By-passing state power and neutralising state bureaucracies 41 incorporated into customary international law, the statelessness framework remained relatively weak (de Chickera 2010; Edwards 2014). The statelessness framework attempted to place a duty on individual states to both protect those without access to nationality and ensure the right to nationality in cases where the alternative is statelessness. There are two international conventions devoted to addressing statelessness—the 1954 International Convention relating to the Status of Stateless Persons and the 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness. The 1954 Convention established the definition of a stateless person and set out minimum standards of treatment and protection of stateless persons. The 1961 Convention focused on the reduction of statelessness. It requires states to confer nationality where a person would otherwise be stateless (focused primarily on conferring at birth), and not withdraw nationality where it would otherwise render someone stateless. Statelessness scholarship points to weaknesses relating to the Statelessness Conventions in five key areas: low ratification,4 the lack of an oversight mechanism,5 reservations,6 (excessive) reverence to state concerns over sovereignty and border control,7 and that the Conventions have developed on a separate trajectory to broader human rights frameworks.8 State power to deny citizenship to populations with links to the state, then, was left largely unchecked within the foundational framework. Siegelberg (2020:6) argues that the state as the ‘sole legitimate organising unit of global politics’ to which the international sphere deferred was also consolidated in the decades that followed WWII as decolonisation occurred. As the European empires dissolved (e.g. British, Dutch, French) and independence movements grew, self-determination as a concept rose in prominence within the international order (Siegelberg 2020). Self-determination is the right of ‘all peoples’ to ‘determine their political status and freely pursue their economic social and cultural development.’9 The principle is enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations and in customary international law.10 Self-determination was the subject of intense debate within international law, in particular, its focus on collective rather than individual rights. In matters of sovereignty and citizenship, it had a heightened significance (Siegelberg 2020). A key aspect of self-determination was the right of newly independent states that had seceded from colonial powers to freely choose their own political membership. This consolidated the notion that recognised states should be deferred to in matters of citizenship and that all states should be treated as formal equals within the international state system. The consolidation of state power at the international level meant that in practice international organisations largely deferred to states (Spiro 2011; Conklin 2014). Within this international context, Burma gained independence from Britain shortly after WWII, after intense conflict in the region between colonial Britain and imperialist Japan. As Chapter 4 explores, independent Burma’s citizenship law sought to establish the boundaries of both territory and membership with India and Pakistan. To a large extent, the citizenship law was a