Impacts of Conflict and Displacement on Myanmar Citizenship Pre and Post-2021

This research and policy brief focuses on conflict and displacement as key factors
contributing to statelessness and barriers to acquiring and holding Myanmar citizenship. The brief is designed as a working document for discussing important issues relevant for local governance during the revolution and national and state-level governance in the future. To aid in these conversations and policy developments, it focuses on the historical and contemporary citizenship regimes of Myanmar to explore the relationship between long-running internal and international armed conflict, widescale and/or targeted displacement, racial, ethnic, gender, and religious discrimination, and citizenship acquisition and issuance of civil documentation.

Identifying these issues as intersecting, highlighting citizenship as a cross-cutting issue with consequences for sectors from protection to health, gender, food security, education, conflict, and more is an important step in rethinking how citizenship issues are understood and approached both today and in a future Myanmar. Until now, scholars and practitioners working on conflict and those working on citizenship rarely engaged each other outside of the Rakhine context, yet, as this research brief shows, the ‘citizenship issue’ and Myanmar’s long-running armed conflicts are closely intertwined.

Myanmar’s current citizenship legislation, the 1982 Citizenship Act, is widely acknowledged as not only discriminatory, but leading to statelessness for a wide variety of Myanmar’s peoples. While the most well-known group impacted by the 1982 Citizenship Act are the Rohingya, the Act also impacts a wide range of other vulnerable groups: orphans, women, children, refugees and displaced persons, people living in conflict zones, Hindus, ethnic Chinese, Muslims, and others not recognized as taingyintha, as well as many taingyintha who cannot prove their parentage or their residence due to the intergenerational impacts of conflict and displacement.
The brief provides a brief history of the relationship between conflict and citizenship and its contemporary impacts before providing policy recommendations for how citizenship gaps and challenges caused by conflict can be addressed.