Racial Exclusion by Bureaucratic Omission: Non-Enumeration, Documentary Dispossession, and the Rohingya Crisis in Myanmar
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This article traces the bureaucratic bases of the Rohingya crisis in Myanmar. I draw on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with Rohingya activists to elucidate the political struggles and competing archival logics surrounding their disenfranchisement and displacement. I explain a curious shift in the past decade in Myanmar’s approach to managing the Rohingya population, whereby longstanding strategies of legally-encoded racial exclusion gave way to moves to withhold and contract the state’s administrative reach: 1) the repudiation of the Rohingya category in the 2014 census; and 2) the dispossession of documents leading up to the 2015 elections. I develop the concept of “bureaucratic omission” to reveal an alternative mode by which the state’s symbolic power can be accumulated and exercised. In the wake of new claims-making pressures during Myanmar’s short-lived democratic opening, state officials nullified Rohingyas’ claims for recognition as citizens by depriving them of the material evidence to support these claims. In response, Rohingya activists invoked this same epistemic power of documents, leveraging archival sources and documentary vestiges to build their own historical counternarratives of indigenous belonging. By protagonizing stateless Rohingyas, I provide insight into top-down administrative efforts to un-make race and into how minorities can contest these omissions.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it