2025
Statelessness & Citizenship Review
7(1)
citizenship.99 Conflict has also engulfed Rohingya homelands in Rakhine State
Myanmar, with the main Ethnic Armed Organisation (‘EAO’) in the area, Arakan
Army, replicating state practices of group persecution. Internationally, the legal
processes designed to hold Myanmar and Myanmar officials to account for the
crimes against Rohingya, including the legal proceedings at the International
Court of Justice, the International Criminal Court and those relating to
international jurisdiction have referred to the deprivation of nationality,100 but they
have no mechanisms or procedures through which they can effectively incorporate
Rohingya articulations of citizenship restitution.101 The lack of accountability in
international law extends beyond either the Rohingya or Palestine context,
underlining how state-issued documents are imbued with forms of state power
that, within the current international political order which gives priority to states,
cannot easily be turned around by the bearers of these documents to push back.
3
Countering erasure through community-centred knowledge production and
arts
As noted in the previous Part, mass citizenship stripping is often accompanied by
state practices that attempt to re-work the histories and identities of the targeted
group to erase them from nationalist histories or to legitimise exclusions.
Exclusionary framings are asserted through the control over national curricula in
schools and higher education settings, the curtailing of academic freedoms, the
control and censorship in media and social media, and the drafting processes for
discriminatory citizenship laws and constitutions. Such practices have, for
example, been a feature of state approaches to Palestinian, Kurdish and Rohingya
histories. 102 Strategies to counter exclusionary statist histories and discourses
include community-centred knowledge production and the development of
platforms and networks for dissemination. State erasures been challenged by
producing literature, poetry, art, language and research articles that centre
community knowledge and identity to counter nationalist histories and discourses.
This can also involve linguistic renewal, and the teaching of traditional skills and
knowledge.103 Likewise, art and cultural production in the Kurdish context has
been key to countering erasures in Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey.104
Some forms of knowledge production and art explicitly explore administrative
and legal erasure and the violence of national ID systems that target specific
groups. For example, Palestinian poet laureate, Mahmoud Darwish, explored
99
Anonymous, ‘Palestinian citizens of Israel Fear Risk of Becoming Stateless amidst Rising
Calls for Citizenship Revocation’, ENS (Blog Post, 12 September 2024)
<https://www.statelessness.eu/updates/blog/palestinian-citizens-israel-fear-risk-becomingstateless-amidst-rising-calls>, archived at <perma.cc/JE95-4JYY>.
100 On the universal jurisdiction issue, see ‘Burmese Rohingya Organisation UK (‘BROUK’):
For the Rights of Rohingya’, Historic Decision by Argentinian Courts to Take up Genocide
Case
against
Myanmar
(Media
Release,
28
November
2021)
<https://www.brouk.org.uk/historic-decision-by-argentinian-courts-to-take-up-genocidecase-against-myanmar/> , archived at <perma.cc/UN2D-9NNL>.
101 Jade Roberts, ‘Statelessness before the ICJ: The Gambia v Myanmar’ (2023) 5(1)
Statelessness & Citizenship Review 226.
102 On Palestinian histories, see Khalidi (n 34). On Kurdish histories, see Sustam (n 74). On
Rohingya histories, see Maung Zarni and Natalie Brinham, ‘Reworking the Colonial-Era
Indian Peril’ (2017) 24 (Fall/Winter) Brown Journal of World Affairs 53.
103 Areej Alshammiry’s work explores novels, literature and the use of social media platforms as
ways that Bidoons from Kuwait have resisted erasure: Alshammiry (n 88).
104 Sustam (n 74).
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