2025 Statelessness & Citizenship Review 7(1) contemporary modes of bureaucratic violence including citizenship stripping. Data gathering practices, including censuses, land registration and policing records in Palestine during the British Mandate and afterwards, provided the foundations of Israel’s contemporary surveillance and citizenship infrastructures and facilitated the dispossession of Palestinian lands and legal status. 26 In Myanmar, movement restrictions were implemented on the basis of the British Empire’s 1864 Foreigners Act that remained in place in Myanmar after independence, forming one of the legal foundations for restricting movement and segregating Rohingyas.27 The Act mandates a strict system of licensing for travel within Myanmar and the residence of non-nationals and forms one of the foundations of the discriminatory system that contains Rohingyas in pockets of northern Rakhine State and requires them to apply for permission to travel between village tracts and beyond.28 This law was also weaponised by the British in British India in the 1920s and 1930s by restricting the movement of dissidents in an attempt to contain revolts against colonial rule.29 In the 1980s, the stripping of citizenship rights accorded to the Rohingya following Myanmar’s independence from British rule was justified on the basis of wildly inaccurate colonial taxonomies of race and ethnicity in the region. 30 During the interwar years, Kurdish homelands were split between the four countries of Syria, Iran, Iraq and Turkey based on colonial mapping projects that sought to contain and curtail the power of other European colonial powers, rendering Kurdish communities ‘minorities’ within broader state structures.31 This article asserts that citizenship stripping in authoritarian or militarised postcolonial contexts is often delivered in part through citizenship and immigration rules, in part through broader bureaucratic and legal means, and in part through military assaults. There are many of examples of this. Israel’s citizenship rules, that denied or demoted Palestinians’ legal status, were partially implemented on the basis of census data that was collected during and immediately after war and mass forced displacement.32 Hierarchical identification systems held in place systems of segregation that provided different rights to Palestinians based on their locations during war-time.33 Restrictions tied to identity card hierarchies 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 Michelle Spektor, ‘From Documents to Data: The Emergence of National Biometric Identification Systems in the 20th and 21st Centuries’ (PhD Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2023) <https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/150683>, archived at <perma.cc/3973-RXVT>; Leibler (n 24) 243–4; Lyon, Identification, Colonialism, and Control (n 22) 49. The Foreigner Act, ‘India Act III’ (1864) (Burma) <https://www.myanmar-lawlibrary.org/law-library/laws-and-regulations/laws/british-burma-1824-1942-1945-1948/theforeigners-act-india-act-iii-1864-12th-february-1864.html>, archived at <perma.cc/U2KF-WF32> (‘Foreigners Act’). For analysis of the Foreigners Act’s use in the Rohingya context, see William Schabas, Nancie Prudhomme and Joseph Powderly, Crimes against Humanity in Western Burma: The Situation of the Rohingyas (Iris Centre for Human Rights, 2010) 99. Foreigners Act (n 28) ss 3, 10. Amrith (n 24); Singha (n 24) 311. Nyi Nyi Kyaw, ‘Unpacking the Presumed Statelessness of Rohingyas’ (2017) 15(3) Journal of Immigrant & Refugee Studies 269. Haqqi Bahram, ‘Statelessness Beyond Citizenship: Kurds of Syria and the Struggle for Identity Between Home and Exile’ (Doctoral Thesis, Linköping University, 2024) 20, 36–8, 42, 83, 188 (‘Between Home and Exile’). Leibler (n 24) 252. Helga Tawil-Souri, ‘Orange, green and blue: Color-coded paperwork for Palestinian population control’ in Elia Zureik, David Lyon and Yasmeen Abu-Laban (eds), Surveillance and Control in Israel/Palestine: Population, Territory and Power (Routledge 2011) 219. 12