48 By-passing state power and neutralising state bureaucracies authoritative tune to which most of the population must dance.’ As I explain in Chapter 8, they are also a state technology through which national identities can be destroyed and reorganised as part of the social practice of genocide. Dominant notions of invisibility, then, and the resultant policy recommendation that calls for more registration, more categorisation, and more citizenship verification in some cases can not only by-pass state power but actually assist in consolidating and legitimising it at the international level. So, the notions of ‘invisibility’ that dominate international campaigns and approaches to statelessness only factor in some of the functions of state registration and documentation processes—the functions that ‘embrace’ and not the functions that ‘exclude’ (Scott 1998; Torpey 2000; Scott 2009). The developing mandate of UNHCR and the rise of invisibility In this section, I consider how UN mandates, action plans, and campaigns have evolved over time to focus so predominantly on notions of ‘invisibility,’ and the need for proof or evidence of state recognition of citizenship status. I argue that just as states have been by-passed as the main producers of statelessness, so too has the violence of their bureaucracies. Studies of bureaucracies in Nazi Germany and Nazi-occupied Europe reveal how the counting, categorising, and documenting of Jewish and other minority populations were integral to genocide (Caplan 2013; Zalc 2021). These populations became hypervisible to the Nazi regime thus facilitating their ghettoisation, denationalisation, and deportation (ibid.). Although the statelessness framework was developed largely in response to the events of WWII, notions of invisibility rather than hypervisibility have gained increasing prominence in statelessness work (Poladoghly 2021). UNHCR’s mandate on statelessness developed over time with increasing resources and focus placed on the issue since the 1990s. State accession to the 1954 and 1961 UN Statelessness Conventions was initially low in comparison to other conventions with only 35 state parties as signatories up until the 1990s.21 UNHCR was designated as the body which would examine individual claims and protect stateless individuals,22 but the organisation did not have a broader mandate relating to statelessness until the early 1990s (de Chickera 2010; Kingston 2013; van Waas 2014; Seet 2016). State secession at the end of the Cold War Following the break-up of the soviet bloc and Yugoslavia from 1991 onwards, statelessness as a concept became increasingly prominent again. States seceded from the soviet bloc and socialist forms of national identity were replaced by more ethnically and culturally defined notions, resulting in a potentially precarious legal status for those who fell between the gaps of different nationality laws. In response to the large-scale state secession during this period, UNHCR’s mandate on statelessness was reasserted and became a