Recognising the Rohingya Genocide in the Global Media

This chapter traces the coverage of the Rohingya conflict in the global media. Drawing upon theories of agenda-setting and framing, it examines legacy media coverage from 2017 to 2024 to understand whether the Rohingya were framed as genocide survivors or humanitarian refugees. Through theoretically informed, iterative coding, we identified narrative emphases, problem definitions, causal attributions, moral evaluations, and treatment orientations, observing the depiction of Rohingya as genocide survivors, humanitarian subjects, refugees, policy burdens, security threats, or political actors. Our longitudinal comparative analysis examined framing across nine international media outlets and four distinct phases: acute violence/displacement; accountability/repatriation politics; coup-pandemic/camp precarity; and protracted displacement/conflict spillover/regional instability. This showed us which frames were most common in certain outlets and how humanitarian visibility and genocide recognition changed over time. Not aiming for statistical generalisation, our qualitative study contributes interpretive depth and cross-outlet comparison and clarifies an unresolved distinction in framing scholarship: the conditions making Rohingya suffering legible.