    1.5.2 Colonial Legacies One distinctive factor for statelessness in Asia is the legacy of colonialism; most states in Asia today were colonized by European powers to varying degrees, with Thailand (Kingdom of Siam), Japan, and to some extent Iran being the main exceptions. Within the field of statelessness studies, scholars are beginning to explore the connections between colonialism and statelessness,104 calling for ‘the value of decoloniality as a tool to understand and critically analyse statelessness’.105 Several chapters in this book contribute important analysis to this ongoing work. These chapters highlight the long-lasting legacies of colonial rule on statelessness in at least three ways, namely the adoption of the nationstate model, the failure to fully integrate populations which arrived through mass colonial-era migration, as well as policies and practices tied to the logic of colonial racial classification that regulate populations and belonging. First, many protracted situations of statelessness in the region have deep roots in the ways through which countries in the region adopted the nation-state model during and after colonialization. Western-derived concepts of race/ethnicity, nationhood and citizenship were imposed on Asian countries during the twentieth century.106 Decolonization and statehood perpetuated sometimes arbitrary borders drawn by colonial powers, which encompassed rich ethnic, linguistic and cultural diversity but also divided traditional communities across newly rigidifed state borders. For example, Ismatov in Chapter 4 observes that in 1924, the Soviet policymakers undertook a ‘massive and clumsy border delimitation process and created five stans in order to consolidate power and promote socialism’. These borders were approximate: ‘people were mixed, and the boundaries between them porous’.107 104 Choudhury, (n 53). Malak Benslama-Dabdoub, ‘Decolonising Statelessness: Unpacking Colonial Legacies and Deconstructing Forms of Epistemic Violence’ (Critical Statelessness Studies, January 2021) <https://law.unimelb.edu.au/centres/statelessness/resources/critical-state lessness-studies-blog/decolonising-statelessness-unpacking-colonial-legacies-and-decon structing-forms-of-epistemic-violence> accessed 13 September 2023. 106 See Leo Suryadinata, The Making of Southeast Asian Nations: State, Ethnicity, Indigenism and Citizenship (World Scientific 2014); and Arif Dirlik, ‘Colonialism, Revolution, Development: A Historical Perspective on Citizenship in Political Struggles in Eastern Asia’ (2010) 39(2) Development and Society 187. 107 Citing Vanessa Ruget, ‘Citizenship in Central Asia’ in Engin F. Isin and Peter Nyers (eds), Routledge Handbook of Global Citizenship Studies (Routledge 2014) 336. 105 https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009399555.003 Published online by Cambridge University Press