1. Introduction It’s 2016. Nural, leader of a Rohingya village in Rathedaung, Rakhine State, Myanmar, sits handcuffed to a chair (Brinham, 2018)1. He looks down the barrels of four guns, held by officers of the Myanmar National Border Guard police. His crime? Refusing to acquiesce and accept Nationality Verification Cards (NVCs), which would force the people in his village to re-apply for Burmese citizenship. In his words, “these NVC cards make us into foreigners who are supposed to apply for citizenship. We are already citizens of this country.” Nural was eventually released; he was not one of the 30 men arrested that day, nor the one shot dead, nor the one blinded in one eye after police beatings. His village was not burnt that day, though it was razed less than a year later. Today, Nural is one of the hundreds of thousands of Rohingya residing in Bangladesh, part of a displaced community demanding the right to return and to be recognized as full citizens of Myanmar. However, at present, the Rohingya are not included in Myanmar’s list of 135 taingyintha (‘national races’) considered indigenous to the country, and they are therefore not automatically eligible for citizenship. In fact, the term Rohingya is absent in government discourse, and the community—which historical evidence places in the Arakan (now Rakhine) State from at least the 1400s (Yegar, 2002)—are instead referred to as ‘Bengali’, ‘foreigners’, and ‘illegal immigrants’. Unable to access citizenship in Myanmar without accepting the NVCs, the Rohingya community are non-citizens everywhere. The repercussions of their stateless status are diverse and severe. Members of the community are systematically blocked from sitting exams and receiving degrees, banned from trading in formal markets, and precluded from ‘legally’ crossing borders. They have no access to healthcare, retirement salaries or birth registration, the latter ensuring the vicious cycle continues. Worse, the production of their stateless status through exclusionary law-making was a harbinger for much worse to follow: Myanmar’s treatment of the Rohingya has been so brutal that it has been termed a ‘genocide’ by the UN (2018). And while the Rohingya may be the most extreme example of the ramifications of statelessness, they are not alone. An estimated 10 million people in the world are stateless, and figures may be even higher, given the challenges of collecting accurate information (UNHCR, 2014a; Staples, 2012). Of those estimated 10 million, just over 3.2 million are officially ‘recognized’ under UNHCR’s statelessness mandate, of which nearly 1.5 million (45% of the official count) live in Southeast Asia (UNHCR, 2017). Within the region, populations are not evenly distributed. Over 95% reside in Myanmar or Thailand, which rank first and third in the world in stateless population size (Côte d’Ivoire is second). Meanwhile, smaller but still significant populations exist in four other states in the region (see Maps 1 and 2 in the appendix). In all cases, the numbers are disputed and the actual figures are likely to be significantly higher. Despite the magnitude of the issue and the significant ramifications of statelessness, a relatively small amount of     4