The Rohingya Crisis and Religious Persecution in Myanmar

The Rohingya, a Muslim minority concentrated in Rakhine State whom Myanmar's government has long refused to recognize as citizens under a 1982 citizenship law that excludes them from the list of officially recognized national ethnic groups, have faced escalating violence and displacement since 2012, culminating in a 2017 military campaign that United Nations investigators characterized as bearing genocidal intent, driving over seven hundred thousand Rohingya into refugee camps in neighboring Bangladesh in a matter of months.

The Gambia brought a genocide case against Myanmar before the International Court of Justice in 2019, citing the 2017 campaign, and the case remains ongoing as of the mid-2020s. Buddhist nationalist movements, most prominently the monk-led Ma Ba Tha organization, have promoted anti-Muslim rhetoric and supported legislation restricting interfaith marriage and religious conversion, framing Buddhism as requiring special legal protection against a perceived Islamic demographic threat, a narrative widely disputed by scholars given the Muslim population's small overall share. The military's 2021 coup, which ousted the civilian government of Aung San Suu Kyi, has further entrenched Buddhist nationalist influence within the state while intensifying conflict with ethnic minority Christian and Muslim armed groups across the country's borderlands.