3 By-passing state power and neutralising state bureaucracies in international approaches to statelessness Introduction In Chapter 2, I explained how my analysis would focus on both the narratives of Rohingya participants and key human rights texts that outline policy approaches. This dual approach enables me to identify where Rohingya framings of their statelessness as state crime diverged from existing dominant approaches to statelessness. In this chapter, I explore some of those texts, including the mandates and action plans of UN and other international and development agencies working on issues related to the right to nationality, the right to identity, and statelessness.1 I also supplement the analysis with critiques from within statelessness studies, an emerging critical and interdisciplinary field (Recalde-Vela, Jaghai-Bajulaiye et al. 2019). The purpose of this chapter is to provide some context on how ‘the state’ and ‘the stateless person’ have been constructed within global governance agendas on nationality and statelessness.2 It considers first how approaches to statelessness evolved in ways that largely by-pass the issues of states’ central roles in producing and reproducing statelessness and state crime. It considers how archetypal notions of the ‘stateless person’ as invisible to states and international bureaucracies have emerged, shaping policies that approach statelessness as a result of state oversight rather than state crime. In this chapter, I understand statelessness as both a legal/bureaucratic category and an evolving discursive concept within global governance that interacts with policy at the international and national levels. More than a technical legal category, and relating to more than a set of policies, statelessness as a discursive concept relates to a system of knowledge and communication imbued with power which shapes social practices and constructs the way people experience the world. The term ‘stateless’ also sets the parameters of policy discussions and profoundly influences international policy recommendations and action plans (Fiddian-Qasmiyeh 2016). Discursive concepts such as ‘stateless’ embody both power relations and subjectivities—as such, they are sites of both domination and resistance (Wetherell 2001; Jørgensen and Phillips 2002). To explain that in more concrete terms, Rohingya narratives throughout this research referred to statelessness not simply as a DOI: 10.4324/9781003494539-3 This chapter has been made available under a CC-BY 4.0 license.