1. Introduction 1.1 The Problem: Statelessness at Scale Of approximately 4.2 million stateless persons worldwide (UNHCR, 2023), the Rohingya constitute the single largest stateless population originating from one country. As Figure 1 demonstrates, the scale of Rohingya statelessness dwarfs other documented stateless populations. Yet scale alone does not define the analytical significance of the case. What distinguishes it is deliberateness: a sequenced, legally engineered process of exclusion spanning four decades, designed not to leave people accidentally outside citizenship law but to place them there permanently and systematically. Source: UNHCR (2023); Minority Rights Group International (2023); IBAHRI (2020). Estimates as of 2023. This paper is written from inside that crisis. The author was born in Rakhine State, witnessed the 2017 genocide firsthand, and has lived in the Cox's Bazar refugee camps for four years building community institutions. That positionality is not incidental to the contribution — it is central to it. The academy has produced valuable scholarship on Rohingya statelessness, but almost none authored by Rohingya practitioner-scholars with direct institutional experience. This paper fills that gap. 1.2 Theoretical Contribution: The Self-Determination Continuum The paper introduces the Self-Determination Continuum — an analytical framework mapping the progressive foreclosure of self-determination rights under constructed statelessness and identifying institutional mechanisms through which stateless communities reclaim those rights from below. It synthesizes Cassese's (1995) internal/external self-determination distinction, Galtung's (1969) structural violence concept, and the indigenous data sovereignty literature (Carroll et al., 2020) into an integrated analytical tool. 1.3 Methodology and Data Sources 3