‘Diagnosing’ Statelessness specific window of time). Getting a combination of these elements right is a complicated affair. To add further complexity, a child’s legal status is determined by that of the parents, making statelessness an inherited transgenerational experience. 27 With discrimination against minorities being one of the key causes of statelessness globally, 28 it is not a coincidence that most stateless persons are considered ‘ethnic minorities’ who reside in the northern region. 29 They are the members of the nine ethnic groups officially classified as ‘hill tribes’, 30 other highlanders not classified as ‘hill tribes’ and children of migrants, who were born in Thailand and do not have ties to their parents’ country of origin. 31 As argued by Flaim, the generally acknowledged causes of statelessness in the Global South such as state succession and state failure do not explain the phenomenal number of in situ stateless persons in Thailand. 32 For Flaim, systemic discrimination and exclusion against ethnic minorities, 33 along with bureaucratic failure, erratic and incomplete registration and legal loopholes account only in part for widespread statelessness in northern Thailand. 34 Arguing that ‘protracted statelessness… persists, paradoxically, as a result of the bureaucratic practices and procedures that have been enacted to address it’, 35 Flaim shines a light on what she calls ‘the fictions of the rule’. 36 Flaim’s work emphasises the importance of historicisation and contextualisation of nationality laws, policies and social practices in order to understand the complex dynamic of how the laws and policies are understood and interpreted by authorities. To understand why some groups of people are not considered ‘authentic Thai’, to use the late King’s words, we must briefly visit the social construction of Thai national identity. The twentieth-century nation-building project of the modern Thai state resulted in the imagined identity of Thai nationality as largely synonymous to ‘the Thai race/ethnicity’; cultural differences and ethnic heterogeneity were considered a threat to national stability. 37 Well-documented 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 See ibid ch 1. Fernand de Varennes, Report of the Special Rapporteur on Minority Issues, UN Doc A/HRC/40/64 (9 January 2019) 12 [85]. There are other stateless groups found in other parts of the country such as the Moken, a maritime mobile population in the Andaman sea, but they constitute a much smaller group as compared to the North. However, with negative connotations attached to this term, I will use the term ‘highland communities’ and ‘highlanders’ instead except when quoting the laws. Among the migrants themselves, those who arrived before the formalisation of labour migration regimes (ie before 2009) are classified as ‘persons without legal status’, rather than ‘temporary migrants’, and are allowed to stay for a duration of ten years, subject to renewal. I later elaborate more in this article under Part IV ‘Legibility Tools and Technology of Governing’. Flaim (n 14) 148. ibid. Here, Flaim cites a number of sources. See Thongchai Winichakul and Siam Mapped, A History of the Geo-Body of a Nation (University of Hawaii Press 1994); Thongchai Winichakul, ‘The Others Within: Travel and Ethno-Spatial Differentiation of Siamese Subjects: 1885–1910’ in Andrew Turton (ed), Civility and Savagery: Social Identity in Thai States (Curzon 2000); Thongchai Winichakul, ‘The Quest for “Siwilai”: A Geographical Discourse of Civilizational Thinking in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth-Century Siam’ (2000) 59(3) Journal of Asian Studies 528; Pinkaew Laungaramsri, ‘Ethnicity and the Politics of Ethnic Classification in Thailand’ in Colin Mackerras (ed), Ethnicity in Asia (Routledge Curzon 2003). See also Toyota (n 14); Morlaeku (n 14). Flaim (n 14) 148. ibid 148. ibid. Laungaramsri, ‘Ethnicity’ (n 33) 160. 219