4790 M. A. BHAT AND R. SHAHID underscores the urgency to dissect the contemporary complexities prevalent in this region. Understanding the intricate interplay between historical injustices, the rise of right-wing politics, and citizenship challenges is pivotal. It sheds light on the enduring humanitarian crises faced by stateless and displaced minority communities. There are also more immediate policy implications. As the sorry history of statelessness makes more than evident, any meaningful attempt at resolving such crises must be based on international dialogue. The case of Tamils in Sri Lanka testifies to this. The attempted resolution of Tamil citizenship crisis was in important ways a result of the diplomatic process between Sri Lanka and India. Unfortunately, no such attempt has been made in the other crises that this special issue documents and highlights. Besides comparatively exploring the shared themes of mutual attrition, this special issue also makes contributions in terms of its methodological approach. We do not conceive of the South and Southeast Asian ‘region’ merely as a static space but as a socially and political pregnant ‘place’ (Kabachnik 2012) that is produced by and in turn constitutes mobilities. From this perspective, the geographical focus is not so much to capture the politics on either side of stable borders. It is to understand how this stability is politically produced and what political work does this constructed stability do. This special issue views this region as a hub constituting what one of the articles describes as ‘neighbourhood effects’ (Berger and Garg 2024). These neighbourhood effects take several forms that the contributions make visible through a focus on India-Bangladesh (e.g. Gogoi and Sen, Bhat), India-Myanmar (e.g. Tiwari et al 2024), and Sri LankaMyanmar-India (e.g. Berger and Garg 2024; Shahid and Lee 2024). Some neighbourhood effects are more direct, for example India’s partition in 1947, which disrupted historical continuities of geographies, livelihoods and belongings. The partition, though, did not remove or minimise the neighbourhood effects. As the articles on Assam show (Bhat, Das, Gogoi and Sen, Sharma), they soon manifested in stigmatising minorities who found themselves on the ‘wrong side’ of the border. The partition was thus not lost in the past, but is an event that lives on in postcolonial politics today. Past mobilities, the special issue demonstrates, continue to constitute state formation in the present. Thinking of space in these socially constructivist terms (Harvey 1996) also emphasises how geographies are constituted through complex processes of mobility, historical and contemporary, real and imagined. The regional focus illuminates how territory becomes the intersection point or a terminus of the flow of populations and ideas, constituting new political constellations, governance practices and perceptions of crises. The region is a hub of mobilities for security, and mobilities constructed as security threats. The account of the Rohingyas in India (Tiwari et al) shows how mobility for safety remains a privilege. Other accounts in the special issue (e.g. Sharma) show how these mobilities become securitised, based on moral panics. The contributions also show that politically pertinent mobilities can often be in the realm of political fiction. Bhat for instance shows how political paranoias of unfounded illegal immigration – generating anxieties of demographic and democratic subversion – have come to legitimise exceptionalist legal procedures in Assam, rendering millions in a state of precariousness. Another important methodological dimension of the special issue is its emphasis on the theory-generative capacities of the Global South. It seeks to theoretically illuminate empirical concerns shared by several global sites. It radically transcends the North–