the Karen peoples, which is discussed in further detail later in this thesis. It is important to note the history of abuses in border regions as a result of legal subjugation. The categories of “associate citizen” and “naturalized citizen” serve to strategically and structurally separate entire groups of people according to their perceived significance in terms of whether or not they can be of use to the military and central government. By establishing these two categories, the military-state at the time further solidified a sense of alienation felt by those not recognized ethnicities to whom any form of citizenship was not available. Both brackets of citizenship—still alluded to as mixedblood races—are given peripheral rights relating to political association and engagement, health, education, and freedoms of movement, marriage and property. Arraiza & Vonk (2017) state: What started as an exclusive nation-building and “otherisation exercise” by the military became state policy and defined the legislation and policy up to the present . . . the rule of law and the access to claim and exercise one’s rights is hampered by a degree of arbitrariness and lack of accountability embedded in the 1982 Citizenship law. (p. 8) As noted by Ullah (2017), jurisprudence holds that no reason is required by entities in which authority is vested to uphold the law. This gives the Tatmadaw, its individual officers, and all subsequent law enforcement partners carte blanche regarding who they persecute or how they carry out the application of the law. The popular uprising in the late 1980s and the SLORC regime’s accession to power marked a significant shift in judiciary codes and practices nationwide—a development enhanced by the 1982 citizenship law. Significantly, the national register cards distributed under the 1949 Residents of Myanmar Registration Act were replaced by Citizenship Scrutiny cards. Color coded to denote citizenship status, these cards 68