‘Diagnosing’ Statelessness Secondly, the state positions citizenship acquired through naturalisation as a less legitimate type than one obtained by Thai nationals at birth. Rather than a natural birthright, citizenship through naturalisation is subject to a state’s permission to begin with, and can be revoked at any time, usually in the name of national security. As seen in the Ethnographic Account One, acquired citizenship of villagers was not ‘effective’ citizenship. Branded as ‘unlawful Others’, their capturing and punishing evokes a sense a spectacle performed by the state to reestablish the dissymmetry between the subjects who has dared to violate the law and the allpowerful sovereign who displays his strength … the punishment is carried out in such a way as to give a spectacle not of measure, but of imbalance and excess. 112 Despite the opaqueness of the state, I argue that having been subjected to state illegibility all their lives, stateless persons do not necessarily fail to ‘read’ the state; most anticipate illegible practices by the state and respond through tactics such as keeping track of communications with the state in the case of Hmong family, finding ways to maintain more than one identity such as in Nida’s case or engaging in paying the ‘tea money’ despite meeting the citizenship criteria. 113 However, on this latter point, after the military toppled the ‘corrupted’ elected government in 2014, the Thai state declares itself ‘intolerant’ of such bribery and all kinds of corruption. 114 Attempting to draw its legitimacy from being transparent and accountable, it flexes its muscles by ‘following the rules’ and employing harsh measures and fear in its management of the non-citizen ‘Other’. Falling into such category, stateless persons are pressured to familiarise themselves with these new rules and mobilise accordingly. Approaching the NHRC and demanding recognition by demonstrating belonging through documentary evidence can be interpreted as one way of responding to state illegibility in the era where the state declares itself to be upholding transparency, human rights and the standardisation of practices. Reading the state is therefore both a skill, and a burden, that stateless persons constantly need to keep up with and modify their responses to fit the state rhetoric. CONCLUSION As argued by Lindsey Kingston, statelessness is not only a cause but a symptom of marginalisation. 115 In this article, I build on the work of other scholars to reveal a complex and unequal relationship between stateless persons and the state through the concepts of legibility and state illegibility. My ethnographic accounts 112 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Alan Sheridan tr (Pantheon Books 1977) 49. 113 Many participants revealed to me that they still had to pay tea money to get faster facilitation or to obtain a signature from a village head in their citizenship application despite fulfilling eligibility criteria. 114 The military government itself has since faced a lot of large-scale corruption scandals. See, eg, ‘Rajabhakti Park Scandal a Test for the Government’, The Nation (online, 11 November 2015) <https://www.nationthailand.com/opinion/30272722>; Pavin Chachavalpongpun, ‘The Latest Thai Corruption Scandal is Causing Problems for the Ruling Junta’ The Washington Post (online, 23 January 2018) <https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/democracy-post/wp/2018/01/23/the-latest-thaicorruption-scandal-is-causing-problems-for-the-ruling-junta/>. 115 Lindsey Kingston, ‘Worthy of Rights: Statelessness as a Cause and Symptom of Marginalisation’ in Tendayi Bloom, Katherine Tonkiss and Phillip Cole (eds), Understanding Statelessness (Routledge 2017) 17. 237