By-passing state power and neutralising state bureaucracies 39 these interests and the implications in terms of promoting oppressive forms of state registration and documentation. Second, I explore the dominant notion of ‘invisibility’ within campaigns to end statelessness and the way in which these notions shape international action plans to eliminate statelessness. Third, in order to provide context to the Rohingya framings of the production of statelessness as part of a genocidal process that destroys group identity, this chapter also considers how identity has been conceptualised within international approaches to statelessness. I argue that the increasing focus on state recognition of individuals’ citizenship status has effectively diverted policy approaches away from experiences of group destruction. The increasing prominence lent to state recognition of individual citizenship status and what constitutes proof or evidence of that recognition has resulted in increasing focus within global governance on the identity document as the purveyor of status, rights, and social goods (Lawrance and Stevens 2017; Bloom and Kingston 2021). The implications of the rise of the ID document in global governance and statelessness work and the impacts on Rohingya are explored further in Chapter 8. By-passing state power in solutions to statelessness This section explores how the state has come to be treated as a neutral and depoliticised entity within international approaches to statelessness. This sets the context from which the role of the state in producing statelessness and as a perpetrator of crime is by-passed. The neutralisation of the state and its bureaucracies enables a situation in which state registration and ID systems are construed, not as tools of oppression and persecution but as solutions to the problem of statelessness. The state as the ‘sole legitimate unit of political organisation’3 Statelessness, as a discursive concept, is imbued with state power. The meanings related to statelessness have shifted significantly over time with global events and changing configurations of states as a unit of political organisation within the international global order (Sigona 2016; Siegelberg 2020). As Linda Kerber (2007:9) notes: Statelessness is a condition that . . . changes over time, dynamically created and re-created by sovereignties in their own interests, defining the vulnerable in ways that affirm the invulnerable, and in the process revealing changing domestic values and changing power relations across international boundaries. Citizenship and subjecthood during the times of empire, as Chapter 4 explores, were characterised by hierarchies which were differentiated according