What’s in a Name? The Discursive Logic of Identity Erasure and Genocide Denial

Genocide denial is commonly understood as a post-facto effort to dispute genocidal violence, minimise its scale, or recontextualise it to foster impunity for perpetrators or rehabilitate their image. However, this historical revisionism captures only one dimension of a much broader phenomenon that is genocidal denial. Genocide denial should also be viewed as an integral component of the genocidal process. Because genocide entails the attempted destruction of a collective identity, denying a group’s identity should also be understood as a genocidal strategy. This chapter examines the discursive strategies used by the state of Myanmar to persecute the Rohingya people, manifested through the rejection of the Rohingya ethnonym, the denial of their humanity, and the construction of their foreignness. A discourse analysis of political messaging, official communications, and media representations shows that framing the Rohingya as foreign, subhuman, and threatening functioned as a strategy of genocide.