she has cared for.

In addition to austere ethnography and everyday acts of care, Community Based Research methods provide a toolkit for creating research that resists co-optation through its attention to the role of communities in the design, implementation, and dissemination of research. These methods also decenter researcher ‘expertise’ and question researcher positioning vis-à-vis participants and the process of producing knowledge. For example, Richa Nagar’s conceptualization of ‘radical vulnerability’ encourages the researcher to make themselves vulnerable to participants in a similar way that participants are often asked to be vulnerable with researchers. This concept aims to address the vast differences in power and access to resources that often separate researchers and ‘the researched’ by cultivating emotional equity.

Feminist methods prioritize community and individual insights about best practices for engaging with researchers and the ways they may be able to achieve their goals through alliances with academics. In the context of my own research on Myanmar, a collaboration with Rohingya political activists and students has shed new light on the meanings and challenges associated with literature that represents Rohingyas as a ‘stateless’ mass of humanity. As one community partner explained to me, “we are not stateless. Our citizenship was taken away.” Prioritizing Rohingyas’ ideas about what ‘good’ and ‘beneficial’ research looks like and trusting their views of what an academic ally should write about, opens new avenues for undermining knowledge that reinforces the role of the state as the arbiter of rights while simultaneously representing Rohingyas as less-than-human.

Radical feminism also enables us to look beyond generic stories of Rohingya vulnerability to highlight the everyday ways that many displaced Rohingyas contribute to societies, economies and places. In her discussion of the production of knowledge about Black experiences in the United States, McKittrick (2011) challenges academic writers to engage an analytics of race and racism based on human life, not on human suffering. Bifurcated understandings of dispossession and possession miss the importance of human life in forming and mediating structural processes. To study dispossession from the perspective of inevitable killing and death is to consign racialized bodies to death without recognizing the lives that people make diagonal to geographies of racism and dispossession. Recent analyses of Rohingya displacement from the perspective of state power over ‘bare life’ only work to frame Rohingyas according to their deaths, not their lives. Academic research about Rohingyas, therefore, should be predicated on life and act as a space for cooperative action and human efforts (McKittrick, 2011: 960).

Crucially, analyses of suffering need not preclude necropolitics and the role of the state in wielding absolute power over death (Mbembe, 2006). However, I do not see a tension or contradiction between the recognition of oppressive state power and the production of scholarly knowledge that resists representations of people as ‘bare life’ and less-than-human.

Efforts to co-produce feminist, anti-capitalist, and antiracist knowledge about Rohingya experiences creates space for new alliances between rural Rohingyas, political activists, and Gramscian ‘organic’ intellectuals who aim to cultivate a broader class consciousness among Rohingyas and other ethnic minorities. The formation of alliances between diverse intellectuals and ethnic minority activists not only has the potential to alter party politics in Myanmar, these alliances have the potential to undermine and destroy the forms of knowledge that allow Rohingyas and other populations to be marked as deviant, abandoned, and to be killed with impunity.