From mutual aid to charity: violence and women’s changing interethnic relationships in Rakhine state, Myanmar 

This chapter approaches Myanmar’s unfinished post-war transition through Rohingya and Rakhine women’s memories of their lives before and after 2012, when racially motivated violence dispossessed Rohingyas of their livelihoods and led to their confinement in inhumane internal displacement camps. Using the lens of feminist political economy, we argue that women’s interethnic cultural ties and friendships – and the absence of these social relations – are not only shaped by, but also reproduce broader economic and political processes. Rohingya women’s embodied securitization and repositioning as recipients of Rakhine charity, rather than equally-positioned friends who practice mutual relations of aid, both reflects and reproduces Burman hegemony as a mode of organizing gender, racial, and class relations in post-war Myanmar.