ABSTRACT
International agencies and actors frequently featured in Rohingya ID narratives. Statelessness was generally understood as being produced by the militarised state in Myanmar but also reinforced within the international state system. Rohingya experiences and understandings of statelessness sometimes converged but more often diverged, from international discourses relating to the prevention of statelessness. Framing international approaches to Rohingya statelessness and Myanmar ID schemes within global historical contexts from 1990 to 2020, this chapter explores these ruptures. It considers the ways in which Rohingya have contested, resisted, and informed international approaches to statelessness. It focuses on whether Myanmar’s ID systems were understood to be pathways towards citizenship or statelessness; towards inclusion or exclusion; towards peace and security, or conflict and protracted displacement. It concludes that the ‘legal identities for all’ sustainable development agenda is accountable to statist interests over and above the individuals that it seeks to protect and include. Rohingya ID narratives illustrate where sustainable development work departs from the core value to ‘do no harm,’ and where international interventions relating to legal identities fail to take account of the crimes of the powerful.
