Statelessness & Citizenship Review 2025 7(1) 2 IV Countering document stripping through the collection and exhibition of documents.................................................................. 22 3 Countering erasure through community-centred knowledge production and arts.......................................................................... 24 4 Countering conflict-associated statelessness through selfregistration ...................................................................................... 25 5 Countering the conditionalities of IDs through strategic compliance and subversion ................................................................................ 27 Conclusion ............................................................................................................... 28 I INTRODUCTION This article1 takes as a starting point the understanding that people affected by statelessness are active agents in seeking social justice, but that structural factors and power relations limit the effectiveness of many forms of action and resistance. At the root of all forms of statelessness are the practices of state authorities. These practices emerge from a multitude of intersecting factors, ranging from administrative oversight to discriminatory laws to group persecution. When a lack of administrative efficiency or legal flaws are factors, interventions at the international level can seek to address statelessness through capacity building and technical support. Common examples include upgrading civil registries or supporting amendments to states citizenship rules. 2 At the other end of the spectrum, when statelessness results primarily from the misuse of state power, it has proved more challenging for international organisations to develop appropriate interventions. In such circumstances, it is important to look at how communities of resistance respond on the ground. Recent statelessness scholarship has given more attention to situations in which citizenship rules and ID systems have been weaponised by states.3 There is also a groundswell of scholarship critiquing the promotion of universal legal identities in international development work, including important case studies revealing the potential for digitisation of ID systems to exacerbate the problems of citizenship violence in the Dominican Republic, Kenya, the Ivory Coast, India and Myanmar 1 2 3 This article was first drafted in October 2024 based on the information available at the time. Events in Palestine, Myanmar and Syria have been in intense flux. It is beyond the scope of this article to account for the monumental changes that have taken place in Palestinian, Rohingya and Kurdish homelands since that time. See United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (‘UNHCR’), Global Action Plan to End Statelessness 2014–2024 (Report, 2017) 4–5 <https://www.unhcr.org/au/media/globalaction-plan-end-statelessness-2014-2024>, archived at <perma.cc/6NTA-5NK3>. See, eg, Lindsey N Kingston, ‘The Weaponisation of Citizenship: Punishment, Erasure, and Social Control’, in Tendayi Bloom and Lindsey N Kingston (eds), Statelessness, Governance, and the Problem of Citizenship (Manchester University Press 2021); Michelle Foster and Jade Roberts, ‘Manufacturing Foreigners: the Law and Politics of Transforming Citizens into Migrants’ in Catherine Dauvergne (ed), Research Handbook on the Law and Politics of Migration (Edward Elgar Publishing 2021); Neha Jain, ‘Manufacturing Statelessness’ (2022) 116(2) American Journal of International Law 237. 6