Today’s Rohingya crisis began abruptly with the combined Japanese imperial and Burmese nationalist conquest of Arakan, in 1943. It now stands alone for its horrific brutality and legal intractability; but it can also be understood an extreme example of coercive processes – operating various scales and levels of violence – which have produced national state territories in much of the world, and very visibly in South Asia, where they are still at work. The nation is still taking shape in South Asia, and military violence has been a basic feature of its territorial development since the nineteenth century, when territories that became naturalized as “India” came together for the first time under British imperialism. India’s national story can be told as though Partition was merely a sad event on the way to a people’s idealistic creation of the world’s largest democracy. Partition can also be seen, however, as part of on-going national processes of coercive territorial exclusion – the national expulsion of people deemed foreign to the nation – and forced territorial inclusion, which together constitute the structural violence of national state territorial sovereignty. The exclusion of Muslims from Hindu India and Buddhist Burma, the murder of Tamil territorial aspirations in Sri Lanka, India’s military incarceration of Kashmir, and Pakistan’s coercive control of Baluchistan – all these and more suggest the structural violence of nationalist idealism as it translates practically into secure integration of national state territorial sovereignty.