The Rohingya refugee crisis: a persisting dilemma in Southeast Asia

The plight of the Rohingya refugee – the persecuted and stateless Muslim ethnic minority population from Rakhine state of Myanmar – in contemporary Southeast Asia is the most persistent and widely questioned humanitarian crisis. This paper explored how the Rohingya transformed into a redundant population through state-sponsored legal exclusionary policy under the modern sovereign state and humanitarian regimes in Southeast Asia. The study employed a qualitative synthesis approach to analyse existing studies published between 2010 and 2025. The study used Mbembe's theoretical framework of necropolitics to contextualize how discriminatory state policy, civil war, and strained regional diplomacy produced the nexus of necropolitics for the Rohingya. This study delineated institutionalization and the enactment of the Citizenship Act of 1982 in Myanmar induced many waves of Rohingya mass exodus in South and Southeast Asia; however, over 1.2 million Rohingya presently reside in Bangladesh. The study also found that resource based conflict with host societies, minimal chances of social reproduction, ongoing civil unrest in Myanmar, decreasing international aid, and fragmented global and regional diplomacy for sustainable repatriation leave the Rohingya in a void of liminal citizenship right, dignity, and a durable solution. Crucially, the analysis revealed that the Arakan Army took control of Rakhine State, resulting in the necropolitics of fractured sovereignty. Therefore, the paper argued that the Rohingya crisis in Southeast Asia is not merely a failure of global humanitarian regime but also a structural product of the modern nation-state and global governance, which resulted in certain lives being surplus.