20 Papers, cards, and perilous encounters with the state their own stories, or family and community stories in ways that focused on the meanings they attributed to objects, and from there they could divulge as much or as little about individual or collective violence as they felt comfortable with. I was careful to read the silences, pauses, and contradictions, to respect those awkward moments and not to push beyond them. This was my way of giving greater autonomy and control to participants. As researchers, it is for us to both ‘minimise harm’ and ensure we aim to ‘bring about reciprocal benefits for refugee participants and/or communities’(Mackenzie, McDowell et al. 2007:299). On the basis of this ethical principle, I sought to understand the limitation of my own research before extracting information from survivors of trauma, and tried to ensure that there was a ‘favourable ethical cost-benefit ratio’ for survivors and research participants (Newman, Risch et al. 2006:29). As well as encompassing these ethical considerations, ID narratives also provided an excellent entry point for exploring state power, social relations, and identity formation and destruction in ways that captured individual positionality, affect, and emotion, as well as the shifting and evolving structures that framed Rohingya experiences. This chapter explores the role of IDs in the lives of survivors and in state crime and statelessness research. ‘This document is like a map of where we belong’: IDs and identities In the early stages of collecting Rohingya oral histories relating to the production of statelessness, it became apparent that many Rohingya narratives about the state’s role centred around their identity documents. Many researchers working with diaspora, asylum-seekers, irregular migrants, or stateless persons are familiar with the central role that documents play in lives and narratives of those with precarious or uncertain legal status. As such, scholarship has explored how state power is experienced through state-issued documents (Navaro-Yashin 2007; Sadiq 2009; Hull 2012; Reddy 2015; Williams 2019). Rohingya narratives relating to their documents worked on multiple levels— they were not only evidence of claims to Myanmar citizenship but also state-issued artefacts that could plot policies and practices relating to their diminishing legal status; they were the purveyors of state-ascribed categories that destroyed and imposed (rather than recorded) national, religious, and ethnic identities; they were a series of encounters with the state during which Rohingya resisted identity destruction; and they were objects through which refugees could articulate their hopes, fears, and desires for the future. To illustrate some of the potential for ID narratives to produce rich data, I here draw on the narrative of a Rohingya man called Gulam (not his real name).1 As the two young Rohingya interpreters and I were coming to the end of a long day of interviewing in a bamboo shelter in a section of the ‘megacamp’ still under construction, an older gentleman approached us.2 He had heard