‘Diagnosing’ Statelessness DISCUSSION While legibility is considered a ‘central problem in statecraft’, 96 it also constitutes a central problem for the stateless, whose hope relies on being ‘seen’ and ‘counted’ by the state as a full member. Legibility to the state in the form of documentary evidence therefore sits at the core of the interactions between the state and the stateless. For the highland communities, the Hmong family and Nida, documents are kept and handled with care. This practice not only contradicts sharply with the image of state-evading ‘hill peoples’ during the pre-modern state era, 97 but also challenges their contemporary portrayal by mainstream media as ignorant and negligent of documents. Their collective experience affirms existing literature that possession of evidence is not a guarantee for a place in polity and, in turn, reveals to us various forms of state illegibility.98 In the name of national security and adherence to the rules, the state could revoke citizenship of groups deemed suspicious, disbelieve the promise and evidence produced by the state itself and disregard documentary mistakes as anomalous errors. Statelessness is therefore a condition deeply entangled with and produced within the complex circular dynamic of needing to be legible to the state but being unable to be due to state illegibility. A Stereotyping and the Limits of an Individual Identity Kelly Staples argues that statelessness has often been characterised as a major failing of the state system, but it is a failing that is arguably the result of that very system; in particular, of the way that recognition of individuals has come to be organised. 99 My ethnographies expand her call for critical engagement with the politics of recognition to illustrate that for many marginalised minority groups, legal inclusion can be fragile even when granted. Despite having achieved full recognition as Thai citizens at one point, the villagers in the first ethnographic account are still not considered ‘authentic Thai’, to use the late king’s words. As a result, their Thai citizenship was collectively revoked due to a negative perception deeply rooted in a long history of discrimination. Despite this fragility of legal inclusion, stateless persons, in the accounts presented here, still want and seek state recognition in the form of a Thai citizen identification card issued by the Thai state, as such a document not only provides physical and social mobility, but also allows them to be both visible and invisible 96 97 98 99 Scott (n 57) 2. ibid. As argued by Flaim (n 14) 163: ‘no evidences, whether documents, data, or even DNA, can ever guarantee a place in the polity’. The other works in the same edited volume by Lawrance and Stevens (n 9) also demonstrate that states produce statelessness in at least two ways: by questioning the citizenship status of their own citizens; and by rendering its own citizens stateless through bureaucratic practices and procedures of concealing and failing to produce evidence that might vindicate an individual’s claim to citizenship. As put in the introduction, ‘citizens thus are at the mercy of information the agency opposing them is creating, maintaining and hiding from them’: Lawrance and Stevens (n 9) 2. Kelly Staples, ‘Recognition, Nationality and Statelessness: State-Based Challenges for UNHCR’s Plan to End Statelessness’ in Tendayi Bloom, Katherine Tonkiss and Phillip Cole (eds), Understanding Statelessness (Routledge 2017) 174; see also Kelly Staples, Retheorising Statelessness: A Background Theory of Membership in World Politics (Edinburgh University Press 2012). 233