Buddhist Nationalism Research Articles

Funny Boy, postmemorial potentialities, and the queer diasporic Sri Lankan novel

ABSTRACT As the first anglophone novel to foreground queer experiences and memorialize the state-sanctioned 1983 Black July pogrom of Tamils, Shyam Selvadurai’s Funny Boy trailblazed a second wave of Sri Lankan American writing. This article examines Selvadurai’s invocation of queer memory as “postmemory” in line with Marianne Hirsch’s theorization to investigate the transgenerational inheritance of violence emanating from colonial discourses of sexuality and ethnonationalism. It illustrates how Funny Boy extends Hirsch’s framework beyond its Eurocentric and heteronormative familial setting. By calling attention to the afterlives of imperialism, Selvadurai posits queer memory as a postscript that supplements the amnesiac postcolonial record. Funny Boy uses the Bildungsroman genre to illustrate how the queer protagonist undermines the colonial value system that casts a long shadow over postcolonial lived experiences. The article argues that the novel proposes a new epistemic way of interrogating Victorian sexuality, patriarchal norms, and Sinhalese Buddhist nationalism in postcolonial Sri Lanka.

The Politics within the Histories We Write

Abstract This article is a case study of Musaeus College, Colombo, especially its colonial past and the postcolonial histories written about it and its founder, Marie Musaeus Higgins. Marie Higgins, the founder of the school, is not only celebrated within the school, but also throughout the country as the mother of girls’ education. Strikingly, being a white woman coming from ‘the West’ to establish this school as well as some vernacular village schools and a teachers’ training college, is not criticised within postcolonial Sri Lanka as other imperial remains are. This article will look at exactly this opposition between the memory of Higgins today and the historical sources to illuminate the ways in which a present-day narration of the past is used to construct a postcolonial Buddhist-Sri Lankan identity within which contemporary issues of racialised religion are obscured by Buddhist nationalism.

Toward National Buddhism: Thích Nhất Hạnh on Buddhist Nationalism and Modernity in the Journal Phật Giáo Việt Nam, 1956–1959

This article examines Thích Nhất Hạnh’s work as editor in chief of the first national Vietnamese Buddhist magazine, Phật Giáo Việt Nam (1956–1959). It contextualizes him as both a product and a torchbearer of the Vietnamese Buddhist revival movement that began around the time of his birth and argues that, in contrast to the globalist image he cultivated after his exile, Thích Nhất Hạnh was once the most outspoken Buddhist nationalist in Vietnam. His unique contribution to Vietnamese Buddhism in the 1950s was his relentless advocacy for a national organization that could facilitate Buddhist nation-building efforts and help bring peace and democracy to Vietnam.

The Integration of Liberal Democracy in Sri Lanka

The ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka between the majority Sinhalese population and the minority Tamil population has grown to become a complex and pressing matter within the country. The election of Mahinda Rajapaksa as president in 2005 furthered these tensions as his administration passed legislation suppressing the Tamils, ultimately leading to the development of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), an extremist organization representing the Tamils who support independence from the country. Rajapaksa’s pro-Sinhala Buddhist government greatly appealed to the Sinhalese population, but his administration’s lack of action towards domestic and foreign issues resulted in the election of Maithripala Sirisena, a liberal democratic leader who significantly improved the status of Sri Lanka. Nonetheless, with the prevalence of Buddhist nationalism and the recent election of Rajapaksa’s brother, the economic, political, and social environment within the country has again begun to decline. Thus, given Sirisena’s positive contribution to the country’s affairs, this paper attempts to view the impacts of his government on the Tamil-Sinhalese conflict, foreign relations, and the possible future repercussions of integrating liberal democracy within the government in order to propose a feasible solution to and assess the likelihood of stabilizing the ongoing ethnic conflict.

Theorizing Buddhist anti-Muslim nationalism as global Islamophobia

ABSTRACT In the wake of anti-Muslim violence in Buddhist majority states in Asia, increased scholarly attention is paid to anti-Muslim Buddhist nationalism. These studies have paid particular attention to historical legacies within the confines of state borders, be they colonial or post-colonial. However, as this paper shows, the concerns raised in Buddhist anti-Muslim nationalism are not only shaped by local contexts. On the contrary, they are very much informed by global discourses and concerns. Drawing on media and globalization theory, this paper explores the transnational and global aspects of anti-Muslim Buddhist nationalism, arguing that it needs to be understood as a constituent element of global Islamophobia(s). Moreover, the paper shows that Buddhist Islamophobia cannot be reduced to being the result of Western export of Islamophobia globally. Rather, Buddhist Islamophobia has to be understood as a global as well as a globalizing phenomenon, contributing in its own right to global Islamophobia(s).

Monastic Authority and Legitimizing Religio-Political Activism: Buddhist Nationalist Monks in Myanmar

Abstract The Buddhist nationalist movements that emerged during the political and economic liberalization of the second parliamentarian period (2011–2021) in Burma/Myanmar provide unique material for the study of monastic authority. The aim of this article is to examine two overlapping dynamics regarding how monastic authority is established and undermined. As for the first dynamic, the article examines three strategies in Buddhist nationalist sermons aiming to provide legitimacy for the nationalist monks. The second dynamic is a political outgroup criticism that became more common during the period in question. The article makes a distinction between generic monastic authority, which is the fundamental one, and nationalist monastic authority, as they are legitimized and established in different ways. Finally, the article argues that recognition of monastic authority by laypeople is based not merely on trust and respect but tends to be a more complex process.

Unpacking the Rohingya Genocide and Identity Crisis in Myanmar

This paper examines how Myanmar has strived for an ethnically homogenous society while excluding it's Rohingya minority. The paper is divided into sections of how Myanmar came about as a state, who the Rohingya people are, a constructivist analysis of its citizenship laws and the actions of external actors amidst this crisis. The historical context of Myanmar will set precedent for how the social structures of the country came about and construed the collective identity which is predicated on Buddhist nationalism. The constructivists idea of identity will help us understand how identity is a socially constructed entity and influences policies like the 1982 Citizenship laws that serves to marginalize ethnic minorities like the Rohingya and is harming their livelihoods.

The Office on Missing Persons in Sri Lanka: Why Truth Is a Radical Proposition

ABSTRACT∞ In 2016, the Sri Lanka Parliament passed the Office on Missing Persons Act (OMP) ‘to search for and trace missing persons.’ At the time, Sinhala Buddhist nationalist leaders strongly objected to it. In this article, I read their resistance as resistance to a truth-seeking mechanism. Locating my analysis within a global paradigm of ‘dealing with the past’ through truth-seeking that assumes that ‘truth is easier than justice,’ I show that nationalist resistance to the OMP flies in the face of this assumption. In postwar Sri Lanka, truth is not just a second-best option to justice but an equally radical demand. However, I also show that those same resistors have maintained the OMP on returning to power for several different reasons. Finally, I explore the response of relatives of the disappeared to the OMP and their increasing demand for an international truth and justice mechanism.

Religion, political parties, and Thailand’s 2019 election: Cosmopolitan royalism and its rivals

AbstractThe political salience of religious issues and identities has been rising in Thailand, and this is increasingly reflected in electoral politics. Thai political parties seek to position themselves in relation to struggles over the location of the ideological centre of gravity, which has pitted defenders of the religio-political status quo—a monarchy-centred civil-religious nationalism—against Buddhist nationalists, on the one hand, and proponents of greater secularization, on the other. In the 2019 general election, political entrepreneurs ‘particized’ these religio-political differences, which has far-reaching implications for majority-minority relations, to an extent that appears unprecedented in recent Thai political history. This argument is developed through an analysis of the platforms, policies, and rhetoric put forward by political parties contesting the election, which concluded an almost five-year period of direct military rule. This analysis suggests we need to pay greater attention to the role of political parties and electoral competition in maintaining and contesting the secular settlement in Thailand.

Historical memory, reimagining the present: The spatial politics of monuments in Thailand and Sri Lanka

We explore the contested politics of space and memorialization in Thailand and Sri Lanka, arguing that when monuments and sites embrace several, and often opposing memories, the question of whose histories are remembered and openly shared or marginalized and excluded becomes critical for understanding social dynamics and political change. Here, we consider how constructed narratives and histories (what is remembered and who is forgotten) have been publicly challenged, contested, and sometimes (re-)negotiated. Of significance in the cultural mediation of memory and monuments are the competing claims to equitable representation and the invariable memorialization of certain forms of representation. A fundamental feature of religio-political ultra-royalism in Thailand and ethno-Sinhalese Buddhist nationalism in Sri Lanka is that the memorialization of either contesting democratic discourses or of the Tamil minority respectively, is marginalized. In this article, we assert the ethical imperative to continually intervene and challenge the crisis of nationalist (re)presentation.

Exploring the Root Causes of the Persecution Policy Against Rohingya People: A Study based on Three Constitutions of Burma/Myanmar

This article presents and analyzes the complex case of the Rohingya, a large group that allegedly migrated from the Bengal area and has been deprived of citizenship through the sociopolitical measures of the Myanmar government, thereby making them de facto stateless people in Myanmar. Through archival research investigating extensive historical records in Myanmar with a particular focus on the three constitutions of the country, this study attempted to identify and analyse the sociopolitical reasons and underlying sociocultural rationale for why Rohingya migrants are deprived of citizenship in Myanmar, treated as illegal immigrants, and subjected to criminal prosecution and oppression under Myanmar’s military rule. While violence against the Rohingya people should be condemned, the Buddhist nationalism of the majority of Myanmar citizens and the concern about territorial sovereignty of the Myanmar government must be well understood before effective tutelary measures can be contemplated for the Rohingya people.

Performing the Nation in Myanmar

Abstract In 2012, Buddhist nationalist movements in Myanmar started to emerge, disseminating a Buddhist nationalist discourse that aimed to protectively demarcate their nation from the perceived threat posed by Muslims. In sermons, monks exhorted their audiences to make nationalist vows to protect their nation, country, and Buddhism. The aim of this article is to investigate some ritual, discursive, and performative aspects of Buddhist nationalist sermons, and the social dynamics they entailed. The article first examines and analyses three recurrent discursive complexes of the Buddhist nationalist sermons delivered in 2013–2015; it will also look at how the monks drew on their social power and on discursive and performative power to create a boundary around their Buddhist nation and to mobilize Buddhists to protect it, thereby performing their nation. Second, the article examines two ways in which sermons that aimed to protect the Buddha’s dispensation (collectivistic religion) contributed to creating social cohesion and community.

Modernizing Composition: Sinhala Song, Poetry, and Politics in Twentieth- Century Sri Lanka by Garrett M. Field

Reviewed by: Modernizing Composition: Sinhala Song, Poetry, and Politics in Twentieth- Century Sri Lanka by Garrett M. Field Eshantha Peiris (bio) Modernizing Composition: Sinhala Song, Poetry, and Politics in Twentieth- Century Sri Lanka. Garrett M. Field. South Asia across the Disciplines. Oakland: University of California Press, 2017. xii + 213 pp., b&w illustrations, music, bibliography, index. ISBN: 9780520294714 (paperback), $34.95. Garrett Field’s monograph Modernizing Composition: Sinhala Song, Poetry, and Politics in Twentieth- Century Sri Lanka is a study of Sinhala- language song and poetry from 1900 to 1964 that examines how male songwriters and poets of Sinhalese ethnicity modernized their creative output in response to colonial and postcolonial formations. This broad focus constitutes an attempt to bridge the artificial compartmentalization in Western academia that relegates the study of South Asian musics to ethnomusicology and the study of texts to South Asian studies. While many Sinhala speakers will be familiar with the examples and narratives discussed in the book—given their inclusion in the Sri Lankan national secondary- school curriculum—Field moves beyond the isolationist tendencies common in Sri Lanka studies to consider the implications of these cultural histories for interpretating the historical rise of nation- states around the world. The arguments made in this book also serve to nuance some of the foundational theories of postcolonial studies and to bring Western academic insights into dialogue with Sinhala scholarly exegeses. Field’s fluency in spoken and written Sinhala makes his textual analyses rich for both specialists and general readers. Prior to the twentieth century, Sinhala poetry in Sri Lanka was presented to the public through sung performance, similar to other poetic/literary traditions found across the premodern world. Memorization of Sinhala verses was enabled by standard poetic meters and rhyme schemes, which in different eras responded to a variety of poetic conventions rooted in the scriptural language traditions of Sanskrit and Pali (Kulatillake 1976). Among the many labels associated with historical Sinhala poetry, the terms gī and sindu are still used today, referring to what we might now call “song.” As noted in Modernizing Composition, practical distinctions between song (as something sung and heard) and poetry (as something written and silently read) can be traced to the global onset of recorded gramophone song at the turn of the twentieth century (2017, 6). [End Page 144] Modernizing Composition progresses chronologically, with part 1 covering the end of the colonial period (1900–1948) and part 2 the years following political independence (1948–64). Although the analyzed texts are contextualized within the broader contexts of Sinhalese Buddhist nationalist movements in Sri Lanka, Field is careful not to attribute or reduce the motivations of songwriters and poets to a linear evolution of nationalist discourses, instead considering (in addition to nationalism) the impact of other factors that might have inspired composition—for example, commercialism, cosmopolitan connections within South Asia and the British Empire, the growth of the recording and film industries, and biographical details of social actors. Chapter 1 discusses theater songs, gramophone songs, and moralistic poetry from the early twentieth century, framing them in terms of Partha Chatterjee’s three- stage theory of anticolonial nationalist thought (1986)—departure, maneuver, and arrival—and contextualizing them as part of the Aryan- Sinhalese movement of Buddhist revivalism that had roots in nineteenth- century Orientalist ideologies. Chapter 2 examines radio songs and social commentary poems from the 1940s that were informed by the nationalist movement of Sinhala linguistic purism known as the Hela Havula. This history is framed in terms of Chatterjee’s theory of the “inner domain” (1993), which refers to the cultural reform movements that preceded anticolonial political action. In contrast to Chatterjee, Field tries in chapter 1 to account more for the relationship between cultural nationalism and cultural commodities, and in chapter 2 argues that “inner domains” are not always created in relation to Western hegemony, using the example of how the Hela Havula movement arose in opposition to the cultural dominance of North India. Chatterjee is admittedly a slippery target given how his own ideas have evolved in the decades since his pioneering theories of postcolonialism. But Field’s argument that postcolonial studies needs to account for social phenomena beyond the India- Britain...

Buddhist Nationalist Sermons in Myanmar: Anti-Muslim Moral Panic, Conspiracy Theories, and Socio-Cultural Legacies

In Myanmar, Buddhist nationalist movements created a pan-Burmese anti-Muslim moral panic in response to the political and economic liberalisation starting in 2011 and to riots between Buddhists and Muslims that erupted from 2012. Based mainly on Buddhist nationalist sermons and speeches, but also on interviews and fieldwork, the aim of this article is to examine the historical and cultural roots of the anti-Muslim moral panic and its political ramifications. This article argues that Buddhist nationalist sermons contributed to moral panic in three ways. First through aspects of monastic authority by which nationalist, anti-Muslim discourse was authorised. Second, an anti-Muslim conspiracy theory going back to the 1950s and an ingrained historical narrative feeding a sense of collective victimhood and vulnerability among the Buddhist majority created fear that provides justification of discrimination and violence. Third, is a perceived existential threat to Buddhism and Myanmar’s sovereignty considered to be posed by groups of Muslims (local and international) that were interconnected in the nationalist imagination; a sense of threat that was reinforced by a globalised Islamophobia.

Buddhist Majoritarian Nationalism in Thailand: Ideological Contestation, Narratives, and Activism

This article examines the narratives that underpin the activism of Buddhist nationalist movements in Thailand. In arguing that these movements represent an emerging strand of Thai nationalism – Buddhist majoritarian nationalism – the focus is on three discursive components that shape the contours of the movements’ narratives. The first component regards a two-prong threat against Buddhism: political elites subservient to the Muslim minority and the latter’s growing influence. Second, averting these threats necessitates a new form of national consciousness that places Buddhism and Buddhists as the country’s majority at the centre of national identity. Third, this ideological position accompanies the movements’ aspiration to further conflate religion and polity. This argument is situated in the historical inter-relationship of the state, nationalism, and Buddhism, while tracing how recent political upheavals, including political polarisation, influence the movements’ organisational development and discourses. The latter has been mainly promulgated online, but at times have inspired offline protest activism. The Thai movements display various commonalities with their counterparts in Sri Lanka and Myanmar, but their ability to challenge royal nationalism and influence explicitly religious policies remains to be seen.

Journeys with Yal Devi: War, Peace, and Contemporary Art in Sri Lanka

Journeys with Yal Devi: War, Peace, and Contemporary Art in Sri Lanka Sonal Khullar (bio) i was excited to be taking the express train Yal Devi, named after the goddess of Jaffna, to attend ”but political by persuasion,” a workshop on contemporary art in Sri Lanka organized by Mariah Lookman in Colombo in 2018 (Figure 1).1 It was my first time on the train. My companion on that journey, the artist Jasmine Nilani Joseph, was also keen on going south by train from Yalpannam, as Jaffna is known in Tamil. She spoke of Yal Devi, the train and goddess, as a friend and protector. I had come to know Joseph, a graduate of the fine arts program at the University of Jaffna, on trips to Sri Lanka between 2013 and 2018 while researching a book on contemporary art from South Asia.2 The rail journey between Jaffna and Colombo, cities in the North and South of the country and associated with its Tamil-minority and Sinhalese-majority communities respectively, had been impossible for much of the twenty-six-year-long civil war that began in 1983 and concluded in 2009, which is to say, for most of Joseph’s life. [End Page 502] Joseph was born in 1990, the same year Sri Lanka Railways suspended train service to Jaffna City and Kankesanthurai in the Northern Province. Service to Jaffna City and Kankesanthurai resumed in October 2014 and January 2015, respectively. As Sharika Thiranagama has argued, the Yal Devi, or ”Queen of the North,” train was legendary for transporting goods and passengers in twentieth-century Sri Lanka and symbolized better relations between Tamil and Sinhalese communities.3 For many Tamils, the train signified ”normality,” ”magical days” of a prewar period, and ”the dream of ordinary movement, as opposed to wartime forced displacements” and travel ”to a destination that you yourself had chosen.”4 north and south On that day in 2018, the six-hour ride between Jaffna City and Colombo Fort stations was bumpy, even bruising, as train tracks had been bombed in 1985 and set ablaze in 1990 by the ltte (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) during the war and were still not fully repaired. Our journey yielded sights and stops laden with meaning. We passed Kilinochchi, erstwhile administrative base of the ltte, and Anuradhapura, capital of an ancient Sinhalese kingdom. Joseph pointed out Vavuniya, where her family had lived in a refugee camp between 1995 and 1998 (Figure 2). Peacocks danced in the arid bush, with their blue and green plumes shining against golden earth. In response to state-sponsored discrimination against Sri Lanka’s Tamil population, the ltte led a political and military campaign against the Sri Lankan government demanding Tamil Eelam, an independent Tamil homeland.5 The Jaffna Peninsula in the Northern Province was [End Page 503] the imaginative locus for Eelam, although Sri Lanka’s Tamil population, which includes Hindus, Muslims, and Christians, is scattered across the country with significant communities in the east, north, and southwest. The civil war officially ended in May 2009 with the ltte’s defeat by Sri Lankan military forces, a large-scale refugee crisis, and human rights violations by the Sri Lankan government and ltte.6 More than a decade later, the process of resettlement, reconstruction, and reconciliation is incomplete. The postwar period has witnessed a continuation of war by other means and generated new conflicts, encapsulated by the rise of Bodu Bala Sena, a Buddhist nationalist group, and the Easter bombings in April 2019.7 Effects of war are perceptible in the North, South, and journeys between them. During the war, the 250-mile journey by road between Colombo and Jaffna could take as long as three days because of checkpoints and curfews, the artist T. Shanaathanan recalled at a conference in Colombo in 2013. (My bus journey on the A9 highway took about six hours in 2018 with stops. Thiranagama recalls a thirteen-hour journey [End Page 504] on that road in 2010.8) On those journeys, Shanaathanan was stopped and questioned about his drawings by security forces who believed them to be maps that could be used as weapons against the state.9 Maps were coveted...

Gendered Islamophobia: The nature of Hindu and Buddhist nationalism in India and Sri Lanka

AbstractThis article explores the gendered nature of Hindu and Buddhist nationalism in India and Sri Lanka. Nationalist movements have become increasingly prevalent in both countries and frequently rely upon Islamophobic discourse centred around a fear of Muslim expansionism. Specifically, nationalists in each country frame their concerns through a gendered lens concerning Muslim fertility vis‐à‐vis Hindus and Buddhists, religious intermarriage of Muslim men with Hindu/Buddhist women, and the securitization of Muslim women’s clothing choices. Femonationalist rhetoric has also increasingly been utilized by Hindu and Buddhist nationalists to frame Muslim women as victims of Islam’s patriarchal structures and in need of saving by Hindus and Buddhists. This article draws upon original field research in India and Sri Lanka, including interviews with Hindu and Buddhist nationalist groups, their leaders, and Muslim minorities and organizations.

Uncivil Performances: National Politics of the Sri Lankan Theater Space

The 2016 performance of Dutu Thena Allanu (Wanted) by Kaushalya Fernando in the Ediriweera Sarachchandra Open-Air Theater, at the University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka, was brought to a halt, mid-performance, by a violent crowd in the audience that determined the play to be inappropriate for such a “sacred” performance space. Better known as “Wala,” the Ediriweera Sarachchandra Open-Air Theater is considered unique and unlike any other performance space in Sri Lanka primarily due to its origins being tied to the playwright and dramatist Ediriweera Sarachchandra whose plays, such as Maname (1956) and Sinhabahu (1961), hold an unparalleled significance within the new patriotic discursive and theatrical re-performance of quintessential Sri Lankan postcolonial theater. In this study, I examine how this re-signification of “Sarachchandralatory” (what G. A Haththotuwegama terms the unique adulation and aggrandization of Sarachchandra and his work) allows for the self-proclaimed custodians of the performance space to solidify patriarchal politics of the contemporary Sinhala Buddhist nation state. With the 2016 performance of Dutu Thena Allanu by Kaushalya Fernando in Wala as a case study, the paper investigates how Wala is a site of struggle where the spatialization of the gendered, anticolonial nationalist, historical past of Sri Lanka manifests in gatekeeping mechanisms that continue to delegitimize women’s postcolonial work, narratives of sexuality, and their critiques of the male-authored nation as “uncivil.” It further examines how Dutu Thena, in spite and on account of being violently intervened, can be read as Fernando’s exegesis of ethnotionalist politics that govern not only the politics of the performance space but also the hegemonic history of Sri Lankan postcolonial theater that peripheralizes the Gendered and the ethnic Other.

Front and Back Covers, Volume 37, Number 4. August 2021

Front and back cover caption, volume 37 issue 4Front coverTOXIC FLOWS: E‐WASTE RECYCLINGA worker starts a fire to burn off the insulation from electrical cables to extract copper at an informal e‐waste recycling site in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Open fire is one of the methods used here to mine metals from defunct electronics devices and their components.Electronic waste is one of the fastest‐growing types of waste worldwide. However, many countries lack the formalized infrastructures necessary to collect and handle e‐waste safely. The informal sector has stepped up to fill the gap. E‐waste attracts urban dwellers seeking to extract value from these discarded materials while releasing toxic compounds detrimental to health and the environment.In this special issue on toxic flows, Samwel Moses Ntapanta follows Dar es Salaam's informal e‐waste recyclers to find out how they understand the toxic nature of their work and what measures they take to minimize exposure. The number of informal e‐waste recycling workshops in Dar es Salaam has skyrocketed in recent years. High demand for metals, like copper, offers a stable livelihood for e‐waste recycling workers.Scavenging spare parts from the electronic afterlives is primarily driven by a vibrant Tanzanian local market, giving an impetus to repurpose certain materials. During these activities (mining, repurposing, restoring and reusing), workers are exposed to many toxic chemical compounds. With little or no knowledge about these, workers in informal e‐waste recycling face unknown risks of exposure as they make a dangerous living in urban environments.Back coverTOXIC FLOWS: GLYPHOSATELaunch of the #StopGlyphosate campaign supported by the European Citizens' Initiative (ECI) and 37 European organizations in front of the European Parliament, 8 February 2017.Across the globe, grass‐roots movements against glyphosate, the world's most used herbicide, have encouraged regulators to re‐examine its safety assessments. In Europe, a drawn‐out process is widely expected to conclude that glyphosate is harmful to health and should be banned across all 28 member states. If so, this would likely lead to similar decisions in other markets, representing a blow to the agrochemical industry.More than any other pesticide, efforts to ban glyphosate have become tied up with questions of national sovereignty. From Vietnam and Thailand to Colombia and Mexico, the US government has threatened ‘trade disruption’ should a ban go ahead. The message is clear: chemical regulation is an international, not a domestic, matter.Nevertheless, glyphosate has become a standard for emerging populism. In post‐war Sri Lanka, banning glyphosate became a mission of Buddhist nationalist movements seeking to purify the national body. In the UK, Brexit supporters argued an independent UK would have the freedom to stop glyphosate (another ‘Vote Leave’ promise quickly broken).As politics the world over has re‐engaged with questions of national identity and autonomy, halting the free flow of glyphosate has become a goal for those on the left and right of the political spectrum.

Humanizing the Rohingya Beyond Victimization

This article is based on interviews with U Ashin Wirathu and an analysis of Buddhist nationalist discourses of violence against religious and ethnic minorities in Myanmar. I explore a fundamental issue that continues to plague the Rohingya—the emphasis on the Rohingya as victims of nationalist systemic Buddhist violence. This chapter sets out to bring Rohingya agency to the forefront. Rohingyas are characterized as immutably foreign and Muslim—that is, they are labeled with an identity convenient to state-sangha oppression. Through interviews with relocated Rohingya society members and the mentoring of Dr. Jerryson, this work is dedicated to the rehumanization and devictimization of the Rohingya.