2025 Statelessness & Citizenship Review 7(1) people as foreigners, second class citizens, or outsiders; the systematic removal, destruction or nullification of identity and other documents (or document stripping); erasure of history, culture, language and identity of the targeted community; preventing access to civil registration; and conditionalities placed on ID issuance, naturalisation and citizenship acquisition procedures. In the second Part, the article identifies five modes of collective resistance to these forms of citizenship violence. These are: countering re-categorisation through collective refusals; countering document stripping through the collection and exhibition of documents; countering erasure through community-centred knowledge production and arts; countering statelessness through self-registration; and countering the conditionality of IDs through strategic compliance. In considering each mode of resistance, the article also reflects on the ways in which unequal power relations constrain the effectiveness of these actions. These relations can result in limited political clout for those omitted from national statistics, community-level backlash such as counter protest and boycott, other forms of administrative violence and military crackdowns, as well as the use of censorship and surveillance to quell dissent. Meanwhile, international political structures promote administrative state entities as the only viable channel to establish one’s legal identity. International criminal law remains limited in holding perpetrators of citizenship violence to account.6 This examination of the national and international structures that limit the effectiveness of resistance strategies is rooted in postcolonial critiques of human rights discourses and frameworks, for example, those relating to anti-trafficking, liberal feminism and nationalism. Such critiques hold that normative international rights frameworks can lend legitimacy to statist approaches to human rights, sometimes at the expense of human freedoms.7 These modes of citizenship violence, resistance and structural constraints are by no means exhaustive lists, but rather the beginnings of a framework. The analysis draws on interviews and focus groups conducted amongst stateless Rohingya refugees from Myanmar between 2016 and 2019,8 and is supplemented by literature relating to the other two contexts of mass citizenship stripping. 6 7 8 This limitation relates both to the domains traditionally reserved for states to determine their own membership through citizenship laws, as well as the frameworks relating to international criminal law which focus on specific acts such as frameworks on Crimes Against Humanity and Genocide. For more discussion see Cóman Kenny, ‘Legislated Out of Existence: Mass Arbitrary Deprivation of Nationality Resulting in Statelessness as an International Crime’ (2020) 20(6) International Criminal Law Review 1026 (‘Legislated Out of Existence’). See, eg, Ratna Kapur, ‘On Gender, Alterity and Human Rights: Freedom in a Fishbowl’ (2019) 122 (July) Feminist Review 167. Brinham, Citizenship and Genocide Cards (n 4). 8