Absent citizenship: A case study of the Rohingya Jasmine Burnley The world’s attention was captured when from August 2017, over 700,000 Rohingya, fleeing violent attacks by Myanmar authorities, began pouring over the Myanmar border and into Bangladesh.1 These atrocities have since been described by the UN Human Rights Council’s Independent Investigation Mechanism as ‘patterns of gross human rights violations which amount to the gravest crimes under international law’,2 (and) ‘elements of extermination and deportation’.3 Cox’s Bazar, in Bangladesh, which holds nearly 1 million Rohingya, is now the world’s biggest refugee camp, 4 and it is widely recognised that denial of citizenship intertwined with systemic discrimination has played a substantial role in the emergence of this crisis. As states have increasingly turned (back) towards the practice of citizenship revocation,5 the denial of citizenship for so many Rohingya, offers an important case for reflections on the entitlement to citizenship, and how revocation is understood. Unlike the practice in many developed countries (such as the UK,6 Australia7 and Canada8), where the deprivation or revocation of citizenship is constituted as an act,9 the revocation of Rohingya citizenship has been opaque and processual, unfolding over several decades, through (a) a gradual and symbolic reconceptualisation of citizenship as an entitlement premised primarily on belonging to a discrete set of nationally recognised ethnic groups; 10 (b) legally, through the promulgation of the 1982 Citizenship law which redefined the legal conditions under which full citizenship is enjoyed, excluding many Rohingya from holding citizenship because they were neither members of a recognised ethnic group nor had documentation to prove their existing citizenship;11 and (c) administratively, through practices that stripped Rohingya of their documentation and facilitated an iterative erosion of rights associated with citizenship.12 Further, the waves of Rohingya refugees in the 1970s, 80s and 90s, the widespread displacement of Rohingya people in response to  International Development Department, University of Birmingham. 1 International Committee of the Red Cross. Myanmar One Year On: Struggles Far From Over for Rakhine People. https://www.icrc.org/en/document/myanmar-one-year-struggles-far-over-people-rakhine 2 UNHRC-IIFFMM (2018), Report of the independent international fact-finding mission on Myanmar (IIFFMM), A/HRC/39/64. 39th Session. Distr.: General 12 September 2018. 19. 3 Ibid., 16. 4 UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) https://www.unocha.org/rohingya-refugee-crisis 5 Gibney, M. J. (2020), ‘Banishment and the pre-history of legitimate expulsion power’, Citizenship Studies, 24(3): 277-300. 6 See analysis of use of deprivation of citizenship orders in McGuiness T. and Gower M. (2017), Deprivation of British citizenship and withdrawal of passport facilities. House of Commons Library Briefing Paper 9 Jun 2017. 7 See Australian Citizenship Amendment (Allegiance to Australia) Act 2015. 8 See Citizenship Act and Bill C-24 Strengthening Canadian Citizenship Act of 2014. 9 For analysis on the revocation practices of selected country cases see Pillai S. and Williams G. (2017), ‘Twenty-First Century Banishment: Citizenship Stripping in Common Law Nations’. International and Comparative Law Quarterly, Volume 66, Issue 3 pp. 521-555; and Mantu S. (2018), ‘Terrorist’ citizens and the human right to nationality’, Journal of Contemporary European Studies, 26(1): 28-41. 10 Cheesman, N. (2017), ‘How in Myanmar “National Races” Came to Surpass Citizenship and Exclude Rohingya’, Journal of Contemporary Asia, 47(3): 461–483; Ware, A. and Laoutides, C. (2018), Myanmar's Rohingya Conflict. Oxford Scholarship Online. 11 Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion (ISI) (2019). Country Position Paper. Statelessness in Myanmar. 12 Nyi Nyi Kyaw (2017), ‘Unpacking the Presumed Statelessness of Rohingyas.’ Journal of Immigrant & Refugee Studies, 153): 269-286. 18