ALL EARS TO THE GROUND: RESISTING MASS CITIZENSHIP STRIPPING AND CITIZENSHIP VIOLENCE NATALIE BRINHAM* This article explores ground-level collective modes of resistance that highlight state practices associated with mass citizenship stripping. In doing so, it identifies challenges in anti-statelessness work and suggests that these and other forms of resistance can be important in informing and shaping more responsive international interventions. The study focuses on situations in which state authorities have weaponised their citizenship laws and ID systems to exclude, segregate and expel people based on their membership of a group. Specifically, it focuses on Rohingya, Kurdish and Palestinian experiences of citizenship violence. Through these case studies and broader literature review, it identifies specific modes of citizenship violence within the broader processes of group persecution. It then explores five non-exhaustive modes of collective resistance that have been organised by affected communities. 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 conflict-associated statelessness through self-registration; and countering conditionalities of IDs through strategic compliance. People affected by statelessness and survivors of state crime are active agents in seeking social justice, despite the structural factors that limit the effectiveness of many forms of resistance. As such, the power dynamics between affected communities, states and international actors are explored to identify the constraints to these modes of resistance. The study concludes by considering some of the implications of these forms of resistance for the international anti-statelessness sector. TABLE OF CONTENTS I II III * Introduction ............................................................................................................... 6 Mass Citizenship Stripping and Citizenship Violence .............................................. 9 A Conceptualising Mass Citizenship Stripping and Citizenship Violence ....... 9 B Modes of Citizenship Violence in Palestinian, Kurdish and Rohingya Homelands................................................................................................... 11 Resistance ................................................................................................................ 16 A Conceptualising Resistance and Agency in Statelessness Studies .............. 16 B Modes of Resistance ................................................................................... 19 1 Countering re-categorisation through collective refusals ............... 19 Natalie Brinham is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies at the University of Bristol. Data relating to the Rohingya case study was collected as part of an Economic and Social Research Council (‘ESRC’)-funded doctoral study at Queen Mary, University of London in 2016–9. All field work was approved by the Ethics Committee at Queen Mary, University of London. Fieldwork took place predominantly in Rohingya refugee settings in Bangladesh, New Delhi in India, and Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia. Detailed findings from this data, including extensive quotes from focus groups and interviews, are published in Natalie Brinham, Citizenship and Genocide Cards: IDs, Statelessness and Rohingya Resistance in Myanmar (Routledge 2025). This article was initially drafted as part of an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellowship, grant number ES/Y010345/1. No data was created for this grant. It was completed as part of the Leverhulme Fellowship. I would like to extend my thanks to the anonymous peer-reviewers of this article who provided valuable feedback. © 2025 The Author. This is an open-access article licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence and indicate if changes were made. See <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/>.