The Excuse of (Il)legality in Discriminating and Persecuting Religious Minorities: Anti-Mosque Legal Violence in Myanmar

Abstract

This article highlights the convenient excuse of (il)legality used by (1) religious majoritarian mobs to justify attacks against places of worship and religious buildings of minorities; and (2) police and local authorities to absolve themselves of the failure to uphold public order and the rule of law, protect religious minorities, and to punish religious minorities. This article traces the emergence of legal violence in the form of anti-mosque vigilante extremism in Myanmar from 2012 onwards and analyzes cases of attacks against: (1) “illegal” mosques; (2) madrasas being used as or reconstructed into mosques; (3) buildings allegedly being constructed as mosques; (4) private homes and public spaces being used as mosques; and cases of (5) closed mosques not being allowed to reopen. The author primarily used Myanmar-language resources as well as interviews to conduct the research.

Protecting Buddhist Women from Muslim Men: “Love Jihad” and the Rise of Islamophobia in Myanmar

“…While concerns of miscegenation between local women and "non-local" (ka bya) men seem to have been of little concern in pre-modern Burma, such fears became particularly acute in colonial Burma (Ikeya 2017(Ikeya , 2020Latt 2020), and as will be analyzed in detail in this article, they were re-activated in the years of semi-civilian rule and political liberalization (2011)(2012)(2013)(2014)(2015)(2016)(2017)(2018)(2019)(2020)(2021). Thus, while previous research has shown the important historical legacies of colonial era anti-Indian and anti-Muslim sentiments for our understanding of current anti-Muslim sentiments (e.g., Egreteau 2011;Kyaw 2016Kyaw , 2021Ikeya 2017Ikeya , 2020, this article suggests that anti-Muslim sentiments today are also informed by contemporary concerns and global contexts, and that we need to understand how historical "reservoirs" of gendered nationalist imaginaries are reshaped and re-envisioned in new contexts. As argued below, this "reformatting" makes for a shift in our use of terminology as well, from "Indophobia" and anti-Muslim sentiments to "Buddhist Islamophobia".…”

What do we know about religion and interreligious peace? A review of the quantitative literature

“…For instance, religion-state relations governed by institutions guaranteeing freedom of religion or belief (FORB) are theoretically considered important to enable interreligious peace (Joustra, 2020;Stewart et al, 2020). Indeed, a qualitative study on Myanmar found that violent mobs in Myanmar used claims of mosques being "illegal" as justifications to attack places of worship (Kyaw, 2021). However, the relation between FORB and interreligious peace still warrants quantitative investigations.…”

Introduction to the Research Handbook on Law, Movements and Social Change: On "legitimate political discourse" in the global twenty-first century

“…States and other powerful actors create propaganda narratives that reinforce deeply embedded beliefs and identities, while activists try to expose the lies of these narratives or replace them with alternatives. Sometimes the most politically consequential narratives come from sources outside the boundaries of institutional politics, from conspiracy theories (Cassam, 2019) to religious revivals (Abiri, 2021;Gorski & Perry, 2022;Holmes, 2001;Kyaw, 2021;Simandjuntak, 2021;Tonsakulrungruang, 2021;Van der Veer, 2021) to celebrity fandoms (Cramer, 2015;Majic et al, 2020). The growth of social media has further transformed the ways these narratives circulate (Adunbi, 2017; de Sa e Silva, 2022b; Khan & Aziz, Chapter 12 in this Handbook; Nyabola, 2018;Nyong'o, 2012;Wang & Liu, Chapter 9 in this Handbook).…”