2025 Statelessness & Citizenship Review 7(1) paperwork, as well as the negative use of discretion by decision-makers, amongst other means, can mask forms of political persecution and systemic discrimination that result in loss or depletion of citizenship. 15 In outlining five modes of citizenship violence, this article explores some of the state-led practices that both mask and accompany the broader processes of citizenship stripping and citizenship violence. The definition of citizenship stripping used previously refers to loss of citizenship ‘not voluntarily requested.’ In situations where communities of resistance challenge the legitimacy of the document-issuing state and/or where communities aspire to their own statehood, the ‘(in)voluntariness’ of citizenship loss can be ambiguous and difficult to untangle.16 Further, citizenship violence can play out not only in the removal of citizenship, but also in the weaponising of citizenship acquisition, for example, conditions placed on naturalisation processes as noted in Part IIB. Nonetheless, in these situations, the modes of resistance are both similar and important. In acknowledgement of the ambiguity of voluntariness and the breath of citizenship violence, this article refers to citizenship violence alongside citizenship stripping. Mass citizenship stripping is often part of a broader spectrum of persecution. Those without citizenship status can more easily be denied access to vital services, deported, or subjected to segregation and discriminatory policies. 17 There are strong correlations between statelessness and mass atrocities.18 Mass citizenship stripping can be a form of collective punishment.19 It can also enable apartheid, genocide and other crimes.20 From a socio-legal perspective, citizenship stripping is not simply a discrete event in which a person moves across a legal binary from citizen to stateless person. Rather it is a set of interlinked state-led practices and sociological processes that produce the condition of statelessness. An emphasis on the practices and processes of citizenship stripping enables analysis of organisational behaviours (including criminality) of state authorities, as well as the responses of affected people. Resistance in this framework is understood within a relational context, in which affected people collectively respond to 15 16 17 18 19 20 Amal de Chickera et al, Navigating with a Faulty Map: Access to Citizenship Documents and Citizenship in Myanmar (ISI, 2021) 24–36 <https://www.institutesi.org/resources/access-tocitizenship-in-myanmar-report>, archived at <perma.cc/E22J-DW53>. See, eg, Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, ‘On the Threshold of Statelessness: Palestinian Narratives of Loss and Erasure’ in Joanna Story and Iain Walker (eds), The Impact of Diasporas (Routledge 2017) 181. ibid. Priya Pillai, ‘Taking Statelessness Seriously: Linkages to Mass Atrocities’, OpinioJuris (Blog Post, 28 January 2019) <https://opiniojuris.org/2019/01/28/taking-statelessness-seriouslylinkages-to-mass-atrocities/>, archived at <perma.cc/RDU7-92V8>; Natalie Brinham, Statelessness and Genocide (Research Brief, International Association of Genocide Scholars, 2025) <https://genocidescholars.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/Brinham-June-2025.pdf>, archived at <perma.cc/C79J-LL6B>. Kenny, ‘Legislated Out of Existence’ (n 6) 1057. See also Penny Green, Thomas Macmanus and Alicia de la Cour Venning, Genocide Achieved, Genocide Continues: Myanmar’s Annihilation of the Rohingya (Report, International State Crime Initiative, 2018); Fortify Rights, ‘Tools of Genocide’: National Verification Cards and the Denial of Citizenship of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar (Report, September 2019) 10, 43–67 <https://www.fortifyrights.org/mya-bgd-rep-2019-09-03/>, archived at <perma.cc/7Y7Q-QZ2J>. 10