Labelling Rohingya across borders: differential governance, label conversion, and mobility-induced stratification

This article examines how the hyper-visible ethnonym ‘Rohingya’ becomes a governance label across multiple South – South displacement settings. Drawing on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in Myanmar, Bangladesh, China, and Malaysia, it shows how the same displaced population is rendered as distinct governable subjects across different locales: illegalised outsiders, temporary humanitarian subjects, commerce-linked border migrants, and elastically tolerated refugee-workers. To explain this process, the article develops the concept of label conversion, defined as the interface between regime-level categorisation and situated label work. States, humanitarian agencies, markets, and local publics make Rohingya governable through particular labels, while Rohingya people navigate and reshape Rohingya-ness by concealing, inhabiting, intensifying, or redirecting it in everyday struggles over documents, mobility, labour, aid, security, and belonging. The article argues that partial recognitions and small documents rarely provide secure rights, but they create unstable survival openings. These openings are unevenly distributed: those with documents, money, brokers, education, transnational networks, or institutional access can convert labels more readily and secure wider survival space, while those without such resources remain more tightly fixed by punitive classifications. Rohingya-ness is therefore stratified through unequal capacities for label conversion.