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This article explores how states mobilise ideologies of the rule of law to legitimise, facilitate and obscure human rights violations, especially in the context of citizenship and migration. There is a global pattern of states using ostensibly legal means to undermine citizenship status of vulnerable minorities. In several national contexts, the invocation of the rule of law and the use of legal identity documents are interlocked. States have relied on the regimes of documentary citizenship as the legal face of citizenship deprivation. This article studies India's north-eastern state of Assam – one of the most striking instances of this pattern – where bureaucratic practices of citizenship adjudication have threatened the citizenship status of more than 3 million people. It shows that despite being centred around them, the administrators of documentary citizenship routinely disregard identity documents in their everyday functioning. It argues that India's ethnicised politics towards immigration constitutes contradictory attitudes towards identity documents. Officials imagine legal identity documents as legitimate and viable, and simultaneously compromised due to administrative corruption and complicity. This documentary doublethink engenders grave instability of citizenship status. The article illuminates how the rule of law – like the documentary regimes it sustains – is Janus-faced by producing and obscuring precarious citizenship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special issue critically examines the interplay between the law and politics of state trans/formation, status precarity and the abuse of law. Globally, governments have exercised state power to undermine citizenship status, democratic well-being and the rule of law. This introduction makes the case for this focus and highlights the range of the special issue's intervention. Firstly, it shows how the contributions in the special issue build upon scholarship that tackles these three values independently and offers a more comprehensive analysis of contemporary challenges of the law and politics of citizenship. It studies the mutual attrition of citizenship, law and democracy by adopting a focus on South and Southeast Asia, especially India, Myanmar and Sri Lanka. Secondly, it emphasises the special issue's methodological contribution by drawing from the theory-generative capacities of focusing on Asia and the Global South more generally. Thirdly, the introduction highlights the cross-cutting substantive contributions of the articles, especially status liminality and statelessness, securitisation and authoritarian politics, bureaucracy and paperwork, and minority and human rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]