Nothing To Lose But Their (Block)Chains
Biometrics, techno-imaginaries, and transformations in Rohingya lives.
We3 guest writer, Elliott Prasse-Freeman is an Assistant Professor at the National University of Singapore, where he researches social movements and new technologies in Southeast Asia, whilst generally trying to not get deported. He holds a BA from Harvard University and a PhD in Anthropology from Yale University, and has a forthcoming book, Rights Refused: Grassroots Activism and State Violence in Myanmar, to be published in time for next year’s beach reading season.
In this peer-reviewed article Elliott writes about the ongoing Rohingya crisis.
While world attention is focused on the Russian invasion of Ukraine, a 7-year human tragedy is dragging on. The Rohingya surviving in limbo in Bangladeshi refugee camps are increasingly victims of organized crime, while some attempt dangerous escapes to nearby countries.
“Here, you cannot prove that your child is your child”
“Statelessness is the condition in which the Rohingya have been for over thirty years.’’ — Muhammad Noor
This statement, from January 2, 2018 (referring to the Myanmar military’s genocidal September 2017 campaign that drove 700,000 Rohingya into Bangladesh) was made by the man who identifies himself as the founder of the Rohingya Project (RP), a Kuala Lumpur–based nonprofit social enterprise. These words, part of a longer riposte, appeared in the comment section of an article entitled “A Really Bad Blockchain Idea: Digital Identity Cards for Rohingya Refugees” (Vota 2018), which condemned Noor’s organization.
RP had recently proposed to use blockchain to enable the creation of a virtual identity for stateless Rohingya. The article’s author, Wayan Vota, was unimpressed: Why was RP proposing a digital identification project that would increase the visibility of Rohingya and thus heighten their vulnerability? Why was RP rendering that digital identification onto an unproven technological platform (blockchain) that could introduce new risks? And, finally, why was RP launching this dangerous “experiment on the powerless” — given that the stateless are ill equipped to refuse the promises of data extraction? The image accompanying Vota’s article (see Figure 1) delivered this last point with an anvil: grasping refugee hands reach up desperately to men throwing items from a truck; RP’s blockchain icons are superimposed over these items, making the hands clutch at perhaps nothing, or, arguably, at something hazardous. On this point, Vota (2018) was relentless: “I am not going to stand idly by when someone decides to experiment on vulnerable populations.”
Noor tried to address Vota’s critiques, defending the security of data distributed on blockchain. He also attempted to displace Vota’s concerns by foregrounding the larger problem of Rohingya’s enduring statelessness. To this he stressed the solution: “Our Project is dealing with the financial inclusion of the Rohingya diaspora as stateless people. […] This ID system is meant primarily as a key to a virtual platform to give Rohingya access to a range of financial applications, such as microfinancing and peer-to-peer lending.”
Here, Noor’s RP co-founder, Saqib Sheikh, entered the fray, commenting that RP wasn’t reckless, but simply pursuing solutions endorsed by the world’s elite: “Using blockchain with refugees. […] [it] is being done by several parties already. Microsoft and Accenture have launched the ID2020 Alliance project to aid refugees and displaced peoples, and in ID2020 Alliance’s promo materials, one finds no less than World Bank head Jim Kim enthusing that digital identity “could be the greatest poverty killer app we’ve ever seen”.
When I first met Noor and Saqib eight months later at RP’s office in Kuala Lumpur, I asked about this Vota debate. Noor lamented what he perceived as Vota’s misunderstanding of the encompassing exclusion faced by Rohingya. Americans, for instance, “become American [by birth]. […] They don’t understand the situation here.” He paused. “Here, you cannot prove that your child is your child.”
Beggars can be choosers
As RP designed its blockchain IDs for stateless Rohingya in Kuala Lumpur, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) was attempting to distribute biometric ID cards to 1.2 million Rohingya stuck in limbo in Bangladeshi refugee camps. The new “smart card,” distributed in collaboration with the Bangladeshi government, proposed using refugees’ fingerprints, photographs, and iris scans to “provide protection during their stay in Bangladesh”, as quoted in the UNHCR 2018 Report. But, UNHCR added, the card would also become the very “basis for receiving assistance”.
But, even with the subtle coercion of “data for food” UNHCR could not easily disseminate the card. Encamped Rohingya across the social spectrum (secularists to imams, female NGO workers to illiterate widows) refused the cards (Fluck and Rahaman 2018) amid massive protests organized by camp-based civil society. Some Rohingya identified this biometric registration as presaging a system of control that would prevent them from “passing” as Bangladeshis to live outside what were effectively concentration camps, a pathway illuminated by an exposé showing that upwards of 250,000 Rohingya had illegally obtained passports (Mahmud 2018).
That story revealed that Rohingya are consciously identifying biometric registration as precluding such tactics: “Once we are biometrically registered, we will not be able to obtain Bangladeshi NID cards or passports” (Mahmud 2018), according to a quoted source (see also Brinham 2018).1 A camp-based Rohingya civil society group claiming expansive membership explicitly objected to biometric harvesting in a general strike announcement circulated in November 2018: “Stop the collection of our biodata and do not share biodata already collected with the Myanmar Government.”2
Beyond these individual instrumentalist tactics, other Rohingya construed resistance to cards as a collective political necessity. In October 2018, I met with a group of widows who had organized themselves into an advocacy group against sexual violence. They expressed unequivocal opposition to the enumeration project. “It does not say ‘Rohingya,’” said Fatima, indexing the effacement of shared socio-political identity. “Why must we take this card? We get our food packet fine now,” agreed Hasina. “If this card is not harmful to us, why do [Bangladesh police] beat us if we do not take it? No, there is another reason,” surmised Shahira.
Later, a Rohingya colleague showed me a video circulating across camp social networks: shaky handheld video captures a man, bound and blindfolded, kneeling in a grassy field. He identifies himself as a subcamp leader and then apologizes for promoting the card. He pledges to desist, associating his plight with that transgression. The video cuts out before his fate is clarified.
Blockchain ambitions in Kuala Lumpur and biometric resistance in Cox’s Bazar remind us that the Rohingya are not inert bodies awaiting enumeration. They are, rather, strategic actors operating in a biopolitical field of violently constrained options. In such contexts, identification processes are double-edged (Latonero and Kift 2018): they produce a legibility that can enable subjects to access essential resources (Breckenridge and Szreter 2012), while also subjecting them to exploitation by pervading regulatory apparatuses (Dubrofsky and Magnet 2015).
But juxtaposing the two projects introduced above (RP’s “self-sovereign identification” endeavor and the UNHCR card) demonstrates that it is not enumeration per se, but enumeration by whom and for what that explains the different disputes. This illuminates a critical, even onto-political, divide between the ways the respective projects perceive, and then operate on, Rohingya bodies. In contrast to UNHCR, which uses biometric assemblages to more efficiently regulate so as to better contain (Madianou 2019), RP seeks to use similar technologies to dissolve that system of immurement, attempting to transform the Rohingya body — or at least transform that body’s relation to various (bio)political fields in which it is enmeshed or excluded. RP proposes to use biometric identification on blockchain for financial inclusion. In doing so, it aims to constitute a virtual constellation in which bank transfers, loan records, and bill repayments are immutably inscribed on a decentralized ledger, associated irrevocably with a unique biometric identity, and then represented to publics and institutions. These will then combine to assemble new juridical persons who can participate in the global political economy, both symbolic and material.
This assemblage of technological factors (biometrics, blockchain, and fintech) would create an intermediated Rohingya body whose virtual encoding is foregrounded, substantiating its ostensible material referent. In doing so, RP goes beyond earlier experiments by marginalized peoples with digitally mediated solutions (Alcantara and Dick 2017; Niezen 2005). RP’s project thus invites us to imagine transformations in the person (as body, as political subject) under processes of technological interpolation. We may also consider how these bodies carve out ambiguous post- Westphalian spaces of exception, which may increasingly come to define contemporary existence.
This article is based on ongoing multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork with Rohingya communities in Bangladesh, Malaysia, Thailand, and Myanmar.3 I also worked as a participant observer with RP. In this latter role, I followed RP’s own sophisticated knowledge and theorizations of blockchain, biometrics, and “self-sovereignty,” contributing my semiotic analysis of blockchained person- hood to help design RP’s applications that iteratively built identity by recording nonstandard transactions (such as volunteer activities).
Through RP’s work, the article examines the much- heralded dawning of post-sovereign conditions from the perspective of those who actually live them, who survive in the interstices of the current global regime. By attempting to use blockchain and biometric technologies to iteratively record evidence of individual Rohingya actions and collective Rohingya histories, RP hopes to alter trajectories for those perpetually, generationally immured in such spaces, a condition that contrasts with that of Northern bourgeois subjects, for whom blockchain and associated applications largely deepen regnant personhood by intensifying inscription within digital networks. Ultimately, the Rohingya case illuminates a broader phenomenon, one that is perhaps expanding globally: of Westphalian spatial erosion (spaces no longer worth controlling) and biopolitical subjective expulsion (people not worth governing). In response, RP’s intervention allows the extruded to make novel use of such spaces through technologically mediated improvisations.
And yet, even as blockchain creates possibilities of emancipation and autonomy, all post-sovereign space remains inscribed within the Westphalian order. There- fore, when, in the polity’s eyes, the COVID-19 epidemic transformed Rohingya living in Malaysia from objects of care to vectors of disease, the effective space in which Rohingya might live their (quasi-)self-sovereign existence narrowed drastically. This compels reflection on the affor- dances and meanings of “self-sovereignty,” highlighting the “non-sovereignty” (Bonilla 2015) that is its shadow.
Liminal life
International attention to the 2017 Rohingya genocide has elided how the violence is not exceptional but consistent with a protracted state project of ethnic cleansing (MacLean 2019). While Myanmar military attacks in 1978–79, 1992–94, and 2012 each expelled hundreds of thousands (Selth 2018, 13), structural oppressions have proceeded since Burma’s military coup in 1962, oppressions in which Rohingya suffered forced labor, land grabs, restricted movement, and de facto denaturalization (Farzana 2017), and in which they experienced legal, political, and symbolic exclusions. These experiences have precipitated a gradual but consistent egress of Rohingya from their homelands.4
Rohingya have thus diffused across broader Asia, finding provisional refuge primarily in Bangladesh, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Malaysia. This salvation is provisional. Even though some Rohingya have lived in these countries for generations, they lack basic citizenship entitlements (only Pakistan provides de facto citizenship to Rohingya immigrants). Moreover, they face the perpetual risk of imprisonment or expulsion. While some scholars insist that the institutionalization of the human rights regime has “arguably removed” the stateless from their “shadowy existence” (Gündog˘du 2014, 9), pointing to the 1951 Geneva Convention on Refugees as a key moment in that transformation, such institutionalization has not materialized in the countries that Rohingya have fled to, since none have signed the convention.5 For these states the issue appears less an “implementation deficit” (Gündog˘du 2014, 10) than a wholesale rejection of any refugee protection norm.
Malaysia, for instance, has long subjected Rohingya to deportation or indefinite imprisonment in detention centers (HRCM and Fortify Rights 2019). And while Rohingya can reduce their vulnerability by attaining a special UNHCR-issued (but nonbiometric) refugee card, this card is only contingently protective, since it can be disregarded under the prerogative of Malaysian immigration officials and police (Habiburahman 2019, 219; Nursyazwani 2019).
This became clear to me during a 2020 fieldwork trip when research participants who held UNHCR cards nonetheless canceled our meeting, expressing fear of leaving their homes amid rumors of immigration raids. When asked why they felt unsafe, one explained, “The police will say that the card is fake and take us to detention. It can take weeks for us to get out.” Detention is not simply an inconvenience: immigrants often die while detained (Reuters 2017), and refugee advocates report that even cardholders have perished. RP employee Amir, himself a Rohingya, described the poignancy in strongly wanting an object that cannot redress the problem for which it exists. “Rohingya,” he said, “think this UNHCR document is like citizenship, even though we know that we have no rights. Malaysia can throw it away at any time, but they [Rohingya] want it so much.” In fact, after the COVID-19 pandemic altered collective Malaysian perceptions of the Rohingya, Malaysian politicians disavowed the card entirely (Soo 2020). Rohingya therefore remain subject to quotidian harassment (bribes and arrests) and, more importantly, to quotidian exclusions: Rohingya are legally prohibited from working; health care remains usuriously expensive (Frydenlund 2020); and children are barred from attending school (Equal Rights Trust 2014). Frydenlund (2020) shows how formal Rohingya illegality allows employers to flexibilize employment and underpay workers. Rohingya bodies are, following Puar’s (2017) description of debility, available for exhaustion so as to support Malaysian middle-income con- sumption standards. As one KL Rohingya reflected, “I have been here 30 years. If I stayed another 30 years, I would still be a refugee. My children were born here, they are refugees. What will the future bring?” (Wake and Cheung 2016).
RP colleagues made similar observations in the conversations we shared when I first volunteered with them, in 2018. Their office, then in the northern KL district of Ampang, was concealed behind an unmarked steel door in a mixed-use high-rise. Despite its inconspicuous trappings, the office also held the main operations of RP’s media arm, R-Vision, responsible for the majority of the world’s Rohingya-generated and Rohingya-focused content. A half dozen young men and women sat in three cubicle rows, either editing footage that typically included clandestine reporting from Myanmar, working on RP’s applications, or researching Rohingya lives in KL. In one-on-one conversations with these employees from 2018 through 2020, many evoked the sense of perpetual dispossession and daily invisibility they felt in KL. Anwar, a 20-year-old video archivist, described fleeing Bangladesh refugee camps with the expectation that he could find work or education opportunities in Malaysia, only to find formal pathways blocked. “We have no place to go, no place in the world,” he said. He then paused, searching for the right words. “I am visible. You see me. But I am totally invisible in the world. It is very hard to digest as a human.”
Similarly, Ahmer, a program coordinator, began our first conversation by rehearsing the collective Rohingya plight (their indigeneity in Myanmar, the ethnic cleansings, the diaspora across Asia) as a way of prefacing his own story of dispossession and escape from Myanmar, and eventual struggles for recognition in KL. This common phenomenon (Ware and Laoutides 2018, 67) (in which Rohingya recite collective history even to those who might be expected to know it) indexes not only a sense of derealization, in which Rohingya observe and oppose their own exclusion from the world’s consciousness, but also an uncertainty over epistemological grounding. Owing to this uncertainty, the basic facts of Rohingya history and substance cannot be blithely presupposed (pointed to in an authoritative text or institution) but must be perpetually reiterated and thus reestablished.
And even if “Rohingya” was recognized, it did not translate into functional social affordances. Instead, Rohingya life precipitated daily exclusions that often emerged unexpectedly. One day in late 2018, RP staff members sat around the office lamenting a new ordinance that barred noncitizens from buying SIM cards. As they discussed how to get cards on the black market, Yasmin, one of the few female staff, turned to me and said, “This is what we face. Imagine being denied a phone.”
Still, despite these feelings of invisibility and indignity, Noor marked a contrast with these employees and the typical stateless Rohingya who “just do whatever is available. If today grass cutting is available, they just go. If someone calls for cleaning, [they] clean.” Noor’s point was that because most Rohingya lacked skills, “Rohingya life here is just moving in a circle, never changing.” During fieldwork, I met with Rohingya workers in livestock processing, produce, and construction sectors, many of whom conveyed the maddening mix of malaise and insecurity — in which life was exactly the same from one day to the next, until it was not: when police interdiction, employer cruelty, or unexpected illness drastically altered life trajectories.
Noor hence insisted that merely attaining recognition of Rohingya identity is inadequate to alter the collective Rohingya condition of perpetual exclusion: What is after identity? […] I make one identity, and nobody accepts it. Then what’s gonna happen? I’m not here to wait until somebody accepts it. I’m here to come with a service. Noor here evokes Arendt’s (1973, 299) famous observation that the world has consistently “found nothing sacred in the abstract nakedness of being human.”6 His comments highlight how attaining the name “Rohingya” in the context of statelessness produces a degraded recognition: “Rohingya” marks their status as enduringly banned from society, and it can be interpreted as maintaining exclusion within a zone of liminal life. The desperately sought name “Rohingya” demarcates a space in the interstices between the Arendtian poles dividing zoe (bare life) from bios (“full” political life).7 Although Rohingya are abandoned by state care, a symbolic value of the Rohingya name persists as residue, defining the group who has endured suffering and deserves recognition — by humanitarian apparatuses and transnational mediascapes — and thus protection.
Noor apprehends the Faustian bargain immanent in this form of recognition: while the label “Rohingya” promises protection that would make the group’s further destruction an obscenity, it preempts Rohingya from enacting political personhood and therefore prevents them from the legal, economic, and social affordances that could be generated from this status. Despite Noor’s discomfort with liminal life, RP is saturated by it and is compelled to work through its terms. For instance, R-Vision, RP’s aforementioned media arm, mobilizes affect and support by projecting Rohingya abjection to transnational publics. Abraham and Jaehn (2020, 1058) find that R-Vision’s texts install Rohingya suffering as the dominant frame for understanding the ethnos. Yet, even as R-Vision discursively produces this image, it also insists on its necessary transformation. The excluded Rohingya subject is thereby made available for extraction, by RP, from the zone of anomie.
Noor’s own experiences, documented in his memoir, inform this insight. Raised in Saudi Arabia to undocumented Rohingya parents who did “not want their children to forever hide” (Noor 2012, 43), Noor grasped that with- out “the means to go to a university overseas, pass their entrance examinations, and pursue our ambitions,” Rohingya would be “condemned to remain in the hills” (84). Noor concocted a plan in which he presented himself to Saudi immigration police as a trafficked Pakistani hoping to be “returned” to a country he had never visited. “Being detained and deported was my ticket to freedom” (116), he put it ironically. After languishing in a Saudi deportation camp for months, Noor was ultimately sent to Pakistan, where he attained the precious documents that allowed him to enroll at a university in Malaysia, where he lived for the next 18 years. Although in Malaysia he could not attain permanent resident status, despite receiving a master’s de- gree in cryptography and founding RP, he had still achieved, he believed, a modicum of security.
In this sense, Noor was lucky: he had fooled a state into accepting him as one of its own. For the masses of Rohingya in the diaspora, however, the very recognition of “Rohingya” as a legible and identifiable population militates against individual Rohingya felicitously negotiating state-guaranteed identities. Hundreds of thousands of Rohingya cannot follow Noor’s path. A question becomes how, in a world of states that ultimately decide on belonging and identity, can Rohingya satisfy both these communal and individual imperatives (recognition of the individual as a member of the group)? Here, RP deploys the potential affor- dances of techno-knowledge, looking within the apparatus for transformative potential.
Pulling themselves up by their blockchains?
Cryptocurrency’s ascendance has been meteoric (the mar- ket value of one Bitcoin increased from one cent in 2009 to a high of US$64,800 in 2021). This has made blockchain the newest icon of our ever-imminent techno-future, generating a phantasmagoria of interminable wealth creation and infinite “disruption” — not just of banking but of the entire digital ecosystem.
The disruption claim derives from blockchain’s architecture, which at first glance appears unremarkable. Indeed, Saqib, the RP co-director, frequently describes blockchain to the uninitiated as a glorified spreadsheet, one that simply records transactions, no matter how banal. But what makes this spreadsheet particularly special is blockchain’s use of complex coding to ensure that no one controls it, neither users nor software companies. Instead, blockchain enables the construction of centerless databases that immutably record transactions. It does so not by storing data in a single vault but by distributing copies of those data across potentially infinite nodes (Buterin 2017); a malign actor would need to simultaneously “hack’’ 51 percent of the nodes to alter the “history” of the ledger’s data. Satoshi Nakamoto (2008 1), as the anonymous developer(s) of Bitcoin is known, described this system as “based on cryptographic proof instead of trust, allowing any two willing parties to transact directly with each other without the need for a trusted third party.” Instead of relying on “middlemen’’ (banks or states), a transaction’s record is duplicated across nodes (computers) in the blockchain network, allowing mutual ratification by the entire community. This circumvents intermediaries who had jealously guarded centralized data vaults and extracted rents of one kind or another for accessing what lay within.8
As this description of vaults and middlemen indicates, blockchain’s technical complexity means it is often conveyed through metaphor and other rhetorical tropes that instruct publics how to understand it (DuPont and Maurer 2015, 4; Woodall and Ringel 2020). While this instruction has meant, as Herian (2018b, 166) insists, that blockchain has thus far produced greater “effects as an idea than an applied technology” (see also Maurer, Nelms, and Swartz 2013, 263), DuPont (2019, loc. 18) stresses that such instruction requires significant work: “few technologies require as much from people as … blockchains,” a demand shaped by the technology’s affordances. As Reijers and Coeckelbergh (2018, 112) emphasize, “technologies can have ‘narrative’ qualities themselves, rather than being merely shaped by narratives that are constructed about them,” meaning that the operations of the technology circumscribe the imaginaries as they are developed. In blockchain’s case, what DuPont (2019, loc. 76) identifies as its “key components” — “cryptographic authentication of digital money and de- centralized record keeping” — enable different imaginaries: where cryptography emphasizes secrecy and privacy (individualism), decentralized record keeping relies on horizontal consensus protocols (individualism’s opposite: collaboration). And because many blockchain applications are nascent (or hidden from public perception) and the infrastructure has not yet irrevocably “crystalized” (Kow and Lustig 2018), these different political potentialities continue to invest the overarching blockchain discourse.
Thus, some foreground blockchain’s acephalous nature, using the egalitarian imaginary of a social group in which authority resides not in one chief (who can invoke sovereign prerogative to execute arbitrary decision) but in its constitutive members, investing the imaginary with quasi-anarchist affect (Massumi 2018, 106). Others find this idea of ineluctable disruption and distributed — and thus equitable — outcomes radically overstated, accen- tuating that blockchains may reinscribe and rearticu- late existing modes of global capitalist/statist/militarist political-economic relations. Swartz (2017) argues that the potentially disruptive uses of blockchain remain fantasy and are increasingly displaced by those which intensify control, such as banking. Further, Käll (2018) asserts that as the physical objects we “own” become encoded with dig- ital signatures inscribed on blockchain, the person-thing relationship becomes not only more closely drawn but also traceable and locatable. Herian (2018a, 6) sums this up as “(big) business as usual.”
Anarcho-libertarian digiphiles may insist that blockchain will displace the state from its identity-conferring role in a way analogous to how blockchain transactions displace the financial firm as authorizer, resituating authority in a so-called self-sovereign identification (SSI) network (MrChrisJ 2014). But in a world where legal identity authorization is dominated by states, the uptake of these projects has so far been minuscule. Although projects such as Pan- gaea/BitNation declare that “nation-states are crumbling,” and are “incapable of solving today’s problems” (Bitnation Pangea Pirates 2017), “world citizens” have not flocked to those platforms to “build virtual nations.” Rather, the projects seem to recapitulate the 1970s-era “World Pass- port” fantasy, in which a private club distributed passports that mostly led users to arrest and deportation (Barker 1991). Brown’s (2010, 52) observation about the “two different
faces’’ of sovereignty illuminates the failure here: she writes that “inside” (over the governed), “sovereignty expresses power beyond accountability,” while “outside” (in inter- course with others), “sovereignty expresses the capacity for autonomous agency, including aggression or defense against other sovereign entities.” While “self-sovereign” individuals might succeed in the first “internal” dimension (of regulating oneself), they necessarily fail in the latter, “outside” one. So-called virtual nations, whether individual or collective, do not constitute but supplement their targeted clientele, (predominantly) elite cosmopolitan netizens. SSI is grafted atop the existing state infrastructure and the related affordances these subjects already enjoy. Indeed, states have already constituted bourgeois subjects through processes of enumeration and regulation. Their existence as legal persons preempts blockchain’s putative disruptive potential.
For Northern bourgeois data subjects, blockchains are irrelevant to identity. This becomes clearer when we emphasize blockchain’s social function as a ledger, one that, as Herian (2018a, 31) notes, fulfills the human sociopolitical imperative to preserve memory. Building on Reijers and Coeckelbergh’s (2018, 115) suggestion that blockchains can allow viewers to “oscillate between the narrative as a whole and separate events,” I argue that blockchains can distill into synoptic representations what had been either discrete moments or simply life’s evanescent noise. For example, the necessarily haphazard flow of an individual’s life can be reordered in various and more coherent ways when certain aspects rather than others are inscribed. This is critical to RP’s use of blockchain. I see blockchains as a specific material representation of the basic framework that undergirds all intersubjective exchange: the experiences that one shares (and then later recalls) with another constitutes a sort of “blockchain.” Critically, human societies (states, tribes, communities) can thus be said to have blockchains of their own: ways that an individual’s social roles are sedimented through the dialectical relation between his or her practices and their social recognition and ratification (Kockelman 2017, 167). The Northern bourgeois’s subjectivity is constituted legally and politically — if not also personally and affectively — by sign processes that prevent digital blockchains from revolutionizing subjectivity. A question is whether it might be otherwise for the stateless, such as the Rohingya, who are not legally constituted by any originary sign processes. Rather than being mostly superfluous, might blockchains be different for the stateless — and if so, in liberatory dimensions or in ways that only exacerbate marginalization?
New kinds of chains for refugees?
We can assess blockchains’ transformative potential by examining their incorporation into humanitarian spaces. Here, techno-governance applications are often presented as liberatory, as conveyed both by Kim’s comments presented above and by UN rhetoric (Curran 2018, 28–29; ID2020 Alliance 2017). Such hype, driven by and driving international donors’ “pressure … to integrate biometrics into aid delivery” (Engine Room and Oxfam 2018, 3), helps explain both why two of the largest administrators of refugees (UNHCR and World Food Program) now include biometric registries in their programs (Engine Room and Oxfam 2018, 6), and digital technology’s rapid penetration across the sector more generally (Gelb and Clark 2013). UNHCR has not only developed PRIMES, its “Population Registration and Identity Management Ecosystem” (UNHCR, n.d.), but it has also commissioned research to identify connections between these identities and financial inclusion and internet connectivity (UNHCR 2019).
Yet, according to critics, these projects expose refugees to new risks, continually getting their bodies “wrong” when collecting data about them (Magnet 2011). Others assert that such projects are mostly unnecessary for improving lives (Privacy International 2019). Some go further, arguing that rather than “empowering” refugees, they intensify control over them, contending that biometric applications in humanitarian contexts represent a “creep” from biometrics’ carceral origins that nonetheless maintains those original carceral functions (Ajana 2013). Madianou (2019) suspects that camps become laboratories for the development of new forms of social control, finding that the “biometric assemblage” (biometrics on blockchain deciphered by artificial intelligence) must be understood as a form of statist regulation, containment, and control (see also Cheesman 2022; Prasse-Freeman 2020a), one that nests within a bourgeoning global migrant surveillance regime (Carruthers 2019; Ghosh 2019).
Much like an obligate species that cleans up the excesses of its larger companion, the UN works symbiotically with the Westphalian state system, acting as the warden for the globally extruded. What appears as a double layer of protection — the nation-state protects citizens, the “human rights” regime protects those who fall out- side it — manifests as a duplicitous collaboration, each party acting as the other’s alibi. In the Rohingya case, UN agencies have been subservient to both Bangladesh and Myanmar throughout multiple Rohingya refugee crises, brokering shameful deals that have shunted the Rohingya from one territory to the other (Crisp 2018) — the memory of which persists, as indexed by the protests against the UN- HCR card described above. Even non-UN interventions — such as the Arcadia blockchain platform (https://www. arcadiablockchain.com/), which allows NGOs to deliver cash to refugees through blockchain — are parasitic on the general structure of containment. This is because Arcadia’s insistence on preserving anonymity (its “identityless” feature) means that users will still lack the legal personhood that could allow them to transform their lives.
Taken together, the biometric assemblage risks facilitating more efficient refugee immurement. By better managing the excluded (Scott-Smith 2019, 519), the humanitarian apparatus mobilizes the hope that such admin- istration will help make ultimate political solutions (such as repatriation) possible. Yet refugees remain unintegrated, in a state of seemingly perpetual encampment, so it seems that states endorse techno-governance solutions because the latter contain the security threat perceived as immanent to refugee camps, thus making those camps more likely to perdure.
Gradual interpellation into a post-sovereign data subject?
Is it possible, however, to imagine a digital identity project that does not produce such capture? To assess this question, we can adapt Käll’s (2018, 139) observation that it is “those who have never been fully human who have most to gain from the turning post-human.” Using this idea, we can contrast how signs inscribed on blockchain would operate on our cosmopolitan netizens and stateless Rohingya, respectively.
Each has radically divergent “communities” available to recognize their respective actions. The sign-events in which cosmopolitans participate are recorded and then ratified by multiple overlapping interpreters: from corporations to social networks to the states and global governance institutions that regulate these. Stateless Rohingya, by contrast, lack those broad communities to secure and sustain the roles they perform. As Santner (2012, 57) maintains, stateless people experience a “deprivation of a space in the world in which opinions can be significant and actions effective,” what he calls, following Heidegger, a “radical poverty in world.” Individuals create signs that do not signify beyond the localized community of Rohingya themselves.
RP thus proposes to use blockchain to perform into being, in the material sense advocated by Butler (1999), a “Generalized Other” (Mead 1934) beyond the community of stateless Rohingya, and beyond the humanitarian regime’s demeaning gaze. In Mead’s conception, this Generalized Other is a collectively distributed memory of past actions, which in turn entails current commitments and ratifies future possibilities, of members in a collectivity.9 As specified below, this other is imagined as recognizing Rohingya’s actions and transforming their personhood (by, e.g., legally permitting them to hold bank accounts) from liminal to potential global subjects. Such personhood is neither im- mediately “economic” nor “political,” but rather uses Ro- hingya’s legal status to produce access to financial inclu- sion (economic) that then ultimately substantiates claims to transnational (political) membership. The blockchain navigates a double lacuna: it not only would confirm a com- munity of strangers (Rohingya) to one another, but would also make them recognizable to fields beyond.
This autoscopy — the ability to see oneself — also permits vision by others. Whereas Bitcoin has been described as an insular economy of “just us,” which occurs for “the fleeting moments of our transactional encounters” (Future of Money Research Collaborative 2018, 25), RP proposes the opposite: a durable opening up to the world “to extend society beyond its existing limits” (Hart 2011, 9). It proposes to use the blockchain assemblage as a set of new constitutive conditions, crafting a Generalized Other on a different level — on the transcendent global plane — one that would allow Rohingya different material affordances.
But how would blockchain accomplish this? At the technical level, it means using an application run on a private blockchain network to create unique IDs for Rohingya participants (more on this below). But more conceptually, it involves a double task of first establishing a unique identity only the “self-sovereign” can control, and then making that identity recognizable to others — thus mirroring the dual faces of sovereignty described above by Brown.
The challenge associated with the first issue — the “in- side” problem of sovereignty that Brown illustrates — is to represent an individual so that s/he is “self-sovereign” over that representation: that the individual need not rely on outside ratification (by a state) to establish the connection between the body (in the material world) and the representation (blockchained data). Biometrics addresses this problem by creating a replicable representation. While putting such a representation directly onto blockchain would introduce a significant security problem — given the immutability of data recorded there — encryption technology obviates the risk. Put reductively, encryption does not record bio- metrics (DNA sequences, for instance) but mediates bio- logical material through a representation (a cryptographic encoding of ones and zeros), one that becomes a person’s “private key” (after which the original biological data is destroyed). To later access blockchain data, an individual presents a fresh biometric sample, which re-approximates the matching private key (Cavoukian and Stoianov 2011, 91–92).
Biometrics have long been used by dominant entities (states, corporations) to manage populations; as Abraham (2018, 386) shows in his discussion of the prehistory of Aadhaar, India’s biometric identification program, govern- mental institutions have long mobilized the body to under- mine the “mendacity of the subject,” circumventing speak- ing (and hence prevaricating) individuals, to instead install the body as the site for extraction of unimpeachable truths. The architecture of blockchain, however, inverts the gaze, or rather excises the external viewer (the state or Facebook) to then fold the system in on itself, such that the source of the data views (and thus ratifies) their own data.
The related challenge — making the body legible to outsiders — requires, however, more than an initial transformation of signs (biometric data) into representations. This process is more involved, constituting an iterative operation of interpellation that inscribes in digital form standard practices of subject formation. To wit, Butler (1999, 185) argues that the body, rather than becoming interpellated into subjectivity at once, becomes subjectivized gradually — iteratively — through the sedimentation of that body’s “acts, gestures, enactments” (see also Butler 1997, 32). Analogously, by putting Rohingya data on blockchain, RP would link biodata with personal experiential information such as financial transactions, thereby attempting to construct virtual-material (re)iterations of non-bare-life existence.
Every additional transaction further constitutes persons: they are no longer undifferentiable tokens of a common type (a replication of the Rohingya mass as perceived by the humanitarian apparatus) but subjects with differentiable histories. The data’s immutability conveys each person’s authenticity, and the imaginary of distribution across the network’s infinite space does not just protect subjects (against data-hacking attacks) but magnifies and ramifies their personhood to additional publics.
Critically here, an individual’s on-chain data can be rendered through “graphical user interfaces,” data visualizations provided by major blockchains (etherscan.io for Ethereum; live.blockcypher.com for Bitcoin, Litecoin, Dogecoin, and dash). These represent the newly becoming legal person, meant in the sense of re-present: turning strings of code (see Figure 3) into images and signs that are legible to humans. Such re-presentation — in which code is translated into a different kind of sign — evokes the transformation that RP pursues: transforming everyday Rohingya actions into signs that signify beyond the local Rohingya community.
But what kind of “transactions” precisely would be recorded? The issue of signification remains unresolved: just because Rohingya actions are presented on blockchain does not mean that anyone will care to look at them. In the next section, I discuss the most troubling element of the digital trinity: how financial transactions will join bio- metrics and blockchain to not only provide evidence of Rohingya existence but also to invest that existence with value.
Financial inclusion’s indirect dividends
As 9/11’s fallout spurred a (Western) state preoccupation with identifying and disrupting networks of putative “terrorist financing” (De Goede 2012), a new financial regula- tory system consolidated under the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), intensifying the reach and ambition of knowl- edge apparatuses. Financial firms, implored to “know your customer” (KYC), referred authorization to states, meaning that the sector relies on state-sanctioned identities. While this is ironic because, as Maurer (2010, 225–26) illustrates, powerful Western states themselves are often responsible for establishing havens for unaccountable finance, nonetheless, the stateless have been rendered finance-less as well: legally excluded from access to capital.
FATF statutes do, however, provide a biometric-sized loophole for circumventing these barriers to financial exclusion (Curran 2018, 24). But even as biometrics provides a legal solution, two practical problems persist: First, who has this name that corresponds to this fingerprint or iris scan? From a risk-mitigation perspective, the financial sys- tem wants to know if this name-body is an average laborer using the loan to rebuild a life after terrorization or a “terrorist” using access to finance to redirect terror at former tormentors. Second, and more fundamentally, the aporia separating the name-body from identity calls attention to the fact that a constellation of biometric data is insignificant when no one cares about its holder.
In my reading, RP understands that without financial inclusion on blockchain, the biometrically identified body would dematerialize into the string of encoded fingerprints or iris scans, evaporating into signs signifying nothing to the addressees from whom they request recognition. Con- versely, if financial inclusion alone is incorporated (as with the aforementioned Arcadia project), the body gets little closer to transformation: under the global financial architecture, such a recipient can be included only as a vassal of the humanitarian care regime, not as an autonomous ac- tor. But the blockchain representation modality, combined with “financial inclusion” and the access to capital that it promises, raises the symbolic-political profile of the Rohingya as a collective entity, qualifying them for recognition as a bio-politically relevant population group — people who are not just the wretched of the earth but meaningful participants in it.
R-coin: Recording life transactions
Why, however, would banks lend to stateless Rohingya? RP perceived this chasm separating the identity-less from the loan-worthy, and identified the need for an initiatory element to spur the process of identity formation. RP also recognized that any identity-forming process would need to concurrently address refugees’ immediate material needs. RP thus designed R-Coin — a crypto-token program piloted from November to December 2019 — as simultaneously addressing four interlacing challenges adumbrated above: refugees’ inability to work legally, their lack of bank accounts, their underdeveloped skills, and their lack of le- gal identity (I describe R-Coin at length in Prasse-Freeman 2020b).
The pilot rewarded volunteer work with R-Coin rather than cash: one R-Coin per verified hour of volunteer work. R-Coins were stored on designated “R-wallets” accessed through R-Coin’s smartphone app (according to an RP survey, 95 percent of KL’s Rohingya have smartphones). R-Coins were then exchanged for goods and services, from the relatively frivolous (Starbucks cards) to the significant: limited-balance ATM cards or health insurance packages. In total, 35 refugees collectively accrued 583 R-Coins (community hours) during the pilot.
To accomplish this, R-Coin — created on blockchain firm Datarella’s private Ethereum blockchain network — works to displace (or at least supplement) Malaysia’s cash economy, constructing astride it a virtual R-Coin economy (Future of Money Research Collaborative 2018). To function, this economy must form an entire social ecology in which the R-Coin mediates and valorizes exchanges that otherwise would not realize as much value. R-Coin does so by imbricating four distinct entities: (1) R-Coin providers who organize and verify both refugees and their volun- teer activities, such as tutoring, cleaning, and counseling (the pilot did not use refugees’ biometric data; RP leader- ship sought a successful pilot before introducing the more expensive biometric component); (2) refugee participants who fulfill volunteer activities to earn R-Coins; (3) ven- dors who accept the R-Coin and distribute goods or ser- vices in exchange; and (4) RP, which distributes R-Coins to providers and then “buys them back” from the vendors who accepted them from refugees.
Constructing this “economy” allows exchanges to proceed without RP’s authorization — the partner organization that transfers the R-Coin recognizes the individual user who completed the labor; RP effectively authorizes the infrastructure that allows that group-to-refugee transaction to occur (see Figure 4).
Building this alternative economy requires a significant expenditure of labor. Describing it illuminates the inefficiency of the process. The blockchain currency swaps the cash-issuing state with a substitute middleman (the R-Coin), an irony given the descriptions of “eliminating the middleman” touted by proponents. It is only because R-Coin provides additional affordances that this immense effort appears worthwhile. The critical benefit is that transferring R-Coin builds quasi-legal personhood by inscribing — and ultimately, with consent, rendering visible — the participant’s contribution to the network, thereby transforming aid recipients into active architects of the infrastructure. Thus, while financial inclusion initiatives will likely not act as a general salve for global poverty and exclusion — given that such inclusion brings financial risk (Prasse-Freeman 2017), and many are barred from participating in entrepreneurship (Irani 2019) — the identity-construction component provides a critical concomitant benefit.
Moreover, the pilot’s success allowed RP to plan to broaden R-Coin to incorporate refugees’ records of credentials acquired, training attended, examinations passed, and education attained. Therefore, “tomorrow, if UNHCR called me to resettle in a Western country, I don’t want to be a burden to that country. I want to contribute,” as Aziz, an R-Vision journalist, commented. “[R-Coin] will be very helpful to let them know what we have done, to show our track record.”
Reflecting on one’s blockchained body
To explore R-Coin users’ perspectives, I designed, dis- tributed, and analyzed a survey of the pilot participants, and then followed up with interlocutors on how using the R-Coin (and by extension the blockchain project in general) fits into their lives. There was an array of reactions. Some, such as that of Nurul, a graphic designer in his early 20s, were sanguine, replicating Noor’s official optimistic vision. “If [I get] dig- ital ID [even if ] they remove my passport, no problem, I can still work,” Nurul said. Some, by contrast, were critical. Zubair, a Rohingya translator for NGOs who did not participate in the R-Coin program, suggested that the project would be ineffectual without substantive policy impacts: “It will just come and go,” he said, adding, “There needs to be [Malaysian] government involvement or nothing will change.”
Many, however, expressed ambivalence: hope for R- Coin’s potential, both in Malaysia and — as with Aziz above — in other locations; concern about its unfulfilled potential; and fear of what it might foreclose. Anwar, the archivist introduced earlier, congealed many of these sentiments in his description of both R-Coin and RP’s project more broadly. Reflecting on how his new identity linked with the space of home that he imagined for himself, he brought into focus what he perceived as the political stakes of the identification project:
My name is Anwar Islam. I don’t need anyone else to tell me — this is self-sovereign identity. Now we do this as an e-ID. It’s a virtual thing, so that even if we see that my land [in Rakhine State] is destroyed, the house is burned down, it’s still a geographical location, it can- not be removed from the map. So then I take the e-ID and identify my ID with that space. I am from Maung- daw township, and you can find that on the map! So all this stuff about e-ID, it might be a fancy matter for you, it is a matter of survival for us.
Anwar then paused and asked me, shifting registers with a sheepish laugh, “What do you think? Is it actually feasible?” While Anwar’s acumen in articulating his own self- sovereign identity demonstrates a transformation in how Rohingya like him perceive themselves, by also construing the connection of identity with territory as implicating survival itself, he seems to simultaneously index anxiety that digital intermediation might leave Rohingya individuated and atomized, both separating them from one another and undermining political mobilization. While some suggest that digital identity challenges Myanmar’s legitimacy (e.g., Abraham and Jaehn 2020), Saqib — RP’s cofounder and the lone non-Rohingya on the team — described the opposite: how “some have critiqued that we are doing the Burmese state’s job by solving the problem of identitylessness, by giving Rohingya an identity, as then Burma doesn’t have to take Rohingya back.” He then described how RP has had to evolve its thinking to address this concern: “But we are working both sides. We are insisting that they are Rohingya, and that as Rohingya, they belong there. We are reinforcing how the identity is connected with that territory.” In carry- ing this out, RP has initiated a blockchain land registry to preserve Rohingya land claims.
Yet a question that persists is whether that linkage can be maintained: Can the deterritorialized identity preserve its connection with the homeland that gives it meaning to many who claim it?
Reassembling the nation or reifying “Rohingya”?
These conversations compel engagement with the question of Rohingyas’ connection with what they see as their homeland and, in turn, each other — and how the crucible of violence and dispossession alters these relationships. It also spurs reflection on how RP, and the architecture it pre- sides over, affects these conceptions. Here, there are significant problems with that architecture, at least as currently designed.
On the one hand, Aziz, Fatima, Noor, Nurul, and oth- ers, when reaggregated into a deterritorialized Rohingya nation, stand in a relationship of iconicity to the blockchain it- self: both the Rohingya nation and blockchain data go from vulnerable and mutable to protected and durable through their copying and distribution across the network, achieving singularity only through plurality. Meaning that when immured in apartheid-like conditions in Myanmar, Ro- hingya face intensifying vulnerability to eradication; when distributed across space, conversely, they become less vul- nerable: this distribution, seen through the brutish optic of genocide avoidance, protects against collective annihila- tion. Denied a homeland, diffused across multiple spaces, the Rohingya would use blockchain to construct a new plateau that they could inhabit as a deterritorialized nation. As with certain Jewish (Paz 2009), Roma (Guy 2001), Indian Emirati (Vora 2013), and Eritrean (Bernal 2014) movements before it, the necessity of territorial grounding appears displaced.
Yet we must ask: Who gets to belong to this nation? RP’s effective gatekeeper role, in controlling access to the pro- gram, evidences how decentralized identification appears plagued by an original sin in which the putatively horizontal network is animated by a hierarchical inclusion/exclusion mechanism (Pisa 2018, 85) in which RP decides who be- longs. As with similar identificatory projects, this process is shaped epistemically by colonialist governmental structures inherited from Myanmar (and from the British before that) that has “hemmed people into fixed grids” (Simpson 2014, 45).
This aporia is exacerbated in the Rohingya case by the emergent and evolving nature of Rohingya-ness — in other words, while all people navigate “porous social orders” (Gershon 2019), the grid that constitutes the Rohingya order is barely legible (Prasse-Freeman, forthcoming). Further, while classic conceptions of ethnicity (Barth 1969, 9) presume bounded group features and relatively stable membership, both are significantly mutable and internally con- tested in the Rohingya case, a phenomenon exacerbated by the effects of extraordinary violence that itself both inter- pellates and repels members (Prasse-Freeman, forthcom- ing). Consequently, RP’s own shibboleths — in which, as its promotional materials illustrate (Rohingya Project 2018), “geographical, social, language, culture, and occupational” metrics ensure that “someone is authentically registered as a Rohingya” — cannot make dispositive identifications.
RP, to its credit, recognizes this method’s ultimate untenability. It proposes a scheme for eventually disinterme- diating itself — using a logic immanent to blockchain — by allowing new Rohingya to be incorporated into the net- worked nation without requiring a centralized entity such as RP to ratify inclusion. In a blockchain transaction, the problem is solved through the “consensus protocol”: when “a transaction is entered into the P2P network, the nodes … confirm the transaction and this decision is laid down in a block” (Ølnes, Ubacht, and Janssen 2017, 356). In a functionally equivalent way, RP imagines that the Rohingya ethnos itself will identify its members by building verification proce- dures that are not explicitly identitarian. This is meant in two senses: the criteria neither insist that subjects submit to assessment as Rohingya by adequately fulfilling a pre- arranged schema of constitutive ethnic elements, nor do they allow subjects to simply self-identify as Rohingya. In- stead, their method entails that members establish presence within a category. This means that in addition to providing demographic data (name, place of origin, lineage) and then giving a two-minute testimony conveying their stories, prospective Rohingya will be asked to provide material evidence of their belonging in Rohingya space — from passports and school certificates to shop receipts and photographs.
The forensic examination attempts to reconstruct the entire sociomaterial world that existed in Rakhine State before the waves of violence disinhabited most Rohingya from it, to assess whether the presenting subject has adequately emplaced themself within that world. RP is building this archival ecology, putting texts documenting Rohingya lives on blockchain while adding audio testi- monials that contextualize them. As Saqib put it, “This increases the evidentiary value of the documents, and this is also a way of capturing Rohingya heritage as well.”
In a sense, RP desires evidence of Rohingya dividuality, a variation of what Strathern (1988) describes as the ways that Melanesian persons are constituted by others’ material objects. Where Strathern identified gift exchange as central to that co-constitution, RP by analogy is pursuing proof of how objects from the Rohingya lifeworld have been inserted into (in)dividual Rohingya.
There are, however, three problems — of incomplete knowledge, territorial bias, and the tyranny of naming — with this circumvention. First, RP insists on a vastness of knowledge of all Rohingya worlds, an immense task given the scattered nature of the Rohingya (and the changing dynamics of Rohingya-ness in these various spaces). Second, while refusing to define what Rohingya is, in terms of ascriptive metrics, RP still insists on particular inclusion criteria for belonging to the community, ones connected to specific (and restricted) places and their histories, thereby excluding prospective members who live elsewhere. Third, ascriptive identity still reemerges ex post facto, since those included are labeled “Rohingya.” This is problematic be- cause that term inadequately describes all de facto stateless Muslims of Rakhine State (Prasse-Freeman, forthcoming), and in so doing effectively inscribes an ethnic label on what is an identity of presence and (lack of) legal status.
A question remains whether, rather than having ossified criteria — fixed in an imagined eternal past — the defin- ing features of the Rohingya nation could be subject to perpetual reconfirmation by the community itself. For all of RP’s creative imaginaries about Rohingya futures, this one has not been engaged.
Conclusion: Blockchain and spaces beyond
It was always unlikely that R-Coin’s initial limited successes would lead to the full realization of RP’s plan — to expand R- Coin among thousands of Rohingya who would use its bio- metrically encrypted IDs to access financial services. Would banks find Rohingya loan-worthy? Even if they did, would Malaysia permit the sprouting of a micro-economy in its shadows?
These questions were preempted by other political developments. As RP was preparing to scale up R-Coin and roll out its ID program, the COVID-19 epidemic struck, up- ending how Rohingya were perceived in Malaysia. Associated with a superspreader event (Reuters 2020) by scapegoating nationalist discourses, Rohingya went from a cause to celebrate to a disease to be eradicated, as reflected in both popular discourse and policy (Nursyazwani and Prasse-Freeman 2020). Malaysia turned away boats carrying Rohingya asylum seekers (Al Jazeera 2020) and detained thousands of undocumented migrants — even those holding UN cards (holders remained detained 18 months later). As many online petitions encouraging these roundups garnered broad-based trans-religious support from Malaysian publics, the Rohingya were transformed beyond vector to disease itself: “They breed like mice and eventually [will] become virus, there will be NO vaccine for it, that is why Myanmar decided to wipe them out,” one tweet declared (@Mulia_Aziz 2020).
The vertiginous shift in Rohingyas’ effective status in the polity has implications for the blockchain identity project. R-Coin has been suspended, the pilot’s momen- tum enervated. Ahmer, the RP program coordinator, described the “immense hate” as forcing Rohingya to stay in- side, avoiding public places where possible: “I was even afraid to go to the market,” he added. This has had ramifications on RP’s work as well: “Even when Covid is gone, things will never be normal as before.” As a result, Ahmer conveyed how RP has been forced further into the realm of the virtual (“We are now always on Zoom”), while Saqib ac- knowledged that RP has diverted energy into online education provision. Skills and knowledge acquired by Rohingya who cannot use them on the ground in Malaysia, at least not currently, means that RP must imagine its students as “virtual migrants” (Altenried and Bojadzijev 2017) who would find their labor valorized only in digital spaces.
Taken together, the effects of Covid have forced a reflection by RP about the limits of escape from the tyranny of sovereignty: while the identity project imagines a world in which Rohingya carve out a little space of self-sovereignty in the interstices of nation-states, Covid has reminded the group of the difficulties of enacting this vision. Hence, if the biometric blockchain is the emergent, it must contend with how the residual and the dominant militate against its full materialization (Rabinow and Marcus 2008). If RP envisions the dawning of a post-Westphalian world, the rapid change to Rohingya fortunes compels reassessment. While theorists insist that there is no more outside (Hardt 1998) to global societies of control, the Rohingya case demonstrates how the current global regime nonetheless produces its own outsides: territories not worth regulating (Andersson 2016), people not worth exploiting, a fact true for not only the world’s nearly 10 million stateless persons (Nahmias 2020), but also for the rapidly expanding global lumpenproletariat (Li 2010). And yet Malaysia’s recent crackdown on Rohingya shows that the sovereign can strike back.
RP’s version of sovereignty thereby diverges from the conventional understandings of self-sovereignty — either radical bourgeois autonomy or, conversely, the self- sovereignty in name only bestowed upon refugees.10 It thus appears closer to Bonilla’s (2015, xiv) concept of “non- sovereignty,” which she defines as “both a positive project and negative placeholder for an anticipated future charac- terized by something other than the search for sovereignty.” This is self-non-sovereignty, ever vulnerable to shifting conditions, ever forced to maneuver within mutating governmental fields (Prasse-Freeman 2022), in ways that con- stitute “strategic entanglement”: “crafting and enacting autonomy within a system from which one is unable to fully disentangle” (Bonilla 2015, 43; see also Dennison 2017; Ong 2020).
Ultimately, the project’s problems are vexing, and it is tempting to dismiss the entire endeavor as a mere techno- governance dream that ignores the political structures that have produced and maintained the Rohingyas’ marginalized position. Yet RP implicitly argues that the “solution” it offers — financial inclusion via blockchain — appears distasteful not only because it is problematic but because it punctures the fantasy that a desirable political remedy will ever be effected. The technological intervention implicitly critiques those who invest hope that the interstate political system (of “international law” and the human rights regime) will finally address this problem. Seen from the perspective of those who might use these tools to transform their lives, the binary dividing techno-optimists from pessimists is deconstructed. The techno-fantasy throws light on the political assemblage within which it is conjured, and it makes an implicit demand: that the political assemblage itself be radically altered.
