JOURNAL OF ETHNIC AND MIGRATION STUDIES 4801 Bhat exposes how racialisation and exceptionalism in political contexts generate exclusionary legal practices, where law serves as both a tool and a legitimising cover for citizenship deprivation. They further highlight the interplay between legal citizenship processes and social constructs. The significance of paperwork emerges in how these processes perpetuate exclusion. The contributions draw attention to the distinct social significance of documents among various groups, such as Miya Muslims (Das) and defendant lawyers representing persons facing threats to citizenship status (Bhat). There is a profound concern for accuracy and errors in these documents. Instead of dismissing this concern (assuming that documentary claims will be decided based on social relations beyond these documents), Das seriously considers the ‘objectification’ of documents, making it a focal point of her study. She argues that citizenship claims and rejections among Assam’s char communities hinge deeply on documentary accuracy, including aspects like spellings and photo angles. Despite severe marginalisation, documents remain ‘key to the very formation of networks and organization of people’. This parallels Tiwari et al.’s observations that ‘unsettled normative and legal conceptions’ under Indian law render Rohingyas vulnerable. A ‘general lack of clarity’ about refugee law in India becomes a means to entrench vulnerability. These arguments converge in the idea that legalities are constructed, and uncertainties in legal norms and legal documents have tangible effects on vulnerable communities. Such uncertainties – be they ‘documentary gaps’ (Berger and Garg 2024) in Assam or ‘procedural gaps’ (Tiwari et al.) in refugee regulations – are not a natural state but profoundly political, either actively constructed through prejudiced state action or cumulatively through racialised state inaction. In essence, liminal citizenship is constructed through various means: states issuing ‘thin’ (error-ridden) documents (Das), imposing ‘burdensome’ procedures (Berger and Garg 2024), and fostering ‘documentary doublethink’ (Bhat). The contributions, taken together, redefine law not merely as a tool or outcome but as a constitutive process. They conceive law and policy not merely by individual legal impacts but by their collective and interdependent influences. For example, Tiwari et al. examine the ‘process’ of Rohingya illegalisation in India through ‘interconnected’ policies. Similarly, Bhat delves into India’s Foreigners Tribunals, exposing discretionary, exceptionalist, racialised and inherently contradictory features that generate precarious citizenship. Berger and Garg highlight the contradictory interactions within historically evolving legal frameworks that undermine citizenship status. Citizenship attrition and regime transformation The question of regime identity, and regime transformation are central to these dynamics. This is because of the erosion of democratic rule, as the contributions in this special issue show, flow from, produce and constitute, in the different ways, the erosion of citizenship. The contributions reflect on the relationship between the attrition of democratic rule and citizenship status in different ways. In India, this relationship is marked by the politicisation of the insider/outsider (citizen/noncitizen, majority/minority) in the ostensible democratic sphere, and through this, the growing popular authorisation of the slide towards a hybrid polity. Citizenship law has become the site of ethnonationalist