By-passing state power and neutralising state bureaucracies 51 the Rohingya situation in Myanmar, whereby the UN Resident Coordinators Office in Myanmar and associated UN agencies prioritised engagement with the military and military/civilian government over directly challenging state abuses (Mahony 2018; Rosenthal 2019). International approaches included attempts to identify stateless Rohingya; ensure Rohingya were documented with a view to reducing statelessness over the long-term and inter-generationally; and expand access to the ‘naturalisation’ provisions in the citizenship law by relaxing administrative barriers (Brinham 2019).29 Over the years, UNHCR was pragmatically reticent in calling for changes in the 1982 Citizenship Law itself.30 Furthermore, the issue of Rohingya claims to citizenship through their group identity was consciously sidelined in favour of not disputing the state narrative. Such claims were perceived as ‘political’ and thus off limits.31 This is despite the fact that Rohingya were arbitrarily stripped of their citizenship en masse.32 Likewise, other international agencies such as UNICEF avoided using the term ‘Rohingya’ and continued to use the term ‘communal violence’ to refer to the state-led abuses of 2012–3 (UNICEF 2013). It was largely convenient and strategic when engaging with the Myanmar State, to imply that Rohingya statelessness was not a direct result of state persecution but rather a result of state oversight that could be resolved through more efficient and better documentation processes.33 The focus on expanding state registration processes and the provision of IDs grew in global contexts, as well as the Rohingya context, after 2015. This was driven by the global international development agenda developed through the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), as well as new approaches to ‘migration management’ through the Global Compacts (de Chickera 2018; Guild and Basaran 2018; United Nations 2018). Consultations on the development of the SDGs of 2015 were viewed within the statelessness field as a significant opportunity to ensure that the issue of statelessness was addressed within the global development agenda (UNHCR 2017; Bloom, Manby et al. 2019). The guiding principle of the SDGs was ‘leave no one behind’ (United Nations System 2017). Linked to this was the increasing prominence of the notion that stateless people were ‘invisible’ to states and in the international sphere; that being left out of national data and statistics resulted in being excluded from national development initiatives (UN Sustainable Development Group 2019). Sustainable Development Goal 16 was to ‘promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels.’ Included within the targets for this goal was SDG 16.9, ‘By 2030, to provide legal identity for all, including birth registration.’ Legal identities as a form of state recognition have been closely associated with approaches to reducing and preventing statelessness, as explained in this chapter. The addition of this target, then, was significant for those seeking to raise the international profile of the issue. Within the statelessness movement, this SDG was viewed as an opportunity to build more momentum to address the global problem of