‘Diagnosing’ Statelessness group that fails to ‘read’ the state’s rules and understand what is happening.17 Stephen Campbell further argues that state illegibility produces ‘uncertainty and insecurity for those at whom the practices are directed. Rather than aberrant, this illegibility is centrally constitutive of the state itself’. 18 Through three ethnographic accounts in Thailand, I interrogate various forms of state illegibility in attempt to understand why a meticulous recordkeeping practiced by the stateless persons in these vignettes has failed to improve their legal status. Is state illegibility simply synonymous with, or masked as, weak bureaucracy? Do stateless persons fail to ‘read’ the state as suggested by Das and Campbell? I argue that the state illegibility framework not only affirms Flaim’s argument on the myth of fair bureaucracy and an even production of evidence by the state, but reveals the process by which the bureaucratic burden of statelessness is placed upon the stateless. By portraying statelessness as a personal legal status issue to be resolved using a fair and rational evidentiary procedure, the Thai state downplays its past and present illegible documentary practices and marginalisation against certain minority groups and in turn shifts responsibility to stateless individuals. In other words, the assertion of standardised evidentiary procedures frames a root cause of statelessness as an individual’s neglect and inability to provide ‘proper’ documents without recognising the state’s own unstable documentary practices, and is in itself an act of violence. By not recognising state illegibility, statelessness risks being reduced to an individualised legal status issue, rather than being recognised as a symptom of systemic discrimination. In the following Parts, I will first explain my methodology and establish my positionality before providing the historical and social context of statelessness in Thailand. Then I will use three ethnographic accounts to illustrate forms of state illegibility and explore the implications of failing to recognise them. NOTES ON METHODOLOGY AND POSITIONALITY As a research method, ‘ethnography is a mode of knowing that privileges experience’, 19 and thus provides rich and important insights into social relations and the lived experience of the researched. The ethnographic accounts presented in this paper were collected in 2016–18 as part of my larger PhD research project that examines everyday experience of statelessness among ethnic Shan youth in northern Thailand. 20 While the key participants of my PhD research are stateless Shan youth living and attending school in urban areas of Chiang Mai, I also had opportunities to interact with other stateless communities during my 13-month fieldwork such as the ones in this article. The data for this piece was collected 17 18 19 20 Das (n 16) 231. Campbell (n 16) 318–19. Veena Das and Deborah Poole (eds) Anthropology at the Margins of the State (School of American Research Press 2004) 4. The fieldwork for my PhD research was conducted intermittently during 2015–18, totalling 13 months. I used a range of ethnographic research methods such as participant observation, focus-group interviews, semi-structured interviews and a photo-elicitation method. In addition to conducting participant observation in venues frequented by my youth participants, I have had a parallel engagement with policy-level discussions on addressing statelessness. I also conducted interviews with several bureaucrats at both operative and management levels, as well as textual analysis of relevant policies and the Thai state’s official communications materials regarding statelessness. 217