Rodziana Mohamed Razali2024-05-272024-05-27202010/20/20200025-12831012-5https://oarep.usim.edu.my/handle/123456789/3605This article peruses statelessness in the heterogenous Myanmar and Malaysia, depicting how its dynamics continue to act as fodder for exclusion, conflict, marginalisation, and at times, Holocaust-like persecution. The stories of statelessness in these two ex-British colonies with dissimilar political, religious and cultural systems potently juxtapose the ontology of ‘the haves’ and ‘the have nots’ — and of a public milieu where claims to rightfulness are recognised, and the extreme form of loss of such realm, thus condemning everyone who falls into its hollow, or, ‘shadow’ — to indignity, insecurity, and worthlessness. Among others, they demonstrate that statelessness or the lack of an established legal identity explicitly or implicitly flies in the face of customary norms of non-discrimination on the basis of race, religion, nationality and other grounds. Further enabling its manifestation is the logic of sovereignty that allocates space for rejection of sovereignty-conflicting or eroding norms, as well as the exploitation of normative holes in the relevant frameworks.enArticle26