infrastructures seeking monopolies over violence and movement (Weber, 1965; Torpey, 2000)—are connected by a hyphen. The hyphen implies simultaneous connectedness and separateness, further implying the necessity of some ‘glue’ by which to bring the nation and the state together (Reynolds, 2005). Others have focused on a wide range of types of ‘glue’, from the census (Hirschman, 1987) to the map (Thongchai, 1994) to museums (Anderson, 2016) to national monuments (Reynolds, 2005), and more. This paper specifically considers the vehicle of citizenship as one part of the ‘glue’. As a legal and embodied signifier of ‘belonging’, citizenship, in the formal sense, forms and delimits a body of nationals, institutionalizing ideas of shared commonalities and boundaries. Citizenship also produces differential inclusion and statelessness. The territory comprising contemporary Southeast Asia is now divided into a network of ‘nationstates’, each pushing right up to the boundaries of its neighbors, leaving no space unchecked or unbound. However, most of the contemporary nation-states in the region have only existed since the 1940s or later—previously, non-state spaces were more prevalent. Most contemporary states in Southeast Asia are the results of attempted triple alignments of ethnic group, nation and state, with differing degrees of success. This chapter examines the logics of many of those attempted alignments, examining how self-defined ethnic groups have largely grounded claims to nation- and state-hood in the language of indigeneity to the space, often through comparison to other groups, as discussed in the previous section. These ‘others’ are thus branded as ‘migrants’ or ‘non-indigenous’, often despite having lived in the region for centuries (Hoerder, 2002), and are differentially included in, or entirely excluded from, the polity. In all cases, the primary instrument used for reifying these ethnically-defined nationalistic claims to the territory of the state—the tool used to align ethnicity, nation, and the state— is citizenship. But bounding citizenship through indigeneity claims raises numerous questions. Primarily: who has the political clout to reify those claims? And what happens to groups that are left out? Almost always, claims of indigeneity in the pursuit of statehood were successfully made by the largest ethnic group in the territory, in consort with some groups but not others. These claims were possible because those groups were either granted power or seized power from their former colonial oppressor, and the writing of Constitutions and citizenship laws reflect the politics of those moments as well as the ramifications of history. The remainder of the section examines three particular cases where these dynamics and questions arise and factor into the daily lived realities of hundreds of thousands of people, in Myanmar and Thailand. These are by no means the only examples in the region or worldwide but have been selected because they are perhaps the most illustrative cases and also have exceptionally high rates of statelessness, giving practical reason to examine the cases closely.     19  

Select target paragraph3