2019 Statelessness & Citizenship Review 1(2) affirm existing literature on the myth of complete and even bureaucracy, and further reiterate the circular dynamic of legibility and illegibility. With respect to legibility, the state demands that stateless persons wishing to obtain citizenship be ‘legible’ through documents. Yet, the state and its administrative bodies’ own practices regarding documents are uneven. Through inconsistent rules and policies and selective application of the rules, the state has created a system of governing that on the surface demands clarity but in practice operates under opacity. In using the theoretical framework of state illegibility and ethnographic accounts, I further illuminate the process by which the state places burden on the stateless. All three accounts demonstrate various forms of state illegibility and how they are justified in the name of national security. Under such pretext, the state exercises the ultimate authority to revoke citizenship en masse, disbelieve the promise and evidence produced by the state itself and disregard documentary mistakes made by representatives of the state. The ethnographies confirm common challenges facing many stateless persons beyond the context of Thailand such as the pattern of legal incoherence, unexpected revocation of rights, reliance on favours from officials and mysterious disappearance of documents into a black hole of the bureaucratic universe. I argue that stateless persons, having been subjected to state illegibility all their lives, are well aware of its various forms and continuously devise means to anticipate and respond to them. This knowledge does not take away the burden placed upon them. Neither does it reduce the danger of the state’s rhetoric of standardised and fair bureaucracy. Therefore, for those working to address statelessness, it is important to recognise and acknowledge various forms of state illegibility. Failure to do so risks reducing statelessness to a legalistic issue to be solved primarily by amending the laws or producing documents. As shown by the ethnographies, this approach risks placing blame on individuals for not possessing the right documents and further exacerbating the vulnerabilities of stateless individuals. Conceptualising unevenness in state bureaucratic practices as state illegibility rather than weak bureaucracy therefore allows us to recognise the violence that is systemic and rooted in discrimination, rather than viewing it as unintentional and anomalous errors. 238