JOURNAL OF ETHNIC AND MIGRATION STUDIES 4795 India and newly formed Pakistan. Adding to this scholarly background, Das’s treatment of ‘liminal citizenship’ specifically highlights bureaucratic challenges faced by the Miya community in Assam. Despite their formal citizenship status, administrative errors in identity documents create a significant gap between citizenship and the actual exercise of rights, leading to missed opportunities and disrupted livelihoods. This bureaucratic inefficiency and oversight render the Miya community’s citizenship fragile and uncertain, echoing broader concerns identified by Gogoi and Sen, and Bhat. Das underscores how errors in identity documents, despite granting formal citizenship, result in a precarious existence where basic rights remain inaccessible. This state of liminality is not fleeting but a persistent condition for the Miyas, emphasising the crucial role of accurate documentation in asserting citizenship rights and seizing opportunities. Expanding on this theme, Bhat’s analysis explores how states fabricate statelessness, particularly through documentary regimes in Assam. The article’s focus on bureaucratic discretion, political manipulation of legal documents, and the ethnicisation of documentary regimes sheds fresh light on how bureaucratic practices and legal frameworks disenfranchise marginalised groups. This paradoxical situation renders documents, intended to affirm identity and rights, as instruments of exclusion and statelessness. The second theme in relation to liminality is historical: the constitutive role played by colonial modes of governance that continue from the past to the present. This has happened because the postcolonial states in the region have used colonial modes of governance in service of state formation. Several contributors note these intersections that renders the status of individuals and groups – who found themselves on the ‘wrong’ side of the new national border – liminal. These ‘zones of liminality’, as described by Berger and Garg, originated alongside postcolonial citizenship regimes due to the amalgamation of rules, procedures and evidence. This amalgamated matrix fosters exclusion, uncertainty, precarity and liminality, evident in various countries’ citizenship laws and documentary cultures. This artificially ruptured communities, geographies and mobilities; introduced new and often unrealistic demands of proof and documentation; and constituted new regimes of suspicion targeting minority ethnic groups. The role of state formation and law/paperwork is further complicated by the politicised context of ethnonationalism. ‘Zones of liminality’ evolve and expand due to exclusionary politics. In India, documentary citizenship regimes, especially the Foreigners Tribunals and the National Register of Citizens, have increasingly brought more individuals under scrutiny. The contributions in the special issue emphasise that these zones of liminality are not merely due to state incapacity affecting individuals but arise from racialised violent ethnic politics impacting entire populations. Berger & Garg’s article, for instance, widens the horizon by comparing citizenship regimes in India, Sri Lanka and Myanmar. Their analysis of intricate citizenship structures, the impact of ethnonationalism, and the systematic shift in burden of proof reveals how states create zones of liminality, particularly affecting ethnic and religious minorities. This comparative approach underscores the transnational complexity of the issue, where bureaucratic and legal intricacies in one country echo and influence those in neighbouring states, resulting in regional challenges concerning citizenship. The collective works of Gogoi and Sen, Bhat, Das and Sharma paint a comprehensive picture of a region grappling with citizenship challenges amidst ethnic tensions, bureaucratic obstacles and security concerns.