Statelessness, Governance, and the Problem of Citizenship out that the conferral of citizenship can likewise contribute to problematic social control and erasure. Kingston gives the example of citizenship in a colonised state that effectively forces Indigenous peoples to operate within a system within which their own identity, status and sovereignty may not fit. 23 Historically, citizenship has also been imposed on certain foreign populations to consolidate colonialism and aid governance. 24 In another chapter, Haqqi Bahram similarly explains, regarding the conferral of nationality to certain Syrian Kurds, that ‘once a person is able to change legal status from stateless to national, a long-lasting legacy of statelessness unfolds’. 25 Overall, as Kingston argues, these observations mean that careful attention must be given to any assumption that ‘[posits] legal nationality alone as a solution to the rights abuses associated with statelessness’. 26 In their chapter, ‘Legal Identity and Rebel Governance’, 27 Katherine Fortin, Bart Klem and Marika Sosnowski provide an interdisciplinary ‘comparative perspective on lived consequence of contested sovereignty’. This chapter complicates looking at citizenship/legal identity and governance in an important way: it acknowledges armed rebel groups challenging the state as actors with a potentially significant role regarding legal identity in practice. Armed conflict can create great challenges or even impossibilities for affected populations to access civil status documentation. 28 This chapter explores how certain insurgent groups, usually when they are in de facto control of some territory and parts of a population, do in fact issue documentation concerning life events such as births, marriages and educational achievements and confer legal identity documents of certain kinds. As the authors explain, these assertions of governance can exist alongside those of the state in question. The comparative aspect of the chapter is a consideration of the key similarities and differences in how insurgent groups instil legal identity compared to states. This, the authors base around a typology of three broad factors affecting the conferral or not of legal identity or related documentation to populations living under a non-state group’s de facto control. These factors are the nature of the insurgency (eg does the group have sovereign ambitions? To what extent is it trying to establish or ‘mimic’ state structures and geographic control?), the nature of the state against which they are fighting (eg to what extent is state bureaucracy well-instituted, or weak and intermittent, within the society?) and the temporal stage or trajectory of the conflict (eg this includes thinking about the consequences for the holders of rebel-conferred legal identity documents once an insurgency ends). The chapter then reflects upon how legal identity in relation to rebel governance can be conceptualised, once again setting out three strands of fruitful future thought: rebel governance and de facto sovereignty, state performance and mimicry, and legal scholarship in relation to non-state armed groups. For me, given also that the authors explain that ‘there is 23 24 25 26 27 28 Kingston, ‘The Weaponisation of Citizenship’ (n 23) 101. See also Tendayi Bloom, ‘Members of Colonised Groups, Statelessness and the Right to Have Rights’ in Tendayi Bloom, Katherine Tonkiss and Phillip Cole (eds), Understanding Statelessness (Routledge 2017) 153. ibid 102. Bahram (n 19) 266. Kingston, ‘The Weaponisation of Citizenship’ (n 23) 107. Katherine Fortin, Bart Klem and Marika Sosnowski, ‘Legal Identify and Rebel Governance: A Comparative Perspective on Lived Consequence of Contested Sovereignty’ in Tendayi Bloom and Lindsey N Kingston (eds), Statelessness, Governance, and the Problem of Citizenship (Manchester University Press 2021) 125. Katharine Fortin, ‘To Be or Not to Be?: Legal Identity in Crisis in Non-International Armed Conflicts’ (2021) 43(1) Human Rights Quarterly 29. 363