Book Review: Citizenship and Genocide Cards: IDs, Statelessness and Rohingya Resistance in Myanmar by Natalie Brinham 

Guest post by Veronica Soon. Veronica is a DPhil Candidate in Law at the University of Oxford. Her doctoral research looks at citizenship deprivation in international law. She can be found on X: @veronicasoon and Bluesky: @veronicasoon.bsky.social 

Review of: Citizenship and Genocide Cards: IDs, Statelessness and Rohingya Resistance in Myanmar by Natalie Brinham (Routledge, 2024) 

The horrific waves of genocidal violence committed by the Myanmar government against the Rohingya in 2016 and 2017 have led to a case brought against Myanmar in the International Court of Justice as well as an application for an arrest warrant for General Min Aung Hlaing, Senior General and Acting President of Myanmar, filed by the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court. While these are positive legal developments, one cannot help but wonder: Can these Hague-based international tribunals – miles away from both the Rakhine State and Cox’s Bazaar where survivors are mainly located – really deliver victim-centred justice? Our current international legal system privileges state discourse and narratives over non-state entities like individuals. An important goal, then, is to ensure that the voices of survivors are not drowned out in this system. One way to counter this imbalance is by taking into consideration the narratives, opinions, and experiences of survivors.  

Brinham’s Citizenship and Genocide Cards addresses this gap as she amplifies the voices of the Rohingya participants she interviews, giving them a chance to participate in the international legal discourse that affects them as a population. She does so by conducting narrative research using identity cards (IDs) as a way for her Rohingya participants to share their individual and collective stories and to show the meaning they attribute to these IDs. This approach reflects Brinham’s thoughtfulness on her methods as she chose to use IDs to avoid retraumatising the survivors, shifting the attention from the usual damage-centred approach to one that was more victim-centred.  

The use of IDs is also especially important for the Rohingya who have had to negotiate their belonging to Myanmar since the pre-independence period. Brinham explains this history eloquently in Chapters 4 and 5, tracing this tension from British colonial period, to Burma’s independence, and to present day where Rohingya’s citizenship was deprived by Myanmar’s discriminatory 1982 Citizenship Law (as explained by Human Rights Watch). As such, IDs are not merely neutral documents identifying an individual’s status in the country, but a tool for states to categorise and recategorise who belongs to their ‘imagined communities’. Drawing on Scott and Torpey’s works, Brinham argues that state issued documents should be understood as central to the nation-building project and that reliance on the law for security that many of us have is a privileged view. 

For Brinham’s Rohingya participants, IDs have become a sort of artefact – confirming their past relationships with the governing powers and of the violence perpetrated on them as a group. This is especially important in the face of the Myanmar government’s constant reimagining of the Rohingya’s identity and belonging. As Brinham laments, “In Myanmar, Rohingya as a people of place were reconstructed as ‘foreigners’. Internationally, they were reconstructed as ‘stateless’.” (p. 4) It was also touching and inspiring to read the story of Gulam, how his document became of value not only to him but also to other Rohingyas around him, and the lengths he went to protect his document from being confiscated through the different waves of violence.  

As a legal scholar researching on statelessness, one of the most interesting aspects of Citizenship and Genocide Cards is how the Rohingyas actively reject calling themselves ‘stateless’. In international law, the two legal instruments addressing statelessness focus on two aspects: (i) protection of stateless individuals and (ii) the reduction of statelessness. Tension arises from this rejection as the Rohingya cannot be protected in international law unless they are recognised as stateless. However, this is not in line with the Rohingyas perception of their citizenship – that they are Myanmar citizens but were wrongfully deprived of their rights. This can also be clearly seen in Akhavan et al’s work, “86 percent of participants said they needed citizenship and the right to identify as Rohingya in Myanmar. Indeed, many participants used the terms justice and citizenship interchangeably.” (p. 193) 

Furthermore, the general international approach to the issue of statelessness is to view it as an issue of state neglect, with the notion of stateless persons as invisible phantoms to the States by some oversight. Naturally, the solution to that problem is to provide legal identity for all individuals. For Brinham, this approach can only provide devastating consequences for the Rohingya as this approach does not consider situations where a state manufactures statelessness (see also Neha Jain’s work). It was interesting to read that the UNHCR’s ‘diplomatic’ approach by supporting the Myanmar government’s issuance of white cards – IDs that did not provide for citizenship – was viewed by the Rohingya as the organization falling for a government lie, or worse, that UNHCR colluded with the Myanmar government in the latter’s commission of genocidal crimes. The introduction of new documents invalidating the Rohingya’s status as citizens have also made IDs an arena for resistance movements. Brinham’s research shows how Rohingyas would reject the government’s attempt to issue them these new IDs in an attempt to categorise them as non-citizens, and the guilt individuals felt when they were forced to take up these IDs. 

In the last part of her book, she calls for the international community to reconceptualise ID schemes as one that can bring both harm and good, rather than solely viewing it as ‘progressive development’. This is especially important since digital IDs are a massive growth industry in the Global South where privacy laws are scant and where private tech companies (unregulated and unaccountable) are mainly involved in the development of these ID systems. This presents a greater risk for vulnerable populations to be pushed into statelessness as one’s identity is hinged onto an ID. 

Overall, this book is a timely contribution to the increasingly contested notions of citizenship and statelessness in general, and the plight of the Rohingya in particular. It provides an excellent blueprint for the international community on how to involve affected peoples in a discourse that is usually overtly legal and disconnected from the ground. 

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