research has been conducted on statelessness in general, and statelessness in Southeast Asia in particular. Within this research, even less has examined how statelessness is produced, on which types of groups are made stateless while others are not, or on why those groups diverge. This paper seeks to fill those gaps—examining how, who, and why—by employing an analysis of regional citizenship laws and examining exclusionary clauses within those laws, which produce statelessness. In doing so, this paper will demonstrate that statelessness in the region primarily effects three groups: precolonial ‘migrant’ communities (primarily Chinese and Muslim), colonial communities who were largely ‘moved’ through colonial practices and policies (primarily South Asian), and ‘borderzone’2 groups who, despite often being 'indigenous' to the area, do not, for one reason or another, have the political capital to make good their claims of being native to the land. The paper further demonstrates how these pre-colonial and colonial migration patterns in the region, intricately interwoven in methods of governance and domination by ‘outside powers’, led to the writing of specifically-targeted exclusion clauses within citizenship laws at the moment of post-colonial independence, premised primarily on claims to indigeneity and belonging to the ‘national community’ of each state, excluding these three groups. Finally, the paper demonstrates how statelessness is being actively produced through these exclusion clauses, tracing the histories of citizenship laws and their implementations from independence and diving into clauses in which exclusions are made. This paper contributes to the body of literature on statelessness and citizenship, and weaves in insights from migration studies literatures throughout. The paper brings together the three theoretical bodies and examines the primary evidence of constitutions and citizenship laws, particularly looking at ‘differential inclusions’ in citizenship (Ong, 1996; Ong, 2006; Rosaldo, 1994; Rosaldo, 2003; Casas-Cortes et al., 2015; Manby, 2009; Pailey, 2016; Pailey, 2017). These differential inclusions, at their most extreme, exclude certain groups altogether, rendering them stateless. When using the term ‘differential inclusions’, this paper draws from Stuart Hall’s (1986) work, which discusses how “specific, differentiated forms of incorporation have consistently been associated with the appearance of racist, ethnically segmentary and other similar social features”, leading to subordination and segmentation within the act of inclusion itself (25). As such, it recognizes that inclusion within a community is not homogeneous, but stratified. Along these lines, to a smaller extent, the paper will also highlight how those stratifications can be revealed through intersectional analysis (Crenshaw, 1989; Crenshaw, 1991), though a broad intersectional analysis of the citizenship laws is regrettably beyond the scope of the paper. Instead, it will primarily focus on ethnicity as a marker of exclusion, though it recognizes that ethnicity operates alongside a host of other positionalities in a complex web of “reciprocally constructing phenomena” which all create interlocking systems of exclusion and oppression (Collins,     5