146 C. FAULKNER AND S. SCHIFFER protection from their country of origin, stateless persons lack the very essence of citizenship – ‘the right to have rights’ and the basic recognition and rights afforded to a state’s citizens (Bradley, 2014, p. 111; Kesby, 2012). Unsurprisingly, stateless persons are often designated as one of the world’s most vulnerable populations and attempts at repatriating stateless refugees are often met with barriers from multiple states. Estimates in 2017 identified approximately 10 million people as stateless (UNHCR, 2017) with upwards of 1.5 million considered stateless refugees; that is, stateless persons who fled their self-identified country of origin in search of asylum (Milton et al., 2017).1 To put these numbers in context, nearly two-thirds of the 1.5 million were stateless refugees from Myanmar residing in Bangladesh, virtually all self-identifying as Rohingya (UNHCR, 2017, p. 69).2 Given the number of stateless refugees in Bangladesh and growing concerns over the country’s ability to accommodate such a large population, questions have continued to arise about their repatriation.3 Unsurprisingly, this has been a complicated endeavour given that the Rohingya, although having lived in Myanmar for generations, are not deemed citizens and lack many rights, opportunities and protections, including restrictions on movement within the country, the inability for more than four people to gather together in one place, and segregation policies which have limited their access to a variety of services including government education (Amnesty International, 2017). Further, their historical persecution within Myanmar and concerns about their treatment should they return to the Rakhine State are ambiguous at best. The purpose of this paper is twofold. It first aims to define and clarify ambiguities surrounding stateless refugees. Second, our analysis explores how statelessness can motivate refugees to stay or go during a repatriation process and how the condition of statelessness hinders a sustainable refugee repatriation processes. From here, the paper proceeds as follows. First, we briefly examine the literature on factors contributing to the success or failure of repatriation efforts. In particular, we examine the principle of ‘statelessness’, offering a discussion of international legal ramifications resulting from the designation. We introduce our central argument, which identifies a population’s designation as stateless as a key inhibitor to the success of repatriation. We probe our argument qualitatively using an in-depth examination of the repatriation of the Rohingya in the1990s, highlighting how these efforts parallel the ongoing crisis. We then assess the illustrative case of a (largely) successful repatriation of the past – the Angolan refugee repatriation of 2002–2005. Though markedly different, the Angolan case underscores the importance of refugees’ status before and during repatriation. We conclude with a brief discussion of implications for future repatriation efforts and broader regional security issues in Southeast Asia. Literature Review To date, scholars have given considerable attention to refugee repatriations, often arriving at varying conclusions as to why some succeed and others fail (Emizet, 2000; Kibreab, 2003; Chimni, 2004; George et al., 2016; Gerver, 2018). This divergence is perhaps unsurprising given the challenges that are often unique within cases of refugee repatriation. For instance, repatriation of refugees to a state still controlled by the very government responsible for the original crisis (Guatemala late 1980s) may look quite different from repatriation occurring after a major political change (post-Saddam Iraq)