WP 26-006: Statelessness as a Barrier to Self-Determination: The Rohingya Experience, Refugee-Led Governance, and the Politics of Belonging

The Rohingya people of Myanmar represent the most extensively documented case of constructed statelessness in the contemporary world — the deliberate engineering of legal nonpersonhood as an instrument of ethnic persecution. Stripped of citizenship under the 1982 Citizenship Law and subjected to genocide in 2017, nearly one million Rohingya now live in the refugee camps of Cox's Bazar, stateless in displacement as they were stateless in their homeland. This paper argues that Rohingya statelessness is not a technical legal classification but a systematically designed architecture of exclusion that forecloses every dimension of self-determination: political participation, economic agency, cultural expression, and the foundational right to recognition as a people. Drawing on an original empirical evidence base — oral history testimonies from the Roots of Arakan archive (N=50+), program impact data from the Rohingya Youth Union (RYU), comparative statistical analysis of global stateless populations, and humanitarian data from UNHCR, UNICEF, WFP, and GAGE Bangladesh — this paper makes three analytical contributions. First, it introduces the Self-Determination Continuum framework, assessing Rohingya rights status across eight dimensions with original visualizations. Second, it documents how refugee-led community institutions are constructing alternative forms of governance and data sovereignty in the absence of state recognition. Third, it presents eight original data visualizations, nine analytical data tables, and four evidence-based policy recommendations to advance Rohingya self-determination. 

Keywords: Statelessness - Constructive Statelessness - Self-Determination - Rohingya - Refugee-Led Governance - Oral History - Indigenous Data Sovereignty - Structural Violence - Transitional Justice - Myanmar 

JEL Classification: K33 - K38 - O15 - P48