2 Introduction (UNHRC Sept 2019) and others were framed around this definition of genocide. They provided an evidence base that led to The Gambia filing a case of genocide against Myanmar at the International Court of Justice (ICJ).2 The field research for this book began two weeks prior to the genocidal violence in August 2017 and finished in December 2019, shortly after I attended the ‘provisional measures’ public hearing at the ICJ with Rohingya activists (10–12 December 2019). The research and analysis are confined to this period and focus on the immediate aftermath of genocide, in hope that Rohingya knowledge and experience can provide food for thought for researchers, practitioners, and policymakers working on the issues of statelessness and genocide. In 2024, ICJ proceedings are still pending. Safety and justice for Rohingya have not been secured. More than one million Rohingya in Bangladesh remain confined to camps unable to return home. Conflict in the Rohingya areas of Rakhine State between the Arakan Army, a predominantly Buddhist Rakhine armed group fighting for self-determination, and the Myanmar military have exacerbated the insecurities and injustices for Rohingya in their homelands and increased the risks of further acts of genocide (Human Rights Watch 2024). Nonetheless, the provisional measures hearing was significant in shifting international and domestic and international perceptions. Not least, the initial judgement provided confirmation that Rohingya are a ‘protected group’ under international law (International Court of Justice 2020:paragraph 46). This discredited Myanmar’s decades-long assertions that Rohingya ethnicity was ‘made up’ by ‘Bengali’ migrants to claim land and rights in Myanmar (Khaing Mya Waa 2012). None of us working on these issues prior to 2017 needed a reminder that genocide is not only a discrete event or a set of events of mass killing, but is instead ‘a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups’ (Lemkin 1944:ix). The processes of intentional destruction of the Rohingya as an ethnic and national group spanned several decades, a process that my coauthor, Zarni, and I characterised in 2014 as a ‘slow-burning genocide’ (Zarni and Cowley 2014).3 A key part of this destruction was the production of Rohingya statelessness in Myanmar. This book explores how Myanmar’s intentional manufacture and consolidation of Rohingya statelessness did not simply strip Rohingya of their citizenship rights and leave them vulnerable to abuses, but rather was inextricably linked to the broader processes of group destruction. This includes the biological and physical elements of destruction that are contained in the legal definition of genocide, as well as the communal, cultural, religious, intellectual, and economic elements on which all groups anchor their identities, which were key to Lemkin’s original conception of genocide in 1944 (Lemkin 1944). Just as genocide is best understood as a sociological process, rather than a set of discrete events (Feierstein 2014), so too is citizenship stripping or the