In Malaysia, nationality is a highly sensitive matter as it is regarded as a manifestation of the country’s sovereignty and identity. As with a number of other countries, citizenship has also been used as a political tool in the creation of “who belongs” and “the other” (Wingfield, 2003; Mannarini and Salvatore, 2020). Despite attempts to reduce incidences of statelessness through the application of national laws, there have been disturbing numbers of stateless persons. During the 2013 to 2018 period, Jabatan Pendaftaran Negara (the National Registration Department, hereafter referred to as JPN) reportedly recorded 111,142 citizenship applications, with 26,222 of them being rejected and another 54,222 being processed. Roslina Che Soh@Yusoff et. al. (2019) also listed down several factors leading to the creation of stateless children in Malaysia – failure of marriage registration by parents, adopted or abandoned children, children of refugees, undocumented migrants, and unregistered births. Since 2015, SUHAKAM has received 1,291 complaints related to statelessness (SUHAKAM, 2021). During an online dialogue on “Human Rights and Statelessness in Malaysia”, organised by SUHAKAM on 11 June 2020, various issues were raised. The dialogue concluded that there exist gaps in nationality laws and guardianship, a lack of transparency and inconsistency of procedures, complexities of statelessness in Sabah, and other issues. There have been significant efforts to understand statelessness from a legal perspective – specifically focusing on the laws that govern citizenship and legal cases within the judicial system that fight for individual rights and claims to citizenship – and broader, macro policies surrounding statelessness. However, less attention has been paid to understanding the micro, intersectional lived experiences of stateless persons, as seen in Figure 1 below. Thus, this report uses rigorous social science methods to understand and bring to light the various aspects of life for stateless persons that have been underexplored, specifically related to the social, political, legal, and economic aspects of their lives, and how all of these dimensions are informed or are affected by statelessness. 3