Cosponsored by College of Public Affairs & Administration

The Rohingyas, a Muslim ethnic group living in the predominantly Buddhist country of Myanmar, are described by the United Nations as among the most persecuted people in the world. The re-emergence of a newly democratic Myanmar on the global stage has been accompanied by international scrutiny of its maltreatment of minority groups resulting in the recent creation of a high-level commission on the issue led by former UN Secretary Kofi Annan.  Ibrahim argues that the use of religion as a unifying nationalist sentiment has left the Rohingya disenfranchised and marginalized.

Azeem Ibrahim completed his PhD from the University of Cambridge and served as an International Security Fellow at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, World Fellow at Yale and a Rothermere Fellow at the University of Oxford. Dr. Ibrahim has been researching the Rohingya crisis for over half a decade and is the author of “Rohingyas: Inside Myanmar’s Hidden Genocide” (Hurst: 2016) – currently the only book on the Rohingyas crisis. To undertake research for his book, Dr. Ibrahim made numerous trips to Myanmar, Bangladesh, Malaysia and Thailand over a number of years. He has also published op eds on the topic in the New York Times, Washington Post, Daily Telegraph, Newsweek, CNN, Foreign Policy and many others and is regularly invited to advise policy makers on this issue in the US, UK, EU and UN.