Grateful Politics: Rohingya and Social Media in the Time of the Pandemic

Abstract

Existing scholarship has discussed how social media brought about the democratisation of voices, particularly, those from marginalised communities. However, one needs to be cautious about the valorisation of social media as a tool of resistance for these individuals, given this chapter’s findings from a study of Rohingya refugee experiences in Malaysia. Using digital ethnography, we interrogate the notion of privilege, especially as manifested during the COVID-19 pandemic, thus highlighting the complexity of social media use by refugee communities, which are already in a precarious state given that Malaysia is not a signatory of the United Nations 1951 Refugee Convention. Yet it is also important to underline the ways in which Rohingya refugees exert agentic potential in (cyber)space. Rather than seeing their social media posts as apolitical, we explore how they negotiate a social media space fraught with tensions and potentialities to make their presence in Malaysia more salient through the exercise of “grateful politics”, as seen through hashtag campaigns—such #ThankYouMalaysia and #GratefulRohingya—and even self-policing within the Rohingya community to avoid external criticism from the general public. Effectively, these social media activities, in which both Malaysians and Rohingya refugees participate in, have implications for the discourses of Rohingya-ness and refugee-ness. It is productive to think about social media as a political tool that may be available to marginalised communities, serving as sites of political potentialities where the online and offline worlds are implicated in each other, thus allowing the Rohingya to draw upon tropes and narratives to counter xenophobia and harassment. This is important for highlighting the ways in which marginalised communities digitally navigate the intersections of precarity and promise, and how refugees may become agentic, political subjects.