Third World Quarterly 959 the 1982 Myanmar Citizenship Law, sections 3 to 5, which renders full citizenship contingent on state-recognised national groups (Cheesman 2017, 461–483). The Rohingya are not recognised as a national group and therefore are excluded from full citizenship. Two other categories of citizenship are provided for in this law, namely associated citizenship and naturalised citizenship. This law nonetheless excludes Rohingya from both associated and naturalised citizenship. In the former case the requirement that all applications be lodged within one year of the law coming into force, in addition to the potential of revocation on the grounds of ‘disaffection or disloyalty to the state’, renders the option of associated citizenship unviable for the Rohingya. Even naturalised citizenship is not within their reach due to lack of documentation. Few Rohingya have access to documents of ancestral or parental residency. Their very limited access to education – because of the state barring them from education – makes impossible the acquisition of additional languages, other than their own (Indo-Aryan) language. Moreover, proof that Rohingya children were born in Burma is difficult to provide because since the 1962 coup d’état, few Rohingya children have been issued birth certificates (Irish Centre for Human Rights 2010; O’Brien and Hoffstaedter 2020). Obtaining Burmese citizenship for the Rohingya has been made progressively more arduous to virtually impossible with the provisions of the 1982 Citizenship Law, which are retained also by the current Constitution of the Republic of the Union of Myanmar (The Republic of the Union of Myanmar 2008). The exclusion of the Rohingya therefore is enshrined in law, including the supreme law of the land, the State’s Constitution. Denial of citizenship effectively renders them stateless – the de jure Other – broadening the scope for state violations of their human rights. A condition of extreme danger, statelessness subjects the Rohingya not only to an inferior status in terms of political and economic rights, but also to unwarranted and prolonged detention and various forms of punishment. Therefore, in the sovereign ban, there is a direct relation between law and violence in the sense that the law enables violence and violence contributes to law’s constitution. This is the sphere wherein violence and law are so intertwined that they become indistinguishable – a condition conducive to cascades of violence that have ensured the dehumanisation of the Rohingya and their exclusion from their ancestral land. The nation, the state, and the Rohingya ‘other’ The above analysis has shown that for over six decades the Burmese/Myanmar policy towards the Rohingya has been one of consistent persecution, exclusion, and expulsion of this minority group. The following sheds light on a complementary aspect of state policy that has framed the Rohingya as an unwanted ‘Other’ in the process of moulding the Burmese/ Buddhist nation out of a diverse multitude. The ‘nation’ does not designate a unitary notion, hence it is an imagined community (Anderson 1983). Its materialisation can be grounded on a violent relationship with the ‘Other’ (Mulaj 2018) – particularly so in conditions of authoritarianism. The accompanying exclusionary processes are customarily justified by the ideology of nationalism – the idea that the state and national boundaries ought to be congruent (Gellner 1983, 1). In the setting of totalitarian states, nationalism can facilitate instrumentalisation of the nation by the state, and the identification of the citizen with the member of the nation to the detriment of anyone else. To accomplish this task, the authoritarian state enforces centralisation tendencies and monopolises all instruments of violence and power-possibilities. In the process,