    between laws and how they function in society have spurred a rich scholarship on the bureaucratic and administrative state practices that are often involved in the production of statelessness, a phenomenon also explored in the contributions to this volume.71 Such socio-legal approaches, often involving ethnographic research (see Chapter 6), have expanded our understanding of the origin and consequences of statelessness in Asia. As a start, it bears noting that many nationality laws in the region have deep roots in colonial histories. One colonial legacy is the dominance of jus sanguinis as the primary mode of acquisition of nationality at birth in Asia.72 This contrasts with the practice in the Americas, where jus soli is more widely used. Even where jus soli was initially adopted, countries in Asia have followed a global trend in the abolition of automatic jus soli, often by replacing relevant provisions with more conditional forms of jus soli.73 The chapter on India in this book, for example, examines this gradual evolution towards more restrictive modes of acquisition of nationality. Combined with the prevalent reliance on legal documentation and mounting burden of proof – frequently affecting some groups more than others – these developments have forced many populations to undergo costly, complex, and difficult administrative processes to seek to prove their citizenship, sometimes unsuccessfully. Colonial legacy may also manifest in underlying prejudices and discriminatory practices embedded in the citizenship regime. Indeed, chapters in this volume show how state practices have rendered many communities in the region stateless, often in arbitrary and discriminatory ways. The intersection of gender and statelessness is another area studied in this book, particularly as arising from cross-border marriages. As in other regions in the world, the abolition of gender-discriminatory nationality laws, allowing women to possess their independent nationality and granting them equal rights with men in their ability to acquire, change, retain or pass on their nationality, has been a long and protracted process. Brunei, Malaysia and Nepal are among the countries in the region that still 71 See also Jamie Liew, Ghost Citizens: Decolonial Apparitions of Stateless, Foreign and Wayward Figures in Law (Fernwood Publishing 2024) and Kamil Sadiq, Paper Citizens: How Illegal Immigrants Acquire Citizenship in Developing Countries (Oxford University Press, 2009). 72 Olivier Vonk, ‘Comparative Report: Citizenship in Asia’ (Comparative Report 2017/04, GLOBALCIT December 2017). 73 ibid. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009399555.003 Published online by Cambridge University Press