Abstract
Anniversaries are powerful instruments of nation-building, political legitimacy and collective memory. Yet for stateless peoples like the Rohingya – systematically stripped of citizenship in Myanmar and forcibly displaced into refugee camps in Bangladesh – commemorative recognition remains structurally foreclosed. This article argues that the absence of formal recognition surrounding Rohingya suffering constitutes what I term an ‘invisible anniversary’: a politically produced silence that renders violence ongoing, ungrievable and internationally manageable. Drawing on twenty-four in-depth oral history interviews conducted across three phases (January–May 2025) and six narrative case studies, the article demonstrates that these women’s narratives function as counter-commemorative praxis – embodied acts of remembrance that resist temporal erasure and assert political claims to memory, justice and future-making. Theoretically, the article brings memory studies into dialogue with anticolonial feminist scholarship and International Relations, challenging state-centric approaches to commemoration by foregrounding stateless, gendered memory as a site of international political intervention. The analysis contributes to scholarship on memory politics, displacement and transnational justice by centring refugee women’s oral histories not as supplementary testimony but as epistemologically generative counter-archives.