This article analyses the Rohingya genocide of August 2017. The accusation of genocide has been denied by the state of Myanmar, but what is demonstrated here is how the phenomenon of Islamophobia – anti-Muslim racism – informed, sanctioned and culminated in a genocide whose consequences are ongoing. Islamophobia has generally been understood to relate to the ‘othering’ of Muslims in settler societies and the nations of the global North, as documented by critical race, postcolonial and feminist scholars, with much of the current discourse on it structured around the ‘war on terror’. But increasingly, it has also come to encompass systemic racism and anti-Muslim violence in the global South, with, in Myanmar, the ‘war on terror’ used to sanitise more recent violence against the Rohingya. This article examines both structural Islamophobia, and the Islamophobia of private actors in Myanmar, in particular the powerful Buddhist extremist movement. It demonstrates that the co-dependent relationship between structural and private Islamophobia since military rule in Myanmar, in the absence of a strong and unified resistance, contributed to the genocide. Moreover, the troubling logic used to defend state-sponsored violence and killing in Myanmar bears a number of similarities to Islamophobic trajectories in other spaces of the global South in the context of the ‘war on terror’.

本文分析了2017年8月的罗兴亚人种族灭绝事件。缅甸政府否认了种族灭绝的指控，但此处证明的是仇视伊斯兰的现象-反穆斯林种族主义-是如何在知情的情况下，受到制裁并最终导致灭绝种族的后果正在进行中。伊斯兰恐惧症通常被理解为与定居社会和全球北方国家的穆斯林的“其他”有关，正如批判种族，后殖民主义和女权主义学者所证明的那样，目前关于伊斯兰的恐惧是关于“战争”的。恐怖'。但是越来越多的情况也包括全球南方的系统性种族主义和反穆斯林暴力，在缅甸，“反恐战争”被用来清理最近针对罗兴亚人的暴力行为。本文研究了两种结构性的仇视伊斯兰情绪，缅甸私人演员的仇视伊斯兰情绪，尤其是强大的佛教极端主义运动。它表明，自缅甸军事统治以来，结构性和私人伊斯兰恐惧症之间的相互依存关系，在没有强大而统一的抵抗的情况下，导致了种族灭绝。此外，在“反恐战争”的背景下，用于捍卫国家资助的缅甸暴力和杀人行为的令人不安的逻辑与全球南方其他地区的伊斯兰憎恶轨迹有许多相似之处。