2015: 1). The ways other intersectional positionalities also play into differential inclusion within citizenship will be considered anecdotally throughout the paper. However, the major connections made will be between ethnicity, citizenship, differential inclusion and statelessness. Overview The inspiration for this research began with a simple puzzle: why are rates of statelessness in certain countries so high, when neighbouring countries have little or no statelessness? Diving into that question unveiled a much broader set of issues altogether, related to pre-colonial and colonial migration patterns and governance practices, a historical reversal in which communities historically avoiding the state suddenly desired state inclusion, the slippery yet powerful articulation tool of indigeneity claims, and the intentional exclusion of particular groups from citizenship. This paper takes the following form. After this introductory overview and a note on methodological limitations, Section Two dives into the context of the region further, paying particular attention to historical governance policies and migration patterns of countries in the region prior to when they became independent nation-states. It highlights those patterns most relevant to understanding contemporary citizenship laws and the groups they exclude. The section is particularly critical to understanding why the three aforementioned main groupings of stateless people—pre-colonial migrants, colonial migrants, and borderzone minority groups—have been excluded, and how they have been conflated as ‘non-indigenous’ and therefore outside of the nationally accepted community. The section also historically traces the concept of ‘indigeneity’, particularly examining how, as a contemporary term, it is used as a legal tool of articulating claims against the state. Section Three highlights the historical trajectory of Myanmar’s citizenship laws: as it has the highest rates of statelessness of any country, and as the Rohingya are one of the most actively persecuted stateless groups in the world, it is a natural choice for the main focus of this paper. A more extended version of this paper, submitted as my MSc. dissertation and accessible at the Oxford University Social Science Library, also considers the cases of Thailand and Malaysia, drawing out common themes and highlighting differences. Little existing literature demonstrates how clauses in citizenship law actively produce statelessness, and few studies on statelessness consider the role of the histories of political rule and related migration patterns in its production. This section highlights how, in the case of Myanmar, migration patterns have shaped citizenship laws, particularly clauses premised on the articulation of ‘indigeneity’, excluding some ‘non-indigenous’ groups from citizenship entirely. I look primarily at citizenship laws related to automatic citizenship attainment rights: while citizenship can be theoretically attained through naturalization, this route is often not an option for stateless populations due to the barriers it entails. Further, as illustrated through the case of Nural, for example, many feel     6