Statelessness is increasingly becoming an area of focus for governments and international organizations like UNHCR, which in 2014 began its ‘Global Action Plan to End Statelessness: 2014-2024’ (hereafter the GAP), seeking to “resolve existing major situations of statelessness” worldwide (UNHCR, 2014b). In the GAP, UNHCR (2014b) acknowledges that “the majority of the world’s known stateless populations belong to minority groups” and that “mass deprivation” continues to occur on the basis of existing policies. However, it does not actively call for significant political change. This paper demonstrates how some existing policies specifically deprive certain groups of membership entirely, and how others—while overlooked—only allow for partial access to de facto citizenship. By tracing the histories and contextualizing exclusionary laws, this paper hopes to shed light not only on how statelessness is produced, but also why. From Colony to ‘Nation-State’: Citizenship Reified, Statelessness Constituted Statelessness necessarily emerged, and continues to emerge, alongside citizenship. ‘Citizenship’ is a feature and tool of the ‘nation-state’. Most of the cases of statelessness in this paper have thus arisen as part of nation- and state-building processes, particularly ‘citizen-making’. Therefore, contextualizing the construction of ‘citizenship’ and the ‘nation-state’ in Southeast Asia is vital. Both are non-universal concepts, both emerged from a European context, and both have been heavily shaped by those European precedents (Chakrabarty, 2000; Mamdani, 2012). The nation-state model in Southeast Asia is largely premised upon European models, at least in law. Nation-states are constructed entities, and citizenship is a constructed category: statelessness in its contemporary meaning is thus clearly also constructed. Certainly, however, being ‘state-less’, or living and existing outside of the ruling ‘state’/polity, has been a feature of life for groups and individuals long before the modern concept took form. Further, living ‘outside of the state’ has not always entailed the same pejorative connotation or negative repercussions that modern ‘statelessness’ entails. Indeed, as demonstrated in the previous section, for most of history in the region, the ‘state’ was something to avoid and ‘state-less’ness was a desirable thing for most non-dominant groups (Scott, 2009). This is, without a doubt, no longer the case for most groups and individuals: at some point, a major switch occurred. I argue, building alongside James C. Scott, that this switch was concurrent with the globalization of the ‘nation-state’ model and the growth of ‘distance-destroying’ technologies which allowed the state to reach into every nook and cranny of its territory. The existence of modern statelessness thus emerges from the shadow of the modern state. Let us briefly examine the contemporary ‘nation-state’ for context. ‘Nation’—the politically constructed, ordered, bounded, imagined group that becomes engrained in the ‘habitus’ of the community (Anderson, 1983; Bourdieu, 1990)—and ‘state’—a constructed, bounded, territorialized, constellational assemblage of bureaucratic and human     18