8 Introduction also been central to the debate in Myanmar regarding Rohingya citizenship. Myanmar citizenship law, according to the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC), is in breach of all three of those areas of international law. The law has arbitrarily deprived Rohingya of citizenship, fails to provide safeguards against statelessness, and discriminates against Rohingya and other minorities on the grounds of race/ethnicity.10 International pressure to reform Myanmar citizenship law provoked a backlash domestically which invoked the principles of ‘self-determination’ as a post-colonial nation.11 Myanmar-resisted foreign interference claiming its national identity should be determined almost exclusively through membership of one of the ethnic groups which the state claimed inhabited Myanmar before colonial rule, known in Burmese as Taingyintha.12 International approaches to addressing the citizenship issue in Myanmar hence took a pragmatic position and largely focused on the second of these three issues—safeguarding against statelessness. Thus, Rohingya citizenship deprivation was approached by international organisations as if it were largely a problem of administrative barriers, a lack of capacity by the state to provide and recognise the correct documentation and gaps and omissions in the legal and administrative framework relating to naturalisation.13 Whilst the discrimination inherent in Myanmar’s citizenship regime is well known and acknowledged by international agencies, pushes for legal reform were approached with caution and placed on the back burner whilst incremental change was sought. Scholars, researchers, and organisations that have been pressing for recognition of crimes against humanity and genocide against Rohingya have increasingly framed the production of Rohingya statelessness by the Myanmar State as criminal behaviour—one of the targeted and arbitrary deprivations of citizenship linked to other crimes (Fortify Rights 2019; UNHRC Sept 2018). Discussion as to whether to approach statelessness in Myanmar as an issue of state crime or of administrative failure continued to dominate policy discussions throughout the data collection period. My research over this period, then, focused on not only how Rohingya framed their statelessness as state crime but also how framings of the production of statelessness as state crime disrupted existing discourses and led to emerging understanding and approaches. Accordingly, I supplemented the qualitative and ethnographic research with analysis of key human rights texts by UN, Government and INGOs and observations of advocacy and policy-related forums and discussions. Linking statelessness and genocide The link between statelessness and genocide was first highlighted in literature relating to the European holocaust of the 1930s–1940s (Siegelberg 2020). In particular, the work of Hannah Arendt illustrated how the stripping of Jewish citizenship facilitated and laid the conditions for mass deportations and mass killings—these events became the premise on which she built the oft-quoted notions of citizenship as the ‘right to have rights’ (Arendt 1958). These ideas