38 By-passing state power and neutralising state bureaucracies legal condition but also as a powerful concept that often incorrectly framed their experiences. It often legitimised state narratives that claimed Rohingya had never belonged to Myanmar and approached the lack of recognition of Rohingya citizenship as state oversight rather than a targeted system of persecution (Brinham 2021). Policy approaches framed as addressing their statelessness often promoted the same state registration and documentation processes that Rohingya had experienced as violent and intrinsically linked to genocide (Brinham 2019). Rohingya resistance to state registration and identification, as well as the state discourses that framed and erased their history and identity, was largely ignored by other states and UN agencies as they looked towards solutions at the state and inter-state levels (see Chapter 8). Whilst these issues are explored throughout the thesis, this chapter establishes some key assumptions regarding ‘the state’ and ‘the stateless person’ to provide international and historical contexts for state and UN/NGO practices. Statelessness as a discursive concept that produces archetypal notions of the state and the stateless person is a largely unexplored area within statelessness studies, despite the rich literature within refugee studies. Zetter’s work on the formation of ‘refugees’ and bureaucratic identities (1991:52; Zetter 2007) described how the imposed term of ‘refugee’ and prescriptive policy-making processes interacted to produce standardised ‘refugee’ identities. Through these processes, ‘needs and aspirations became structured into technocratically manageable programmes with unwanted effects on the lives of the refugees.’ Likewise, Malkki (1996), in her seminal essay on the institutionalisation of ‘the refugee,’ shows how dehistoricised and depoliticised discourses of universal humanitarianism served to silence the voices and sideline the lived experiences of the survivors of Rwanda’s 1994 violence and produce an ‘archetypal’ refugee. A similar, but largely unexplored, process is also true of the ‘stateless person.’ Sigona (2016:266) argued that, ‘the stateless person’ is ‘an epistemic object and a (global) technology of governance in construction.’ Sigona (2016:265) described the discourse relating to statelessness as ‘often implicitly assuming homogeneity of experiences,’ he noted it ‘is more attentive . . . to compliance or not with an ideal-type’ than to its dynamic nature. This thesis contributes to addressing this gap in the literature by exploring how statelessness as a discursive category produces certain policy responses based on dehistoricised and depoliticised notions (see also Brinham and Johar 2021). It asserts that notions of the state within statelessness work have been depoliticised and questions of state power, state legitimacy, and state violence have been sidelined (Pillai 2019; Kenny 2020; Van Waas and Brinham 2021). In this chapter, I first establish how states have become ‘the sole legitimate organising unit of global politics’ in the international sphere (Siegelberg 2020:6) and why international organisations largely defer to states on matters of citizenship. In considering how state power is by-passed, I also argue that international concerns over statelessness are rooted in human rights on the one hand, and border control on the other. I focus on the convergence of