42 By-passing state power and neutralising state bureaucracies product of negotiations with these post-colonial states, as well as Britain, and was also influenced by socialism.11 It largely balanced notions of indigeneity, with other links to the country, as well as loyalty and elective citizenship. It was after the advent of military rule in 1962, where debates relating to self-determination were playing out internationally, that the military state in Burma began to reorganise inter-ethnic relations and notions of citizenship around more exclusive and exclusionary forms of national identity (Zarni and Brinham 2017; Charney 2018). By the time these exclusions were encoded in the 1982 Citizenship Law, the Burmese state had sweeping powers to establish the rules in ways that breached non-discrimination norms and effectively withdrew nationality from Rohingya and other minorities (de Chickera, Arraiza et al. 2021). The British acting Head of Mission to Myanmar in private correspondence captured the tension between self-determination of colonised peoples and discrimination in the then-newly enacted 1982 Burma Citizenship Law: The new law is blatantly discriminatory on racial grounds. If the new procedures that are being prepared turn out to be as rigorous as we suspect they will be, then the Law may in practice be even more discriminatory than its text pretends. On the other hand, it would be possible to argue that the new Law is a generous and far-sighted instrument to resolve over a period of time an awkward legacy of the colonial era.12 Despite the fact that the 1982 law, then, was blatantly discriminatory and denied many the right to nationality, no were few avenues through which international pressure could be placed on Burma to comply with international non-discrimination norms in citizenship rules. The alignment of statist and human rights interests in matters of statelessness This section considers how reducing statelessness and assigning a nationality to every person relates to both statist and human rights concerns. It highlights the implications of the alignment of these interests in terms of lending state registration and identification projects’ legitimacy and resources. Statelessness as a statist concern As noted, citizenship is linked to national sovereignty, with states retaining broad discretion to determine their own membership (see also Goldston 2006; Spiro 2011).13 Nationality law, thus remains within ‘the reserved domain’ of states (Conklin 2014) and has been described as ‘the last bastion in the citadel of sovereignty’ (Spiro 2011: 746). However, this discretion is not absolute and is limited, at least in theory, by human rights obligations.