8 M. SCHISSLER Table 1. Stanton’s “8 Stages of genocide.” 1. Classification 2. Symbolization 3. Dehumanization 4. Organization 5. Polarization 6. Preparation 7. Extermination 8. Denial Most analyses of Facebook and genocide in Myanmar fit within just the first three stages of Stanton’s model, because these are the stages that deal with speech that is about the victims – classifying, symbolizing, and dehumanizing them. But Stanton’s model highlights the importance of other intermediary steps before the final stages of “extermination.” His fifth stage, “polarization,” might as well have been called “in-group policing”: his description includes the “intimidating and silencing … [of those] from the perpetrators’ own group … most able to stop genocide.”39 Yet the stages that Stanton described also often occur sim­ ultaneously rather than in sequence. More significantly, sometimes these processes can occur, yet genocide fails to be the result. Over the last two decades, therefore, scholars have increasingly sought to develop theories that can account for such “failed” cases.40 A factor that studies of individual failed cases consistently identify is the relative success of pro­ cesses here termed “in-group policing.”41 Straus, meanwhile, synthesized such research into a diagnostic tool designed to assist policymakers and others working in situations of poten­ tial genocide.42 Among broad risk factors, his tool includes the strength of actors that could serve as sources of restraint.43 Among short-term dynamics of escalation, meanwhile, it includes steps to marginalize or intimidate potential opponents and cut off inter-group relations.44 Ultimately, this literature points to the importance of in-group policing, across a variety of contexts and utilizing a variety of practices, within the larger process of mobiliz­ ing genocide. The following section will analyze these practices in Myanmar during the five years immediately before the 2016–17 military operation against the Rohingya. In-Group Policing in Myanmar The Rohingya and other Muslims in western Myanmar have faced violence and discrimi­ nation for decades, including through military operations in 1978 and the early 1990s,45 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 Stanton, “The Ten Stages,” 2. For example, Deborah Mayersen, “Deconstructing Risk and Developing Resilience: The Role of Inhibitory Factors in Genocide Prevention,” in Reconstructing Atrocity Prevention, ed. Alex Zucker, Sheri Rosenberg, and Tibi Galis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 277–94; Scott Straus, “Retreating from the Brink: Theorizing Mass Vio­ lence and the Dynamics of Restraint,” Perspectives on Politics 10, no. 2 (2012): 343–62. For example, Jeffrey S. Kopstein and Jason Wittenberg, Intimate Violence: Anti-Jewish Pogroms on the Eve of the Holo­ caust (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2018); Max Bergholz, Violence as a Generative Force: Identity, Nationalism, and Memory in a Balkan Community (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016). Note that accounts of intra-group mobilization often feature in-group policing at key junctures, even where the explanatory emphasis is elsewhere. For example, Subhasish Ray, “Intra-Group Interactions and Inter-Group Violence: Sikh Mobilization during the Partition of India in a Comparative Perspective,” Journal of Genocide Research 19, no. 3 (3 July 2017): 391, 394, 396. Straus, Making and Unmaking Nations, Appendix. Ibid., 3b, 4ei. Ibid., 2ai, 2ii, 3a, 3b. Ken MacLean, “Genocidal Violence against the Rohingya in Myanmar,” in Centuries of Genocide: Critical Essays and Eyewitness Accounts, 5th Edition, ed. Samuel Totten (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2022), 553–79; Ronan Lee, Myanmar’s Rohingya Genocide: Identity, History and Hate Speech (London: Bloomsbury, 2021); Carlos Sardiña Galache, The Burmese Labyrinth: A History of the Rohingya Tragedy (London: Verso Books, 2020); Anthony Ware and Costas Laoutides, Myanmar’s “Rohingya” Conflict (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018); Francis Wade, Myanmar’s Enemy Within: Buddhist Violence and the Making of a Muslim “Other” (London: Zed Books, 2017); Azeem Ibrahim, The Rohingyas: Inside Myanmar’s Hidden Genocide (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); Maung Zarni and Alice Cowley, “The Slow-Burning Genocide of Myanmar’s Rohingya,” Pacific Rim Law & Policy Journal 23, no. 3 (2014): 681–752.