Introduction 3 production of statelessness. It is generally understood that Rohingya were rendered stateless by the 1982 Citizenship Law.4 The law stripped back the provisions in the 1948 Union Citizenship Act5 for the acquisition of citizenship through different routes including elected citizenship, marriage, and residence, and made access to ‘full’ or automatic citizenship almost exclusively dependant on membership of an ethnic group considered ‘national’ by the Council of State (paragraph 4). The list of ethnic groups was decided entirely at the discretion of the state based on inaccurate and misleading British colonial ‘racial’ categories prior to the first Anglo/Burma war in 1824 (Zarni and Cowley 2014; Zarni and Brinham 2017). The broad and loosely defined ‘racial’ categories contained in the 1948 provisions were broken down into a list of 135 national ethnic groups on which the application of the 1982 law and national registration system was based. Rohingya were excluded from this list. This stripped Rohingya of both their rights to nationality and their claim to indigeneity. Whilst it was possible to apply for citizenship based on descent from citizens prior to Myanmar’s independence, in practice the evidential requirements and administrative barriers made this process almost impossible for most Rohingya (de Chickera, Arraiza et al. 2021). Whilst the law is deeply significant to the current and future human rights situation in Myanmar, Rohingya oral histories often describe the stripping of their citizenship as a long state-directed campaign that was intertwined with social, economic, and physical destruction. For many, the citizenship law was viewed as simply one weapon used against them in a large arsenal belonging to a hostile militarised state. As one close Rohingya colleague corrected me when I asked about Myanmar’s laws, assumptions that security and justice predominantly flow from national law, are reserved for the privileged with experience of living under (semi)functional systems of rule of law. Rohingya identity, like that of many of Myanmar’s ethnic groups, cannot be disentangled from a sense of belonging to the land. The name itself is derived from terms for the Rakhine region which falls within the borders of today’s Myanmar (Charney 2007). Rohingya homelands are on the eastern coast of the Bay of Bengal, an area characterised by ethnic and religious diversity, with a long history of international trade, human movement and cultural and intellectual exchange, and shifting centres of power (Amrith 2013). The homelands lie to the east of the Naf River which today marks the boundary between Bangladesh and Myanmar. Rohingya did not come to the region; Imperial powers, states, borders, immigration rules, and identity documents came to the Rohingya.6 In a world dominated by methodological nationalism in which people and places are assumed to be naturally and timelessly organised into bordered states and bounded nationalities, Rohingya have been displaced in situ in many imaginings, from government officials to the Myanmar public to international policymakers. This has profoundly influenced the different international approaches to resolving the human rights deficits they experience.