2025 Statelessness & Citizenship Review 7(1) were not registered in the census and were treated as undocumented ‘illegal’.41 Palestinians have been re-categorised over time from citizens of Palestine into a hierarchy of subjecthood based on Israel’s control over and securitisation of the population registers. Different ID cards assign different restrictions relating to movement and work based on the location of Palestinians at the time of registration in the West Bank, East Jerusalem or Gaza.42 The second mode of citizenship violence is document stripping, by which I mean the systematic removal, destruction, or nullification of identity and other evidentiary documents. Rohingyas’ national registration cards that were the mode of identification in the 1950s–1980s, and which remain the primary evidence of citizenship and residence, were removed through legal, administrative and violent means in Myanmar.43 In Syria, Kurdish identification documents were removed before new documents were issued in the aftermath of the 1962 census.44 In all three contexts, destruction of property during war and military assaults have resulted in the loss of documents. The third mode of citizenship violence is the erasure of history, culture, language and identity of the targeted community. This is achieved through state control of school curricula, media, popular culture and policy spaces. Palestinian scholarship has meticulously documented how Israel recast Palestine as ‘a land without people’, and Palestinians as a people without an historic national identity.45 Kurdish scholarship has shown how the processes of ‘Arabisation’ in Syria and elsewhere in the region denied people the use of their language, their names, their cultural practices and other aspects of their group identity. 46 Meanwhile in Myanmar, Rohingya were accused of ‘making up’ their ethnic identity and history in the country and denied the right to self-identify as Rohingya.47 The fourth mode of citizenship violence is the prevention of access to civil registration during conflict, including the suspension and destruction of civil registries and the implementation of movement restrictions that prevent registration. A lack of civil registration can lead to long-term difficulties in proving citizenship, family relations, place of origin, and land and property rights, and can exacerbate problems in navigating refugee registration in contexts of forced displacement.48 It is important to note that this is generally a by-product of war and conflict rather than a targeted attack on a particular group. Nonetheless, in some situations civil registration becomes a mode of warfare in itself. In 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 ibid. Yasmeen Abu-Laban and Abigail B Bakan, ‘The “Israelisation” of Social Sorting and the “Palestinianisation” of the Racial Contract: Reframing Israel/Palestine and the War on Terror’ in Elia Zureik, David Lyon and Yasmeen Abu-Laban (eds), Surveillance and Control in Israel/Palestine: Population, Territory and Power (Routledge 2011) 300; Tawil-Souri (n 33). Brinham, Looking Beyond Invisibility (n 39). Bahram, Between Home and Exile (n 31); Bahram, Too Little Too Late? (n 35). Khalidi (n 34). Bahram, Between Home and Exile (n 31); Barzoo Eliassi, Narratives of Statelessness and Political Otherness: Kurdish and Palestinian Experiences (Springer 2021) 40–1, 44, 109. For evidence of both these accusations and examples of how Rohingyas have challenged these accusations through scholarship, see Aman Ullah, A History of Rohingyas to 1948 (Blurb 2024); Nurul Islam, ‘Rohingya and Nationality status in Myanmar’ in Ashley South and Marie Lall (eds), Citizenship in Myanmar: Ways of Being in and from Burma (ISEAS Singapore 2018) 264. For examples of the impact of statelessness on refugees, see ENS, ‘Stateless Journeys’, The Issue <https://statelessjourneys.org/the-issues/>, archived at <perma.cc/FC3F-8MWF> (‘Stateless Journeys’). 14