Abstract: Since the 1982 Citizenship Law, the lives of Myanmar's Rohingya minority have been subjected to both symbolic, material, and physical violence. This paper seeks to analyze how the Citizenship Law can be considered an act of lawfare, that is, using the law as a weapon. Lack of citizenship can give rise to insecurity, excluding people from a community in which civil and political rights are assured and security is guaranteed. In this way, it can also legitimize violence against the minority. Thus, the Citizenship Law — and the consequent exclusion of the Rohingyas from citizenship — has been an enabler of violence. First, in the form of symbolic and material violence through the denial of civil, political, social, and economic rights; then, physical violence through ethnic cleansing attempts enacted by the Tatmadaw, which sought to transform legislative nonexistence into literal nonexistence.
Problem statement: How did the Tatmadaw government use the 1982 Citizenship Law to create insecurity and legitimize violence against the Rohingya minority in Myanmar?
Bottom-line-up-front: The 1982 Citizenship Law in Myanmar, which excluded the Rohingya minority from the ‘national races’ entitled to citizenship, was not only a cause of insecurity and vulnerability among those targeted but also a genuine act of lawfare carried out by the Tatmadaw to legitimize symbolic, material, and physical violence by marginalising and alienating the Rohingya minority through legal non-recognition.
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