relevance to the production and experience of statelessness. This has
affected both historical and more contemporary forms of mobility.
An example of the former is the scattered communities of maritime
mobile populations or ‘sea nomads’ in the region, including the Moken
of the Andaman Sea of Myanmar and Thailand, and the Bajau Laut of
the Sulu Sea. State-based nationality laws and registration systems
grounded in a system of fixed territorial links struggle to capture the
particularities of such populations, who have lived mobile lifestyles for
centuries.118 In Chapter 9, Acciaioli, Brunt and Clifton explore some of
these issues in the case of trans-border Bajau Laut (or Sama Dilaut)
communities of eastern Sabah, located at the interface of east Malaysia
and the Philippines and Indonesia.
More contemporary forms of cross-border mobility also intersect with
statelessness in the region, including labour migration. Irregular
migration forms a significant part of this mobility, including human
trafficking, both affecting stateless persons and leading to new risks of
statelessness.119 In Chapter 7, Kneebone explores the rising phenomenon
of marriage migration, especially from Southeast Asia to East Asia, and
how its gendered dimension generates risks of statelessness.120
Finally, violent conflict and mass atrocities have generated multiple
displacements and forced migration movements across Asia, both historically and in contemporary times. Guo therefore explores the intersection between violent conflict and statelessness in Chapter 5 with the
example of stateless ex-Kuomintang soldiers and their descendants in
Thailand, noting that conflict and atrocities may lead to statelessness, but
equally statelessness may result in conflict and serious human rights
violations. These dynamics are also made visible by Kyaw in
Chapter 11 on the Rohingya and the ongoing contestations over their
citizenship status in Myanmar after the 2021 military coup. Kyaw highlights how politicization of citizenship (and its denial) could be weaponized by political factions for violence and power, and how embedded
Janepicha Cheva-Isarakul, and Christoph Sperfeldt, ‘Citizenship and Statelessness
among Mobile Maritime Populations: The Case of the Moken in Thailand’ (2023) 27
(4) Citizenship Studies 530.
119
Conny Rijken et al., The Nexus between Statelessness and Human Trafficking in Thailand
(Wolf Legal Publishers 2015).
120
See also Susan Kneebone, Brandais York and Sayomi Ariyawansa, ‘Degrees of
Statelessness: Children of Returned Marriage Migrants in Can Tho, Vietnam’ (2019) 1
(1) Statelessness & Citizenship Review 169.
118
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009399555.003 Published online by Cambridge University Press