2019 Statelessness & Citizenship Review 1(2) officials as a disease, an anomaly. 10 Using the language of pathology, they insist that ‘diagnosing statelessness’ be done through objective assessment of the types of state-issued documents (or lack thereof) possessed by a stateless person. In other words, statelessness is framed first and foremost as an issue of legibility to the state, with an assumption that once a stateless person is ‘properly seen’, due recognition will follow. This approach seems to produce a promising outcome — since 2011, over 23,000 stateless persons have been granted citizenship, earning Thailand praise from UNHCR for its ‘progressive nationality strategy’. 11 Thailand’s dramatic rate of statelessness reduction seems to confirm UNHCR’s claim that ‘with adequate leadership and effective implementation, statelessness can be ended’. 12 What, then, is the problem of framing statelessness as an individual’s documentary issue? What are the implications of portraying ‘statelessness diagnosis’ as a fair and rational process? In this article, I explore these questions using three ethnographic accounts in which stateless persons in northern Thailand face difficulties getting the Thai state to recognise the validity of the documents in their possession, which were issued by the state itself. In examining the complex entanglements of bureaucracy, documentation and statelessness, the article joins a growing body of literature that examines the limits of the evidentiary approach and the burden of proving citizenship as experienced by many stateless persons around the world. 13 It builds on and extends the works of scholars on the plight of citizenship among highlanders in northern Thailand, 14 especially Amanda Flaim's illuminating ethnography and argument on how citizenship conferral ultimately requires the conferral of belief by officials. 15 I use the anthropological framework of ‘state illegibility’16 to encapsulate systemic violence and burden placed on stateless persons by the state’s opaqueness and inscrutable, contradictory and unpredictable bureaucratic practices. State illegibility, according to Veena Das, makes the legal and the illegal in the everyday life become hard to distinguish for the affected 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 Fieldwork in Janepicha Cheva-Isarakul, ‘Navigating the Illegible State: Everyday Experiences of Statelessness among Shan Youth in Northern Thailand’ (PhD Thesis, Victoria University of Wellington) (Forthcoming). ‘Thailand’, United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (Web Page) <https://www.unhcr.org/ibelong/imvisible-thailand/>. ‘Global Action Plan to End Statelessness: 2014–2024’, United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (Web Page) <https://www.unhcr.org/ibelong/global-action-plan-2014-2024/>. See Lawrance and Stevens (n 9). A Right to Belong (Ophidian Films Ltd 2002); Mika Toyota ‘Subjects of the Nation Without Citizenship: The Case of “Hill Tribes” in Thailand’ in Will Kymlicka and Baogang He (eds) Multiculturalism in Asia (Oxford University Press 2005); Chutima Morlaeku, ‘Challenges and Opportunities: Searching for Answers to the Lingering Questions of Legal Status in Thailand’ (Internal Report, United Nations United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization 2010); Mukdawan Sakboon, ‘Citizenship and Education as the Basis for National Integration of Ethnic Minorities in North Thailand’ (PhD Dissertation, Macquarie University 2009); Amanda Flaim, ‘Problems of Evidence, Evidence of Problems: Expanding Citizenship and Reproducing Statelessness among Highlanders in Northern Thailand’ in Benjamin Lawrance and Jacqueline Stevens (eds), Citizenship in Question: Evidentiary Birthright and Statelessness (Duke University Press 2017). Amanda Flaim argues that ‘protracted statelessness persists in Thailand, paradoxically as a result of the bureaucratic and evidentiary procedures and the citizenship application process enacted to address it’: Flaim (n 14) 148. Veena Das, ‘The Signature of the State: The Paradox of Illegibility’ in Veena Das and Deborah Poole (eds), Anthropology in the Margins of the State (School of American Research Press 2004); Stephen Campbell, ‘State Illegibility in the Containment of Labour Unrest on the Thai-Myanmar Border’ (2017) 37(3) Critique of Anthropology 317. 216