4794 M. A. BHAT AND R. SHAHID citizenship one. They could have equally said that the non-citizenship crisis and citizenship crisis (discussed in detail by Sharma and Bhat), in fact, constitute each other. Wider processes of racialisation both aggravate and deepen the line between outsider/insider, and paradoxically, flatten the distinction between them altogether. The so-called insider cannot be secure in status. This is why racialised policies and politics affect formally citizens and non-citizens together. Consequently, thinking about these processes of racialisation in these crisscrossing ways has the advantage of denaturalising the citizen-noncitizen binary. It reconceptualises the problem at hand. States in the region have framed their policies as if wanting to keep non-members out. But as contribution after contribution shows, these policies racialise both citizens and non-citizens. In fact, perhaps most troublingly, they transform citizens into non-citizens. Racialised policies, thus, produce and manufacture the demarcations of legal/illegal, members/non-members, citizens/non-citizens, documented/nondocumented through various political and legal practices. These dynamics have tremendous costs for democracy in the region. Right wing, populist and ethnic party politics in the region have instrumentalised the racialisation of citizenship to entrench themselves, depending on the country, as dominant electoral players and/or in the state. Modi in India and Rajapaksha in Sri Lanka, for instance, have capitalised on divisive ethnic politics to win elections. Modi’s Bhartiya Janata Party, in particular, has actively used the highly charged and racialised discourse on Muslims, ‘illegal migrants’ and citizenship to polarise civil society, stigmatise and target political opposition, and undermine democratic freedoms. All these developments, as argued by contributors (e.g. Shahid and Lee), also create grounds for perverse transformations of the body politic itself: from an inclusive democratic one to an ethnic state. Liminal and precarious citizenship The articles in the special issue also illuminate the crucial subject of precarious and liminal status. This subject has increasingly become a major focus of global scholarship, especially in the context of immigration (Lori 2017). The special issue advances this conversation by showing how states – taking the region as an example – produce liminality of their own citizens. There are several key themes related to liminality that the contributions develop. The first relates to the modalities and channels of producing status liminality. The most significant factor here is the strategic abuse of law and bureaucracy (more below). Legal identity documents in particular play a disconcerting role. Despite diverging focuses and geographical scopes, these articles converge on the notion that bureaucratic and legal structures established by states can engender a state of ‘in-betweenness’ or liminality among specific social groups, significantly influencing their rights and livelihoods. Drawing on the groundwork laid by scholars like Menjívar (2006) and Goldring, Berinstein, and Bernhard (2009), these articles scrutinize how the proliferation of legal and documentary regimes generates liminality among precarious citizens, compelled to navigate intricate bureaucratic pathways. This finding, of course, is not new. Notably, in the context of India, scholars (e.g. Jayal 2013; Zamindar 2007) have noted the significance of identity documents in acquiring citizenship during the early years of partition and the ensuing litigations between