160 Looking Beyond Invisibility Accounts of documentation processes frequently feature state theft, deception, humiliation, and force. Documentation processes are also sites of resistance, through which Rohingya resist the (re)production of their statelessness and group destruction. Their narratives describe unity, heroism, tragedy, loss, and sometimes shame. They narrate the stories of “missing” documents that have been lost through confiscation, destruction, nullification, and targeted non-issuance, and of enforced and unwanted documents that have been issued as part of genocidal violence.29 3.2 Research Methods My research employs narrative and ethnographic research methods to explore the slow production of Rohingya statelessness in Myanmar since 1978. The research focuses on what identity papers signify to people, the shifting meanings attached to registration processes, and the meanings that are attributed to citizenship beyond state-issued identity documents. Research participants were Rohingya who had been displaced from Myanmar and were living in camps and other diasporic communities. In order to reach Rohingya from various different waves of forced migration from Myanmar since 1978, field work was conducted between August 2017 and December 2018 amongst Rohingya populations in Bangladesh, Malaysia, India, and Europe. Methods included focus groups, in-depth interviews, and observations from visits to significant sites and community events. There were 100 research participants, 9 focus groups, 61 interviews with durations between 20 minutes and 3.5 hours, and 23 sets of observations based on separate events. The collected data was then coded and analyzed thematically, including for its narrative content.30 For the purposes of this paper—to explore the notions of visibility and invisibility—I drew on a set of themes that emerged from my broader research relating to the different positive and negative powers attributed to identity documents. The emancipatory, repressive, and destructive powers of identity documents were themes that recurred throughout the data. In order to represent and illustrate these themes that occur more broadly in the research, I have chosen to use one Rohingya man’s account of three identity documents. Narrative research and rich description are effective ways to present what documents signify to holders and the meanings that individuals attach to various interactions with the state. As such, a single in-depth narrative, when employed as part of a much wider body of research, can provide a clear explanation and illustration of both the structures and subjectivities involved in documentation processes, as well as insights into everyday processes and practices.31 Mohammed’s story is one of many. It is not one of the more dramatic accounts, and he does not present events that occupy the extremities of human rights abuses or statedirected harm that some Rohingya have experienced. I selected his story because it binds together different periods of the history of state registration of Rohingya into one single narrative, and because his views and understandings of each era occupy a middle-ground that is broadly representative of other Rohingya that participated in this research. Mohammed’s story describes the three powers that he, other Rohingya, and academic literature from various fields attribute to ID cards. 4 Three Powers Attributed to State-Issued ID Cards In this section, the story of Mohammed’s encounters with the state through three identity documents is retold. Then, it is examined how documents feature in statelessness and social science literature, referring back to Mohammed’s accounts to provide context. His accounts are used to illustrate some of the recurring themes within my qualitative research relating to visibility and invisibility. The purpose is to identify the relevance of various social science analyses to Rohingya situation and to point towards the importance of further analysis of the meaning of documents to communities affected by statelessness. Three themes relating to the power of identity documents are identified. The first draws primarily from statelessness literature and relates to the emancipatory power of documents. The second focuses on the repressive powers of documents found in literature on surveillance and securitization. The third draws on notions from within the sociology and anthropology of genocide relating to the destruction and reorganization of national and ethnic identities. 29 30 31 Natalie Brinham, ‘“Genocide cards”: Rohingya refugees on why they risked their lives to refuse ID cards’ (openDemocracy, 21 October 2018) <https://www.opendemocracy.net/natalie-brinham/genocide-cards-why-rohingya-refugees-are-resisting-id-cards> accessed on 4 January 2018. Amanda Coffey and Paul Atkinson, Making sense of qualitative data: complementary research strategies (SAGE Publications 1996). Corrine Squire and others, What is Narrative Research? (Bloomsbury 2014); D Jean Clandinin and F Michael Connelly, Narrative Inquiry: Experience and Story and Qualitative Research (Jossey-Bass 2000); Catherine Kohler Riessman, Narrative Methods for the Human Sciences (SAGE Publications 2008).