Statutory Erasure and Discursive Legitimation A Theory-Generating Framework and Pilot Study of Rohingya Statelessness in Myanmar

Abstract

Myanmar's Rohingya have experienced legal and institutional exclusion across successive political regimes, despite proceedings before the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court. This theory-generating socio-legal study asks how citizenship law and institutional discourse may interact to reproduce statelessness. It develops the concept of a discursive–legal infrastructure, in which institutional discourse normalises exclusion while legal institutions codify it and limit accountability, and operationalizes the concept through a codebook adapting the 5Ds typology of delegitimization, demonization, dehumanization, disinformation, and denial. Its application is illustrated through a seven-document pilot drawn from an 87-record source inventory of legal texts, state media, school textbooks, and Buddhist nationalist sermons. The pilot covers six legal texts and one state-media issue, yielding 46 text units, of which 35 carried at least one code (39 code assignments). Delegitimisation accounted for 26 assignments, concentrated in the 1982 Citizenship Law and the speech that publicly justified it; demonization accounted for 10, including a disloyalty frame that required a new subcode; disinformation and denial appeared only in state media; and no selected unit met the dehumanization criteria. Intercoder reliability for the dominant code was Krippendorff's α = .673 (95% bootstrap CI [.509, .836]; 46 units, two coders), which supports tentative conclusions only. The pilot therefore illustrates how the instrument applies to the categories observed; it does not establish corpus-wide distributions. The article contributes a specified mechanism, three propositions, and a documented instrument for testing them.