indigenous’ and those on the geographic margins of states; and that areas with high rates of colonial migration tend to have particularly restrictive citizenship laws. Fourth, for context, insofar as international commitments, Myanmar is party to the ASEAN Human Rights Declaration (2012), of which Point 18 grants every person the right to a nationality. However, like most countries in the region, it has not ratified similar relevant UN Conventions, including the 1954 and 1961 UN Statelessness Conventions, nor the 1951 Refugee Convention and the 1967 Protocol relating to the Status of Refugees. Thus, many of the tenets of Euro-centric moral claims on the basis of these conventions do not map on effectively. Finally, many terms that feature throughout the paper are incredibly complex and have numerous divergent meanings—‘indigenous’, ‘nation-state’, ‘ethnicity’, ‘citizenship’ and others. Given the content of the paper, I must largely rely on legal or methodologically nationalist definitions, which are tied up in colonial histories and ongoing colonialities. In using these definitions, I do not mean to undermine any alternative definitions of the same terms, particularly definitions being used to decolonize the terminology, for example those occurring in the North American indigenous studies context (Lawrence and Dua, 2005). In an attempt to avoid this, I clearly spell out my definitions for each concept and use quotations to avoid naturalizing those meanings. 2. Migration, ‘Indigeneity’ and Constructed Citizenship In the first half of this section, I will briefly outline the pre-colonial histories, patterns of political rule, and key migration patterns of the region, primarily because such histories—pre-colonial, nonwestern migration patterns—are largely overlooked in migration studies literature yet have played a critical role in shaping the geographies of Southeast Asia. The subsection helps to contextualize why particular groups have been rendered stateless, while others have not. In almost all cases, stateless groups in Southeast Asia have some connection to migration: many of these movements occurred before European colonialism. This section will largely focus on three pre-colonial movements highly relevant to statelessness today: first, on the movement of peoples away from imperially-controlled lowlands to the highlands of mainland Southeast Asia; second, on the influx of Muslim communities in the region; and third, on patterns of Chinese immigration. Each of these provide critical context for how and why contemporary citizenship laws have been configured, revealing why certain groups have been excluded. The second half of the section will outline colonial patterns of rule and movement, specifically the use of imposed migration as a form of control and governance by the British Empire. The scale of     8