The Rohingya: Myanmar’s Unwanted Minority

This article analyses the plight of Myanmar’s unwanted people— the Rohingya. Although they have inhabited the country for centuries, the Rohingya are not listed as one of the 135 legally recognized ethnic groups by the state and are therefore categorized as illegal immigrants. Rendered stateless, subject to decades of oppression and systematic human rights violations by the country’s successive governments, these people have now become, according to the UN, the most persecuted minority in the world. While an estimated 1.5 to 2 million Rohingya once lived in Myanmar, only around one- fifth remain at present. Over the last four decades, almost two thirds of its population have fled the country due to state- sponsored ethnic persecution. This article addresses: the reason for the Rohingya’s statelessness; their disputed origins and the issue of Rohingya identity; the context of the Rohingya crisis; the nature of human rights violations against the community; the situation of the Rohingya in Bangladesh; and, finally, international reaction to the crisis.

The nature of Islamophobia: A test of a tripartite view in five countries

This article provides an examination of the structure of Islamophobia across cultures. Our novel measure – the Tripartite Islamophobia Scale (TIS) – embeds three theoretically and statistically grounded subcomponents of Islamophobia: anti-Muslim prejudice, anti-Islamic sentiment, and conspiracy beliefs. Across six samples (i.e., India, Poland, Germany, France, and the USA), preregistered analyses corroborated that these three subcomponents are statistically distinct. Measurement invariance analyses indicated full scalar invariance, suggesting that the tripartite understanding of Islamophobia is generalizable across cultural contexts. Further, the subcomponents were partially dissociated in terms of the intergroup emotions they are predicted by as well as the intergroup outcomes they predict (e.g., dehumanization, ethnic persecution). For example, intergroup anger and disgust underpin Islamophobic attitudes, over and above the impact of fear. Finally, our results show that SDO and ingroup identification moderate intergroup emotions and Islamophobia. We address both theoretical implications for the nature of Islamophobia and practical interventions to reduce it.

Chinese Re-migration

Counter-diasporic migration, or the return of diasporic descendants to an ancestral land, has become a noticeable global trend. This chapter troubles linear narratives of emigration and immigration by examining the re-migration of diasporic descendants. It focuses on Chinese diasporic descendants in Malaya, Indonesia, and Vietnam who were compelled to leave due to ethnic persecution between the years 1949 and 1979, a period that coincided with the inauguration of communist rule in China. The Chinese state resettled the refugees in state-owned farms and labeled them as “returnees,” legitimizing its reach toward the diaspora. But the social realities they experienced expose contestations over presumed kinship and co-ethnicity. After 1978 China’s diaspora strategizing shifted from privileging co-ethnicity to encouraging foreign investment and scientific skills transfer to benefit the country’s national development. This discussion foregrounds how citizenship formations in China were intimately connected to the experiences of the Chinese abroad and those who re-migrated to the ancestral land.

Mary Hays’s Biography of María de Estrada, a Spanish Woman in the American Conquest

This article focuses on Mary Hays’s entry of María de Estrada in her Female Biography (1803), and how this English writer dealt with issues of gender, race, religion and nation by means of the mere inclusion of Estrada in this collection of women’s biographies. It studies the life of María de Estrada as inscribed in the fruitful transatlantic dialogue between the Iberian metropolis and the American continent at the beginning of the sixteenth century. In the analysis of her ordeal, issues of colonization are intermingled with those of ethnic persecution. De Estrada is believed to have been a Jew suffering difficulties in the Spanish city of Toledo; she had later an additional plight as a foundling girl living with the Gypsies in order to blur her origin, and thus escape ethnic cleansing. Subsequently, her role as an expatriate woman, who would leave her country of origin on board of a ship in the Hernán Cortés Expedition, is also analyzed.

The Rise and Fall of Mob Violence against Mexicans in Arizona, 1859–1915

This chapter reviews conventional narratives of racism and lynching, examining the extensive mob violence directed against persons of Mexican descent in Arizona Territory. While demonstrating the historical depth and contours of anti-Mexican animus in Arizona, the chapter also traces the pivotal social and political changes that shifted opinion against the lynching of Mexicans in the era of statehood in the 1910s. Moreover, there is no record of the illegal hanging of any Mexicans in Arizona after 1915. The strong reaction of Arizona's constituted authorities to the lynching of Mexican outlaws Jose and Hilario Leon did not end discrimination against Mexicans in the state, but it did close the door on what was agreed as the most symbolic and visible form of racial and ethnic persecution—community-sanctioned, extralegal murder.

Ethnic Persecution

The world has praised Burma for certain social, economic and political reforms taking place in central Burma since 2011 and the present administration continues to assure the world that the process of democratization and liberalization in the country is irreversible. However, the Christian Kachin in the northern corner of Burma continue to face greater oppression, persecution and brutalization which has been terribly but freely perpetrated and perpetuated by the Burmese army since June 2011. The main thesis of this article is that the church in Burma is entrusted with the divine mandate, authority and obligation to responsibly show their firm solidarity with their Kachin brothers and sisters persecuted by the Burmese military. It is the mission of the church to defend the oppressed against injustice, oppression and violence and to encourage an active and prophetic stance toward creating justice and equality between ethnic groups in the country.

Holdninger til de fremmede - forestillingen om bosniske flygtninge i den danske offentlighed

The image of Bosnian war refugees in the Danish public This article discusses sociological inve¬stigations of attitudes towards immi¬grants and refugees in Denmark. In¬stead of viewing attitudes as an attribu¬te of individual psychology or as deter¬mined by social class, the article sug¬gests examining the context of varying understandings and imaginations which set the frame for the meaningful presentation of a concrete event. This approach is exemplified by a study of the reception of refugees from the former Yugoslavia in Denmark ba¬sed on articles from the Danish press from May 1992 to January 1995. These articles indicate that different attitudes towards refugees can be connected to representations based on different nar¬rative imaginations and collective me¬mories as well as other themes of cur¬rent interest in the public. These con¬texts have set different meaningful fra¬mes for understanding refugees and thereby influenced attitudes towards this group in the Danish public. In summer 1992, before the arrival of larger groups of refugees, there was a positive attitude towards them in the press. There was general indignation to¬wards the war in Europe and a wide¬spread willingness to help the people suffering from ethnic persecution and cleansing. There were explicit referen¬ces to World War II which were unambi¬guously supportive of a positive attitu¬de toward these refugees. By the autumn of the same year the¬re was a drift towards a more negative attitude. Episodes of thefts in the regi¬ons where refugee centres were located resulted in demands that criminal refu¬gees from the former Eastern Europe (the Baltic and exYugoslavia) be expel¬led. There were also reports from Ger¬many that neoNazis set fire to refugee camps, and this produced concern that the many foreigners in Denmark would provoke „German conditions“ with eth¬nic and racist problems. Many Danish neighbours to these refugee centres we¬re surprised to see refugees from war torn Yugoslavia arriving wellfed and in new clothing. These refugees didn’t fit the image of suffering which had been the basis for the unambiguous support the preceding summer. These people didn’t appear to be „real“ refugees. The many media reports about the war in Bosnia helped create an understanding that refugees have a reason for being Denmark and that Denmark has an obligation to help. The referen¬ces to ethnic persecution during World War II have been superseded by an un¬der¬standing that the new refugees have es¬caped from a life that was similar to the Danish. „They are like us“ is a sen¬tence that becomes more common in the media, and an understanding that the Bos¬nian war refugees have been forced to leave a life style similar to the Danish one emerge „it could have been us“. This is the basis for development of a public understanding of the Bosnian re¬fugees as a new type of „real“ refugees. The positive attitudes that have de¬veloped towards the predominantly Muslim refugees from Bosnia point to the possibility that the widespread anta¬gonism in the Danish public towards immigrants with a Muslim background is not due to the religion itself, but rather the traditionalistic and nonmodern way of life that this religious affiliation symbolizes for many Danes.