Despite an international legal and normative framework and other global efforts to prevent childhood statelessness, an estimated 70,000 stateless children are born each year in the countries that are home to the twenty largest populations of stateless persons. Children continue to be born stateless, largely due to the inheritance of statelessness from one generation to another. In Southeast Asia, the various causes of statelessness revolve around discriminatory nationality laws premised on race, ethnicity, gender, religion and many other grounds. This chapter examines the different forms of discrimination that engender and perpetuate childhood statelessness in this subregion. It argues that many hereditary and protracted cases of statelessness experienced by children result from direct and indirect discriminatory laws, policies and practices. Case studies from Myanmar, Cambodia, Thailand and Malaysia are discussed to illustrate the dynamics of discrimination that arbitrarily deprive children of their right to a nationality. In addition, the chapter draws on the perspectives of the applicable international norms and their limitations, as well as presents some insights into potential solutions for countering this phenomenon.

Childhood statelessness is an urgent global human rights issue. Yet, there is limited ethnographic data on the everyday and varied experiences of stateless children and youth, whose representations in mainstream media and campaign materials tend to transmute them into generalized subjects with an ostensibly universal experience of total abjection. Drawing on thirteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in northern Thailand, this chapter examines the process of ‘learning to be stateless’ among Shan youth participants and the impact of statelessness during their various life stages. The chapter argues that statelessness is not necessarily a fully and actively internalized status since birth but a dynamic condition that constantly undergoes re-interpretation by the affected youth at punctuated moments and at various life stages. By examining the contemporary regime of statelessness in a country such as Thailand, where stateless persons have access to certain rights as children but not as adults, this chapter calls attention to the intersection of life stages and statelessness and the complex ways in which such regimes of simultaneous inclusion and exclusion place the emotional and practical burdens on stateless persons as they transition from childhood into adolescence and adulthood.