Introduction 5 interviewee8 who, in divulging the destruction of his home and the death of his family members, had expressed remorse at how much he had despised Rohingya in the past. He had a Rohingya grandparent whom he blamed for his own statelessness. Rohingya identities and experiences of citizenship, it seemed, held so much more than their legal status and associated human rights violations. Meanwhile, as human rights researchers, we bemoaned how difficult it was to triangulate information when working with ‘hidden communities’ and we despaired at the inconsistencies in the narrative details. But when we interviewed Rohingya, they were not only appealing to our human rights frameworks but also drawing on multiple and shifting identities and positions to make meaning from their experiences. In Patel’s state crime research, he describes human rights testimony as, ‘often presented as ratifying an existing normative discourse about human rights.’ A process he describes as undermining, ‘original narratives of their own terms of reference in favour of normative international discourses on human rights’ (Patel 2012:244). This resonated with my own experiences. This research sets out to consider, then, how Rohingya survivors of state crime disrupt and contribute to international framings of their statelessness. In doing this, I sought to better understand two paradigms: how statelessness was understood and experienced by Rohingya survivors within the wider processes of state crime and genocide; and how international legal discourses framed the issue of statelessness and approached ending and preventing it. From this base, I was then able to examine where the two framings converged and diverged, and consider how the voices of survivors influenced and informed international approaches. In answering these questions relating to survivors’ narratives and experiences, as well as socio-legal perspectives, I developed research approaches that mixed narrative inquiry and oral histories with textual analysis and multi-site ethnographic methods which I describe in Chapter 2. At the time of the research project’s conception, international framings of Rohingya statelessness were largely based on legal and textual analyses of Myanmar’s citizenship laws and reflected dominant global notions of statelessness grounded in international law. To a large extent, these analyses were divorced from the political, historical, and social contexts within which Rohingya statelessness had been slowly produced and reproduced. Rohingya statelessness, like statelessness more generally, was almost exclusively viewed in literature as the binary opposite of citizenship (Tonkiss and Bloom 2015). Their legal condition of statelessness was described as resulting from two discrete past events that related to the citizenship law in Myanmar—post-independence bordering in 1948, and the enactment of the 1982 Citizenship Law in Myanmar (Republic of the Union of Myanmar 2013; Tonkin 2018). Thus, Rohingya statelessness was more often understood in human rights literature as a product of gaps and omissions in Myanmar’s legal framework relating to citizenship, rather than produced as a set of deliberate and targeted state practices within a broader and ongoing process