All Ears to the Ground: Resisting Mass Citizenship Stripping and Citizenship Violence
TRANSCEND MEMBERS, 1 Sep 2025
Natalie Brinham – TRANSCEND Media Service
This paper explores ground-level collective modes of resistance that highlight state practices associated with mass citizenship stripping. In doing so, it identifies challenges in anti-statelessness work and suggests that these and other forms of resistance can be important in informing and shaping more responsive international interventions. The study focuses on situations in which state authorities have weaponised their citizenship laws and ID systems to exclude, segregate and expel people based on their membership of a group. Specifically, it focuses on Rohingya, Kurdish and Palestinian experiences of citizenship violence.
Through these case-studies and broader literature review, it identifies specific modes of citizenship violence within the broader processes of group persecution. It then explores five non-exhaustive modes of collective resistance that have been organised by affected communities. These are: countering re-categorisation through collective refusals; countering document stripping through the collection and exhibition of documents; countering erasure through community-centred knowledge production and arts; countering conflict-associated statelessness through self-registration; and countering conditionalities of IDs through strategic compliance.
People affected by statelessness and survivors of state crime are active agents in seeking social justice, despite the structural factors that limit the effectiveness of many forms of resistance. As such, the power dynamics between affected communities, states and international actors are explored to identify the constraints to these modes of resistance. The study concludes by considering some of the implications of these forms of resistance for the international anti-statelessness sector.
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I – Introduction
This article1 takes as a starting point the understanding that people affected by statelessness are active agents in seeking social justice, but that structural factors and power relations limit the effectiveness of many forms of action and resistance. At the root of all forms of statelessness are the practices of state authorities. These practices emerge from a multitude of intersecting factors, ranging from administrative oversight to discriminatory laws to group persecution. When a lack of administrative efficiency or legal flaws are factors, interventions at the international level can seek to address statelessness through capacity building and technical support. Common examples include upgrading civil registries or supporting amendments to states citizenship rules. At the other end of the spectrum, when statelessness results primarily from the misuse of state power, it has proved more challenging for international organisations to develop appropriate interventions. In such circumstances, it is important to look at how communities of resistance respond on the ground.
Recent statelessness scholarship has given more attention to situations in which citizenship rules and ID systems have been weaponised by states. There is also a groundswell of scholarship critiquing the promotion of universal legal identities in international development work, including important case studies revealing the potential for digitisation of ID systems to exacerbate the problems of citizenship violence in the Dominican Republic, Kenya, the Ivory Coast, India and Myanmar among many other contexts. Ground level resistance strategies that respond specifically to citizenship violence, however, are yet to be explored in depth. This article aims to contribute to statelessness and citizenship scholarship by outlining a framework to explore resistance.
The responses to statelessness by affected people and communities vary and adapt according to the actions of state authorities and the perceived intentions of state actors. International actors often develop programming according to national level priorities. To a lesser extent, they also respond to the actions and forms of resistance of affected communities on the ground. Both national and ground level actions can then influence the development of interventions to combat statelessness by international organisations and non-governmental organisations (‘NGOs’). In the past decade, there has been increased participation of people affected by statelessness in shaping international interventions, and more emphasis within the sector on these interventions being responsive and accountable to affected communities. Better understanding of how communities respond when their citizenship and rights are under threat can further efforts towards responsive and accountable international programming.
Taking a socio-legal approach, this article contributes to this knowledge base, focusing on the collective and organised modes of resistance to citizenship stripping and violence by directly affected communities. Not all forms of statelessness can be attributed to state abuses of power. This article specifically examines situations where communities of resistance seek to highlight the misuse of state power and call for social justice. It considers situations in which state authorities have weaponised their citizenship laws, ID systems and administrative systems to exclude, segregate or expel people based on their membership of a group. The three case studies explore Rohingya, Kurdish and Palestinian experiences of citizenship violence. In each of these contexts, state authorities have practiced mass citizenship stripping and violence and affected communities have developed diverse strategies of collective resistance.
The article is divided into two Parts: Mass Citizenship Stripping and Citizenship Violence; and Resistance. In the first, it identifies five key methods through which states weaponise their citizenship regimes: re-categorisation of people as foreigners, second class citizens, or outsiders; the systematic removal, destruction or nullification of identity and other documents (or document stripping); erasure of history, culture, language and identity of the targeted community; preventing access to civil registration; and conditionalities placed on ID issuance, naturalisation and citizenship acquisition procedures. In the second Part, the article identifies five modes of collective resistance to these forms of citizenship violence. These are: countering re-categorisation through collective refusals; countering document stripping through the collection and exhibition of documents; countering erasure through community-centred knowledge production and arts; countering statelessness through self-registration; and countering the conditionality of IDs through strategic compliance.
In considering each mode of resistance, the article also reflects on the ways in which unequal power relations constrain the effectiveness of these actions. These relations can result in limited political clout for those omitted from national statistics, community-level backlash such as counter protest and boycott, other forms of administrative violence and military crackdowns, as well as the use of censorship and surveillance to quell dissent. Meanwhile, international political structures promote administrative state entities as the only viable channel to establish one’s legal identity. International criminal law remains limited in holding perpetrators of citizenship violence to account. This examination of the national and international structures that limit the effectiveness of resistance strategies is rooted in postcolonial critiques of human rights discourses and frameworks, for example, those relating to anti-trafficking, liberal feminism and nationalism. Such critiques hold that normative international rights frameworks can lend legitimacy to statist approaches to human rights, sometimes at the expense of human freedoms.
These modes of citizenship violence, resistance and structural constraints are by no means exhaustive lists, but rather the beginnings of a framework. The analysis draws on interviews and focus groups conducted amongst stateless Rohingya refugees from Myanmar between 2016 and 2019, and is supplemented by literature relating to the other two contexts of mass citizenship stripping.
II – Mass Citizenship Stripping and Citizenship Violence
A – Conceptualising Mass Citizenship Stripping and Citizenship Violence
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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. and a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment. 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. natalie.brinham@gmail.com
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Tags: Citizen Duties, Citizen Rights, Cultural violence, Direct violence, Resistance, Structural violence
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