Citizenship and Genocide Cards: IDs, Statelessness and Rohingya Resistance in Myanmar

This book examines the multiple uses of state-issued ID cards and registration documents in producing statelessness and facilitating genocide. In doing so, it challenges some of the international solutions put forward to resolve statelessness.

Rohingya narratives disrupt a simple linear understanding of documenting legal identity that marginalises experiences of these processes. The richly layered accounts of the effects of citizenship laws and registration processes on the lives of Rohingya problematise the ways in which international actors have endorsed state ID schemes and by-passed state-led persecution of the group. This book will be valuable for scholars studying global criminology, state crime, development studies, refugee and migration studies, statelessness and nationality, citizenship studies, and genocide studies.

In 2015, Sustainable Development Goal 16.9 pledged to provide a “legal identity for all by 2030.” That is everyone should be registered and recorded by a recognised state. The international development logic is that the lives of undocumented and stateless people will be improved by making them visible to states, and bringing within the orbit of the state’s welfare and justice system. It’s all part of a pledge to promote “peaceful and inclusive societies” and build “effective, accountable and inclusive institutions”.

It sounds laudable.

Enter criminal states with no intention of spreading peace or inclusion. What are they be effective at? Inclusion or oppression?

Enter multi-national tech companies selling ID systems and surveillance equipment to states. Who are they accountable to? Citizens or shareholders?

The utopian ideal of including everyone in international development goals gave way, in some countries, to dystopian realities in which development agencies focused on updating registration systems as the ‘legal-identities-for-all’ agenda was misused by states to monitor, exclude, oppress, wage war on, or destroy minorities. The ‘Legal-identities-for-all’ agenda gathered speed – juggernauts headed down hills. Corporate interests and development agencies cheered the race on from the roadside. States at the wheel. Some states transporting goods and welfare for citizens – others accelerating towards crowds of persecuted people. No one realised what they were cheering for.

It’s only now, in 2024, that supporters of SDG 16.9 have started to realise that when they built the juggernauts, they forgot to build escape lanes for genocide survivors, refugees and stateless people.

They should have listened more carefully to Rohingyas in Myanmar. Rohingya survivors could have told you that the roads weren’t safe, and the drivers weren’t reliable. They know how ID systems can be weaponised by states to oppress, contain and destroy.

Citizenship and Genocide Cards explores the spaces where Rohingya knowledge and experiences defy the logic behind ‘legal-identities-for-all’. It draws on Rohingya oral histories and narratives about Myanmar’s genocide and ID schemes to critique prevailing international approaches to legal identities and statelessness. By centring the narratives of survivors of state crimes, collected in the aftermath of the 2017 genocidal violence, this book examines the multiple uses of state-issued ID cards and registration documents in producing statelessness and facilitating genocide. In doing so, it challenges some of the international solutions put forward to resolve statelessness.

Rohingya narratives disrupt a simple linear understanding of documenting legal identity that marginalises experiences of these processes. The richly layered accounts of the effects of citizenship laws and registration processes on the lives of Rohingya problematise the ways in which international actors have endorsed state ID schemes and by-passed state-led persecution of the group. This book will be valuable for scholars studying global criminology, state crime, development studies, refugee and migration studies, statelessness and nationality, citizenship studies, and genocide studies

Author

Natalie Brinham

Natalie Brinham ( ) is Leverhulme Early Career Fellow (2024- ) and previously Economic and Social Research Council post-doctoral fellow (2023), both with the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies, the University of Bristol. Under the pseudonym Alice Cowley, she co-authored a 3-year pioneering study of Myanmar’s slow-burning genocide of Rohingyas (2014). She has published extensively on the persecution of Rohingyas for academic publications and media outlets including Forced Migration Review, Project Syndicate. As a researcher and practitioner, Dr Brinham has been involved in both activism and scholarship on refugee affairs in Myanmar and UK over the last 20 years. She holds a PhD in legal studies from the Queen Mary University of London, an MA in education from the UCL Institute of Education and a BA (Hons.) in development and Thai Studies from SOAS University of London.

Further reading:

Refugee experiences of identity documents and digitisation in India and Myanmar – Forced Migration Review, Oxford University, 24 May 2024
https://www.fmreview.org/digital-disruption/brinham-johar/