70 State power and identification schemes in Rakhine on the group’s powerlessness as their lands and their communities that once straddled today’s borders were sliced up by clashing colonial and authoritarian states. The purpose of this section is not to provide a detailed history of the region but to highlight how state power and belonging were perceived in a historical context, based on the understanding that oral histories are fundamentally a meaning-making rather than fact-generating process (Perks and Thomson 2006; Portelli 2006). As noted, in oral histories, today’s meanings are often reflected backwards (Popular Memory Group 2006). Myanmar’s 1982 Citizenship Law (Section 3) states: Nationals such as the Kachin, Kayah, Karen, Chin, Burman, Mon, Rakhine or Shan and ethnic groups as have settled in any of the territories included within the State as their permanent home from a period anterior to 1185 B.E., 1823 A.D. are Burma Citizens.8 1823 was the year before the first Anglo-Burma war (1824–26). Thus, the law attempted to privilege Myanmar’s pre-colonial populations in acquisition of citizenship to rectify the demographic shifts that resulted from economic migration during the British colonial period. However, the borders and populations of the region prior to, and during, the British period were not stable or fixed (Amrith 2013; Charney 2016, 2018). The citizenship law and broader historical constructions drawn on by the military state suggested that Arakan/Rakhine region was part of a bounded pre-colonial Burmese state with a largely stable population that was invaded and colonised by the British (Charney 2018). A large body of historical work challenges these notions. Instead, it describes shifting and overlapping centres of power or mandalas with waxing and waning control over peripheral areas (Winichakul 1997). The power bases consisted of multi-ethnic courts, dependent for labour on prisoners of war, slave labour, and populations imported from the peripheries (Than Tun 1959; Lieberman 1978; Scott 2009; Charney 2016). Scholarship describes unstable identities and porous boundaries amongst clan-based, linguistic, and territorial identities with ethnic identity drawn on intermittently as strategic interactions with groups in power (Lehman 1967; Leach 1973; Lieberman 1978; Scott 2009). Rakhine State, naturally separated from the rest of Myanmar by the Yoma mountain range but connected to Bengal and beyond by the major trade routes of the river and sea, was far more closely connected culturally, economically. and administratively in the past to the Bengal region than to central Burma. Populations were mobile across what is now the border between Bangladesh and Myanmar and a large proportion of the Rakhine populations identified as Muslim as well as Buddhist and Hindu long before the British period (Charney 2016, 2018). Regional, ethnic, linguistic, and religious identities in this region shifted, developed, or were subsumed over time with the structures of governance, resistance identities, and subjectivities (Lehman