By-passing state power and neutralising state bureaucracies 47
result in inappropriate or harmful policy approaches to tackling statelessness.
In particular, notions of the stateless person as invisible or unseen by the state
contribute to dominant policy responses that advocate for increased state registration and documentation, which Rohingya narratives challenge as enabling
systems of persecution, apartheid, and genocide (see Chapters 7 and 8).
State bureaucracies and visibility
Since the end of WWI, as new and old states attempted to mark out the
boundaries or their membership and establish themselves as ‘modern’ and
‘efficient,’ states have increasingly governed through bureaucracies and state
categorisation, registration, and documentation processes (Scott 1998; Scott,
Tehranian et al. 2002; Weber 2006; Thompson 2008). It was during this
period, for example, that the passport emerged as a mandatory document
for international travel (Torpey 2001). Since WWI, states have increasingly
documented individuals within their physical borders as a method of constructing themselves as efficient and modern. Registration and documentation of individuals and related categorisation processes make populations
visible or ‘legible’ (Scott 1998). By making populations visible and legible,
states control movement and access to resources and rights. Categorisation
of citizens enables states to ‘embrace’ populations through the provision of
rights, welfare, and movement (Scott 1998; Torpey 2000). Efficient governance is often understood as being based on the visibility and legibility of
populations. Within this paradigm, the stateless person is understood to exist
outside of the state bureaucracy and is therefore administratively and legally
‘invisible’ to state and according to supra-national organisations who rely on
states for national-level data. Hence, stateless people are also conceived of
as being ‘illegible’ for national and international development programming,
for human rights advocacy and campaigns, and for the purposes of migration management.20 Problematically, within international statelessness work,
state bureaucracies and processes of counting, identifying, and documenting
populations—or lifting people out of a state of invisibility—are most often
constructed as neutral or benign (Van Waas and Brinham 2021; Zalc 2021).
Rather, as Scott (1998) and Torpey’s (2000) work shows, the processes of
identification, categorisation, and documentation are key technologies of
state power through which states build, consolidate, and legitimise their
power (Lyon and Bennett 2008). They enable states to draw the boundaries
of their ‘imagined communities’ through the provision of citizenship to some
populations whilst at the same time excluding others. Registration and documentation do not simply record a set of neutral facts about individuals but
are also integral to the functions of state surveillance and securitisation. They
sort, structure, and order populations in ways that construct the state, as
well as frame and shape an individual’s lived experiences (Sharma and Gupta
2006). State categories, as Scott (1998:83) explains, do not simply chart the
demographic landscape but also shape everyday experience and become ‘the