It is clear that the Tatmadaw has a long history, which continues to this day, of shifting the legal weight of identification cards and certificates depending on when and how such an action would benefit overall military objectives or individual ambitions. Long before the most recent violence in Rakhine state, the idea of citizenship as a tool for the Tatmadaw’s and central government’s political and economic gain was entrenched in Burma’s political system. In 2015, under the NLD government and at the guidance of Tatmadaw officials in high-ranking political positions, a new type of identification card (called Identity Cards for National Verification) were distributed “to scrutinize whether the applicant meets the eligibility to become a citizen of Myanmar and to identify them as residents of Myanmar during the citizenship verification process” (Arraiza & Vonk, 2017. p. 9). Much like the case in Rakhine State, these cards were also distributed to civilians in the self-administered Kokang region of Shan State. To this day the citizenship status of such cardholders is unclear, and in many instances altogether unknown (Arraiza & Vonk, 2017). 70