JOURNAL OF ETHNIC AND MIGRATION STUDIES 4793 can interact with larger national trends and produce citizenship attrition. While Gogoi and Sen concentrate on how local politics – bottom-to-top dynamics – undermine citizenship, Shahid and Lee offer a different entry point by focussing on how racialisation gets incorporated, entrenched and expressed in regime forms. Comparing cross-nationally and regionally, Shahid and Lee call these polities ‘Saffron Ethnocracies’ for incorporating ethnic divisions in their laws and policies, including in their citizenship regimes. This is informed by Yiftachel’s work (1998, 2008) on Israel which presents a critical distinction between democracy, where politicians represent the population of a territory (the demos), and ethnocracy, a form of nationalism where a dominant ethnic group (the ethnos) wields control over the state to mould both the territory and society along ethnic lines (more below). Read together, Gogoi and Sen (for India and Assam), and Shahid and Lee, and Berger and Garg (for India, Sri Lanka and Myanmar) show how local, national and regional can produce racialised regimes of citizenship. These three articles complement answering this question from, so to say, opposing directions. Gogoi and Sen point out the interaction of national politics and the ‘little nationalisms’ of sub-national pockets in doing so. Thus, they do so by going inwards, from national to sub-national. The other two contributors go outwards by engaging in a cross-national comparison. The articles also highlight the modalities through which states racialize citizenship. The articles by Gogoi and Sen, and Das, for example, show the historically evolving racialisation of Miya Muslims communities in Assam, crucially through legal and bureaucratic routes. Bhat documents the wider national-level racialisation of Muslims in India and its implications on the legal regulation and administration of citizenship status in Assam. These three articles bring forth the practical manifestations of the study by Shahid and Turner (2022) who previously examined the implications of India’s discriminatory citizenship laws, to show how minority groups who have experienced deprivation of citizenship or have been labelled as ‘illegal’ under these frameworks, compare to global contexts of deracination of citizenship. The contributors also show how racialised features have been embedded in ostensibly inclusive citizenship regimes in the region often tied to the continuities of colonial practices. These exclusivist and racialised features were embedded in subtle ways in the three countries at the postcolonial moment during the 1940s. Sometimes they were incorporated through legal process that created uncertainty and citizenship liminality (Berger and Garg 2024) (more below); other times it is through the continuation of colonial ‘hybrid bureaucracies’ (Bhat citing Berda 2022) that governed citizenship status; still others by explicit discrimination against minorities despite adopting neutral legal language (Gogoi and Sen). Taken together, the contributions also shed light on the several sites and subjects of racialisation, and its impact on the stability of citizenship status. Bhat’s contribution shows how racialisation transforms the ‘legal common sense’ in relation to how paperwork as ‘juridical truth’ of citizenship evidence is constructed in India. Furthermore, the prism of racialisation (as well as securitisation, another theme we discuss below) allows us to consider that the distinctions of citizen/non-citizen are inadequate to think about the attrition of citizenship. In fact, there is a profound constitutive relationship between the insider and the outsider. Tiwari et al, for instance, show how in India there is a ‘non-citizenship crisis’ that is simultaneously in existence along with a