Beyond the ambiguity and absent analysis surrounding such statements, a larger problem emerges: both examples demonstrate how the authors blithely construct facts out of fractions – “some Rohingya” are a synecdoche of all Rohingya; certain things have been “etched into the minds” of presumably all Rakhine nationalists. This slippage (of perceived part to unknown whole) ultimately derives from the authors’ incapacity or refusal to move beyond the dominant narratives told by various elites who are party to the discursive conflict. When the authors write that they seek to “present the perspective of each side in sufficient detail to understand and explore the ways they predominantly present things” (32), they presuppose that there are common narratives that each group coheres around. Each ‘group’ hence gets ‘their’ say, installing each narrative as what all in their represented group ‘believe,’ ‘think’, or ‘feel.’

Take the supposed “Rohingya narrative” (my scare quotes): the authors present a number of texts written in English by Rohingya elites, many of whom live in the diaspora. These are taken as evidence, implausibly, of what all Rohingya people think. While it is possible that those representations diffused throughout Rohingya communities, cohering into common shared narratives, we learn nothing about any such modes of transmission – are such texts at all relevant for people who do not read them, either because they are not literate in those languages, because those texts do not circulate, or even because they are opposed by people on the ground? Such inquiries are elided in this account.

Instead, ‘the Rohingya narrative’ is merely asserted, installed for contestation by ‘Rakhine’ academics or politicians, who deny it and indeed the Rohingya themselves. And because the Rakhine not only reject these narratives, but the ethnonym Rohingya itself, the authors put Rohingya in the infamous scare quotes of the book’s title. Because this, we are told, is what all Rakhine think.

The ironies abound. The exact things that should be put in scare quotes – “Rohingya narrative” and “Rakhine narrative” – to indicate that their potential distance from their ostensible referents, are casually accepted as representative. Yet, in my fieldwork with Rohingya refugee communities in Cox’s Bazar, with stateless Rohingya in Kuala Lumpur and Bangkok, and with Rohingya in Yangon, I have found a broad range of actors – from local leaders speaking Burmese and English to illiterate farmers speaking Rohingya – who reject many diasporic Rohingya narratives that claim to speak for them. So when Ware and Laoutides assert that diaspora Rohingya mobilization “has raised the hopes of Muslims in Rakhine of international support for their cause” (215), the absence of a single example of such hopes voiced by Rohingya in Rakhine is even more striking.

And yet, even as the Rohingya narrative goes unmarked, Rohingya itself – a sign that should not alone be circumscribed by the scare quotes of delegitimization – is. Meaning that, while the Rohingya have an exonym for Rakhine (Magh), and like all ethnicities the referent ‘Rakhine’ is floating and evolving in terms of its meanings (as suggested by scholar Kyaw Min Htin), the authors do not mark Rakhine in that way. Take, for instance, the statement, “It is widely agreed that the Arakanese [Rakhine] began migrating into Arakan around the ninth century, and gained control of the region in about the eleventh” (112). The problem here is that the people who migrated were not Arakanese at that moment – if they have to be labelled, we might call them Mranma, the shared ancestor of Bama and Rakhine. It makes no historical sense to stove-pipe into the eternal past the current contours of ethnic group identities. The upshot is that while the authors insist on deconstructing the Rohingya ethnicity and ethnonym, they take the Rakhine as pre-formed, existing always-already.

Why? Part of this is the unreflective acceptance of what is supposedly ‘widely agreed’ upon. The other issue is more insidious. Here the authors, in a perverse attempt at ‘objectivity,’ bow to bigotry, employing the risible rationale that capitulating to one ethnic group’s rejection of another’s ethnonym is the grounds for a productive dialogue between them. Call this the soft bigotry of low expectations about bigots.

The definitive irony here is that there are reasonable ways to question both the Rohingya and Rakhine ethnonyms – to deconstruct their terms, the politics around them, how they have evolved and for what reasons, who feels interpellated by them and when they might reject the labels – but because the authors do not mine the depths of daily experiences of actual members of these groups, we cannot perceive such ambiguities, caesuras, and ambivalences.

Hence, the useful observations in the book – including how repressive policies that have prevented Rohingya communities from accessing family planning services have produced the same ‘demographic security dilemma’ so feared by state elites (147); that it is impressive that the Rohingya have remained mostly non-violent especially when violent mobilization has been so successful in earning groups “a seat at the table” (152) – are crowded out by this fundamental mis-orientation.

Indeed, perhaps most striking about this book, putatively about the Rakhine and the Rohingya, is how little we learn about the actual people, how few of their voices are included. Hence, while the authors suggest that the “communities need to re-learn how to live together, side by side, peacefully” (12), their book only serves to fortify the fault lines dividing them.

For more of Elliot’s recent work on this subject, see here for an upcoming book chapter  with co-author, Kirt Mausert. (forthcoming, Kyoto University Press)