2025 Statelessness & Citizenship Review 7(1) violence, as well as undermine state recognition of citizenship and belonging over time as people find themselves without proof of legal status. 2 Countering document stripping through the collection and exhibition of documents Erasure of evidence that national or ethnic groups have previously belonged to a particular territory or state is sometimes practiced by state authorities with the purpose of obscuring the practice of citizenship stripping. By asserting that group members have never had the right to citizenship in a territory, states bypass international legal norms relating to the arbitrary deprivation of citizenship. One way to achieve this is through the nullification, non-recognition, confiscation or destruction of state-issued documents belonging to people from the persecuted group. Destruction and removal of documents can be part of broader campaigns of violence and displacement. In some cases, these practices can take place either prior to incidents of mass violence and displacement, or in the aftermath to diminish access to rights after return. The impact of the loss of documents and non-recognition of documents on people’s legal status and associated rights has been seen in conflict settings in Syria, Myanmar and elsewhere.89 Beyond access to legal status and associated rights, these practices can also be part of a much broader process of reworking national histories in ways that exclude particular groups.90 To counter such practices of document stripping and document violence, communities have developed collections of historic IDs and other documents and/or have exhibited such documents as a form of resistance. In the Palestinian context, land registration documents, school registers, Palestine government passports and refugee documents amongst others have been used as signifiers of national existence. Feldman asserts that land documents from the British Mandate era have a national significance akin to Palestinian flags in various forms of protest and contestation of the erasure of their histories and belonging.91 Similarly in the Rohingya context, the collection and exhibition of historic documents including ID cards and passports issued in the first decades of independence, land-tenure documents from the colonial period, clippings evidencing the state use of their ethnic name, refugee and past repatriation documents, and others were collected in refugee camp settings and shown to community members and visiting human rights actors, researchers and journalists.92 These collections were used to counter erasures of their identity as a group belonging to Myanmar, as well as draw attention to the practices of document removal and nonrecognition as state practices closely linked to citizenship stripping.93 89 90 91 92 93 de Chickera et al (n 15); Marika Sosnowski and Bart Klem, ‘Legal identity in a looking-glass world: documenting citizens of aspirant states’ (2023) 27(7) Citizenship Studies 761. Ronan Lee and José Antonio González Zarandona, ‘Heritage Destruction in Myanmar’s Rakhine State: Legal and Illegal Iconoclasm’ (2020) 26(5) International Journal of Heritage Studies 519. Ilana Feldman, ‘Refusing Invisibility: Documentation and Memorialisation in Palestinian Refugee Claims’ (2008) 21(4) Journal of Refugee Studies 498. Different Rohingya community-based organisations, including Arakan Rohingya Society for Peace and Human Rights, collected copies of community members documents, keeping them in files and displaying them to visiting foreigners, as well as their own communities. For more discussion, see Brinham, Citizenship and Genocide Cards (n 4), specifically ch 5 ‘IDs as evidence of state crime and artefacts from the early decades of independence’. Brinham, Citizenship and Genocide Cards (n 4). 22