The Rohingya, Buddhism, and the Category “Religion”

Abstract

The purpose of this chapter is to elaborate on the scholarly tendency to obscure political causes for violence with invented religious causes. The Myanmar conflict is used to demonstrate how the attempt to theorize religion as a particularly unique or distinct phenomenon that causes violence conceals the deeper relationships between citizenship and politics that are at play in such conflicts. In particular, it stresses that in places like Myanmar, what is needed to understand conflicts is less focus on Buddhism and its foundational principles, and more attention to the historical, ethnic, and political tensions at play.