2019 Statelessness & Citizenship Review 1(2) citizenship application process — and as witnesses in certifying the identity of stateless persons — means that such local figures have significant influence over the success or failure of an application. 106 This procedure may be considered less bureaucratic and more rooted in local relationships assumed to be authentic, it often induces ‘tea money’ 107 and exacerbates an individual’s vulnerability. As shown in Nida’s case, and in Flaim’s work, this arrangement depends on how helpful and active a village head is. With the village head’s signature counting as a reliable proof, evidence is once again far from being neutrally produced; it is subjected to the relationship between the powerful and the powerless. STATE ILLEGIBILILTY AND THE FRAMEWORK OF EXCEPTION Kamal Sadiq’s concept of documentary citizenship 108 demonstrates that creative solutions through documents in the face of state power are possible. They examine the phenomenon where undocumented migrants are able to falsely acquire documents that confer full citizenship and enable mobility and agency. 109 One of the conditions that allows for documentary citizenship to be achieved, in this interpretation, is a weak and erratic bureaucracy in a developing nation. 110 By contrast, my fieldwork suggests that an erratic bureaucracy is not necessarily a sign of a weak state. Instead, state illegibility expressed through opaque policies and practices can be interpreted as a form of hegemony. I argue that the Thai state performs and normalises its illegibility and consequently justifies its production of arbitrariness through the framework of exception in two ways. Firstly, the state entitles itself to dictate what could be allowed and exempted from laws without making itself accountable to the law. It can grant citizenship in honour of a special occasion, under an exceptional policy or to an individual whom it judges to have substantially contributed to the nation (what constitutes contribution, again, rests on the judgment of individuals in power). The letter in the beginning of this article is an example of such form of exception. Honouring the king was cited as an occasion to speed up the process of citizenship granting. With opaqueness being a key character of state illegibility, it is also often unclear what truly constitutes a policy and how long the policy lasts. 111 Must it be a written document? Or do political speeches and people’s interactions and experiences with street-level bureaucrats also count? In the case of the Hmong families, could the words and promises given by the officials representing the state considered a policy or were they just empty rhetoric? Can they be held accountable for their promise if one cannot be sure if the uttered words are policies and not individual voices? 106 Flaim (n 14) 155–56; Morlaeku (n 14). Although there is no statute that states a witness in the 107 108 109 110 111 application process must be a village head, my interviews with informants and the literature above indicate the dependence of stateless persons on such local authorities. See Abigaël Pesses. Highland Birth and Citizenship Registration in Thailand: Final Report on Karen Focus Group Discussions in Chiang Mai Province (Report, United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization 17 March 2018) <https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal01736494/document>. A bribe. Kamal Sadiq, Paper Citizens: How Illegal Immigrants Acquire Citizenship in Developing Countries (Oxford University Press 2009). ibid. ibid 29–30, 117–19, 128, 131, 134. Chris Shore and Susan Wright, Anthropology of Policy: Critical Perspectives on Governance and Power (Routledge 1997) 5. 236