30 Papers, cards, and perilous encounters with the state In this way, we were able to co-construct narratives about Rohingya citizenship, statelessness, and state crime in ways that were more conversational and natural than regular interviews. It was not only the places that generated useful reflections but also the interactions between individual Rohingya with different upbringings, and other local populations. Such visits included: (a) Shahpuri island at the mouth of the River Naf from which many of the media images of burning villages, arriving refugees, and washed-up bodies were taken in 2017. Our visit, a few weeks before the first anniversary of these assaults, was an act of remembrance in which we visited the places from which the photos had been taken. The island is also a place of cross-border trade, where residents across the years have provided shelter for fleeing refugees and freedom fighters. It is also the area associated with the first Anglo-Burma war in 1824, which enabled Rohingya and Rakhine Buddhist refugees pushed out by the Burman invasion/annexation of Rakhine State to return to their homelands in Rakhine (Phayre 1883; Harvey 1925). (b) ‘No man’s land’ or ‘ground zero’ where genocide survivors (not registered by the regular refugee procedures) lived between the Myanmar border fence and Bangladesh territory. At the time, this community had become the frontline in the resistance to repatriations, where they would be approached at the border fence by Burmese and INGO officials to discuss return. The residents’ refusal to return at the time made them heroes of endurance and resistance in some of the narratives of some Rohingya participants. The day of the visit came immediately after the worst day of flooding since arrival. Rohingya make-shift homes were waist high in flood water and the community took it in turns standing under umbrellas on the small wooden bridge between Myanmar and Bangladesh and wandering on to the dry lands on the Bangladesh side, watched by armed Bangladeshi border guards from their concrete outpost. (c) The Buddhist temples in Ramu, a district of Cox’s Bazar, to explore shared Buddhist/Muslim histories of the region. We spoke with the Lord Abbot, in his nineties, and who had provided shelter to multi-religious communities during Bangladesh’s war of independence and had an interest in multi-religious resistances during the colonial and pre-colonial eras. This and other temples we visited were attacked in religious violence in 2012 and were then under the protection of state security forces. We visited on the anniversary of the 2012 attacks when media and others had come to mark the anniversary. (d) Some Bangladeshi villages around Ramu Upazila including a small agricultural village that was the relocation site for a Bangladeshi community displaced by climate change. We discussed attitudes of communities to Rohingya, shared borders, identity loss, government and community responses to displacement, etc.