ABSTRACT
“Dangerous speech” are messages intended to promote dislike and fear, but do not cross the line into incitement to commit violence—a key feature of hate speech. One of the striking features of anti-Muslim discourse originating with extremist monks in Myanmar is that it rarely references Buddhist scriptures or doctrine. Instead, the monks’ calls for action against Muslims (especially Rohingya) typically take a secular form, and concern such topics as economic practices, demographics, and the need to protect Buddhist women. The second feature is that official government responses to dangerous speech from extremist monks indicate that efforts to protect Buddhism need not take extraordinary security measures. Mundane acts, such as popular initiatives to promote “race and religion” in different aspects of daily life, can produce similar outcomes, as do discriminatory laws that do not specifically name Rohingya as the target. These ordinary measures, aided and abetted by dangerous speech, laid the groundwork for the mass forced deportation of Rohingya in 2017–2018, a process facilitated by genocidal violence. Third, these actions, because they have occurred in a non-liberal, non-Western setting, provide the means to understand the current limits of securitization theory, which has its intellectual roots in the historical norms of secular Western nation-states.
