By-passing state power and neutralising state bureaucracies 49 renewed focus within the organisation (Seet 2016). In 1995, the UN General Assembly formally entrusted the UNHCR with a global mandate to ‘identify, prevent and reduce statelessness and protect stateless persons.’23 Specifically, the UN General Assembly (UNGA) requested UNHCR to ‘provide relevant technical and advisory services pertaining to the preparation and implementation of nationality legislation.’24 As such, UNHCR had a mandate to protect stateless persons, but the focus of that mandate was to provide technical legal assistance to states in order to prevent statelessness. This technical assistance was conceived of as ‘non-political’ (UNHCR 2013) and hence should not undermine the sovereignty or self-determination of new states. Statelessness approaches accordingly focused on the coordination between nationality laws, attempting a careful balance of advising states how to tweak their nationality laws to reduce statelessness. Stateless people were perceived to fall between the gaps between nationality laws (Kingston 2013; Seet 2016). Meanwhile, the role of states in producing ‘bureaucratic ethnic cleansing’ through their citizenship frameworks was approached with caution (Hayden 1996). The focus of this technical legal expertise was on state recognition of new citizens and the provision of formal legal status, and thus approaches were predominantly focused on making sure nobody fell outside the international filing system of nationality and ensuring that all populations were visible and legible for effective governance in the new states and internationally. Statelessness scholars have described this period as one in which statelessness was largely approached as a ‘technical problem’ requiring technical legal solutions, rather than as a fundamental human rights issue (Spiro 2011; Foster and Lambert 2016). This approach also characterised UNHCR’s initial approach to Rohingya citizenship in Myanmar in the 1990s which remained reverential to Myanmar’s sovereignty (see, e.g., Zaw Min Htut 2003). Rohingya statelessness was approached not as an issue of citizenship stripping but rather as one in which they needed more state registration to lift them out of a state of invisibility to the state in order to be set on a trajectory from statelessness towards citizenship, as explored in Chapter 8 (ibid.). Many Rohingya contrastingly argued that state registration and documentation from the 1990s onwards had set them on a trajectory from citizenship towards statelessness, as explored in detail in Chapter 7. The rediscovery of statelessness The 2010s also saw the further revival of statelessness as an issue internationally. In 2011, UNHCR prioritised statelessness as a ‘budgetary pillar’ (Kingston 2013:74). State commitments to international legal frameworks relating to statelessness increased, marked by a UNHCR Ministerial Meeting on statelessness in 2011 (UNHCR 2014). Statelessness also became an increasing focus for international NGOs, with several organisations established that were dedicated to the issue of statelessness (Kingston 2013). This growth in interest in the topic during this period has been described as the