4 Introduction A focus on oral histories of IDs and state-issued documents as Chapter 2 explains enables a study of the processes of destruction, state power, and resistance. It facilitates building an understanding of genocide and statelessness in which my own and others’ assumptions are interrupted and displaced by the experiences and knowledge of survivors. In Myanmar, Rohingya as a people of place were reconstructed as ‘foreigners.’ Internationally, they were reconstructed as ‘stateless.’ This is a story of the violence of that reconstruction, the repercussions, and the struggles to reconstruct belonging. Rohingya, statelessness, and human rights research This research was first conceived during the years that I was working on a multi-country project on the human rights of stateless Rohingya from 2010 to 2015. Rohingya were, even then, one of the best-known groups of stateless persons in the world—the term ‘stateless’ frequently preceded their ethnic identity in the media and other reports. This was one of the reasons our project was designed around Rohingya situations—it built on our organisation’s specialisation in statelessness. One afternoon in a flat in Chittagong, statelessness specialists shared food and discussed the human rights situation with a number of Rohingya community leaders. When asked by one of the foreign researchers about Rohingya statelessness, one Rohingya leader replied, ‘But Rohingya are not stateless.’ An uncomfortable silence followed. The statement undermined the very premise of our project. Later in private, we pondered whether this Rohingya man misunderstood international legal definitions of statelessness, or if this statement meant something more. A similar encounter relating to Rohingya statelessness followed a year later in 2013 in Yangon with a prominent Rohingya politician in Yangon. The query stayed with me. It got me wondering about the tensions that exist between the ways in which Rohingya statelessness has been constructed and approached internationally, and Rohingyas’ own experiences and understandings of citizenship and statelessness. In the air-conditioned UN offices in Bangkok, Yangon, and Kuala Lumpur, I thought—and worried—about how the framings of Rohingya statelessness that we drew upon for our research might impact and limit the discussions we were having in advocacy and policy circles, or might mute the dissenting but important voices of Rohingya activists on the topic. Two years into the project, in 2012, waves of violence against Rohingya in Rakhine State,7 took the plight of Rohingya from relative obscurity into the international headlines. As human rights researchers working with Rohingya, we tried to mine the testimonies of the survivors for hard facts relating to human rights abuses and the role of the state in the violence. We would filter narratives for evidence; extract the significant events and statements and categorise them in our human rights frameworks, sifting out many of the conflicting or shifting meanings Rohingya themselves had given to the events. On one occasion, I switched off the recording device as my Rohingya interpreter spun off topic and began sobbing in the arms of the stateless Kaman