Introduction
“Once they had left their homeland, they remained homeless, once they had left their state, they became stateless, once they had been deprived of their human rights they were rightless.”
As of June 2025, the United Nations reported that there are more than 117.3 million people who were forcibly displaced worldwide. This number is larger than the combined population of Germany and Romania. Another equally disturbing aspect of this massive humanitarian disaster is that around 4.4 million people are formally stateless. In other words, no country recognises them as its citizens under the operation of its law.
The modern constitution’s framers sought to protect individuals by ensuring rights and equality through citizenship. But repeated acts of ethnic cleansing demonstrate that those rights are not as guaranteed as one might think. They depend entirely on the state, the same authority that can, at any time, take them away.
Ethnic cleansing is considered by many as the internal decay of law or the failure of constitutional protections. Modern states are founded by deciding who belongs and who does not. These boundaries are drawn using the sovereign power of citizenship. When exclusion is stretched to its limit by a state, it becomes expulsion. The result is what the world now calls ethnic cleansing. It is not an aberration, but rather a continuation of the fundamental authority of states.
The expulsion of the Rohingya from Myanmar and the bureaucratic purging of citizens in Assam are both cases of how readily constitutional identity can be rewritten. And when a state determines that a population does not belong to it, the humanitarian and financial fallout will spill over into other states. It was Bangladesh, not Myanmar, that paid the price to host hundreds of thousands of Rohingya refugees. Families who have been pushed to the brink of statelessness in Assam now depend on local courts, and stretched welfare budgets. The state responsible for causing the crisis is seldom held accountable. The burden shifts outward.
This imbalance creates a strong and tempting technical temptation: the world is haunted by the idea that it can engineer a clean, technical solution that compels states to internalize the cost of their exclusion. This essay introduces a hypothetical mechanism, the Sovereign Human Rights Risk Rating (SHRR), to test whether a technical financial tool could constrain state-driven exclusion. SHRR would first restate the fact that a particular state had deprived a specific group of citizenship or exploited its laws to force out some population, which had directly translated into higher financial risk-measured scores. Investors, financiers and multilateral banks would respond. The cost of borrowing would increase for the state, diplomats would bring pressure to bear, and its reputation would be tarnished. Exclusion would be a less significant financial burden.
For a moment, the idea is appealing. It echoes existing global bodies, such as the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), which pressures states into compliance by issuing technical ratings. FATF’s grey-listing has forced sovereign governments to change laws and restructure institutions. If a money-laundering index can achieve this, why not a rights-risk index?
The rest of this essay follows that tension. It begins by showing how citizenship itself creates the very lines that make mass exclusion possible, and why cases like Assam and Myanmar are not outliers but expressions of that power. It then turns to the political and material rewards that drive states to pursue these projects despite the human cost. Finally, it tests whether a tool like the SHRR could ever force states to bear the consequences of their actions, and shows why such a mechanism collapses once it confronts the realities of sovereignty.
Citizenship and the Architecture of Exclusion
Citizenship is known as a legal status that confers rights, identity, and a sense of belonging. But it is equally a device of exclusion. Every modern state claims the power to decide who qualifies as its citizen. This power is rooted in sovereignty itself. It is exercised through registration systems, population lists, ancestry rules, and documentary requirements that appear administrative but carry existential weight.
When Myanmar adopted the 1982 Citizenship Law, it reconfigured the parameters of belonging in a way that was meant to exclude the Rohingya. In Assam, the National Register of Citizens (‘NRC’) worked similarly, through bureaucratic measures. The NRC is a Supreme Court-monitored exercise of updating the 1951 Register of Citizens of the State of Assam to identify, locate and strip ‘illegal migrants’ of Indian citizenship. Millions were called upon to produce documents that prove that they were in India before 25th March 1971. Many such documents perished due to the passage of time. For a few, lack of a birth record or an ancient land document was grounds for suspicion. Courts subsequently ruled that the most common identity documents, such as Aadhaar card, voter IDs, and ration cards, could not establish citizenship.
These actions demonstrate that citizenship is not a neutral bureaucratic or legislative act. It is a politically charged act that reshapes the polity itself. States use this as a mechanism of sorting, thereby changing demographics, shore up electoral margins, or contest ownership of land and resources. The political gain associated with it is also why ethnic cleansing persists in the face of international denouncement.
The world order regards such citizenship decisions as “internal matters” of respective states. However, it is obvious that these actions are never “inwards”. The people whom a country has stripped of citizenship do not vanish; they travel. They surge over borders and rattle neighboring countries. Camps appear; budgets strain. Aid agencies intervene. The humanitarian cost is international even when the legal act is domestic. This disjuncture is the heart of the crisis.
The Political Economy of Ethnic Cleansing
One must first examine a state’s political and material gains to understand why they pursue exclusion despite humanitarian backlash. Ethnic cleansing is not a moment of irrationality. It is a calculated decision that the States imagine to give internal rewards greater than the external costs.
In Assam, the exclusion promised a clearer and greater electoral majority. The rhetoric of “illegal infiltration” formed a powerful political narrative. The NRC’s ₹1,600-crore cost did not deter the project, despite it driving the state to undertake the economically unfeasible administrative costs. The state was ready to take economic loss to obtain a favorable electorate.
In Myanmar, the profit was material. The Rohingya occupied valuable land, controlled important trade routes, and held strategic territory sought by local power holders and the military. Their removal was the the accomplishment of nationalistic military develop, provided nationalist credentials to the regime, and military supremacy. This profit was worth more to Myanmar’s rulers than access to Western loans or goodwill.
These examples show that the state is ethnically cleansing to gain internal political legitimacy, control over land and resources, and demographic security. The profitability of these rewards often outweighs the temporary discomfort that comes with sanctions imposed by countries like the USA. This also explains why external financial pressure could be bypassed through alternative alliances. When exclusion generates value, states will seek patrons who insulate them from external public condemnation. Myanmar survived years of Western sanctions because China continued to supply weapons, diplomatic cover and investment, giving the military enough room to ignore international outrage.
This logic underpins the failure of all technical enforcement mechanisms. It also frames the limits of the SHRR thought experiment.
The Ideal SHRR and the Limits Exposed by FATF
To assess the capacity of a neutral and technical tool to constrain ethnic cleansing, the SHRR ought to be considered in its most influential form: the model put forth by liberal internationalists.
The model SHRR would capture legal actions that, in the aggregate, facilitate the disaffection of people, i.e., changes in citizenship law, mass deregistration, and the systematic denial of documents. SHRR would not regard these as violations of morality but rather as expressions of politically-willed stasis. A risk score would be assigned, and the mortgages, credit lines, and bonds of investors, as well as the ratings of rating agencies and international financial institutions, would rely on this score. The result would be economic, not moral. Political economists of exclusion would be forced to consider the internal benefits of exclusion and the external market impositions.
One can argue that this is precisely the logic that underpins the functioning of the FATF. The FATF grey-list has resulted in states such as Pakistan, UAE, and Turkey enacting new laws and construing new legal sanctions and prosecuting actors they had previously chosen to ignore. The success by FATF has rendered SHRR plausible.
However, this analogy fails. The FATF works because the act of money laundering is not a significant act of political violence. It does not change the self-image of a state, or challenge its sovereignty. It does not comply to FATF because FATF is apolitical. It does comply because they consider the area to be technical housekeeping.
Ethnic cleansing does not fall into that category. The act of identifying a population as “outsider” is tied to nationalism, identity, and the very definition of the polity. Labeling such acts as “risk triggers” is inherently political. The SHRR cannot escape the politics embedded in citizenship decisions. Unlike FATF compliance, SHRR compliance would require states to surrender their control over belonging. No sovereign will do that.
The SHRR breaks not at the enforcement stage but at the moment of identification. It cannot make the distinction FATF relies on between a technical problem and a foundational political act.
The Trigger, the Bypass, and the Collapse of Governance
The next step is the collapse of what is described as the SHRR bypassing problem. One can imagine that neutral triggers could be defined in some way. In a multipolar financial world by states can avoid the consequences entirely.
If SHRR saw Myanmar as a high-risk country, Myanmar would simply go to China for loans as she already does. If it was India, she is a big enough economy to be self-sufficient in financing through domestic means and bilateral trade. If that label were on Turkey, Hungary or Ethiopia, their geopolitical allies would protect them. The world economy today is a system of interlocking financial spheres, rather than a single, Western-dominated one.
It is not true that in these circumstances the SHRR simply fails. Furthermore, it can accelerate the geopolitical realignment. States that depend on ethnic nationalism as a mobilizational strategy would deepen their alignment to those that offer them free of Western scrutiny. The mechanism would push them into alternative blocs more quickly, thereby entrenching the very impunity the mechanism aims to prevent.
The last stage is governance and it is here that the collapse is at its zenith. A body empowered to issue SHRR scores would lack a plausible rationale. If situated in the UN, it would be subject to Security Council veto. If funded by Western states, it would be regarded as a geopolitical tool. If staffed by rotating member states, it would tear itself apart when asked to issue ratings against its own members. Independence, the heart of its credibility, is structurally impossible.
The SHRR, even in its perfect theoretical form, cannot be born. It fails because it challenges the core of sovereignty: the state’s right to determine its own people.
Concluding Remarks: What the Failure of SHRR reveals about Sovereignty?
The global management’s framework of dealing with displacement further confirms the impossibility of the SHRR. They system of international relations is aimed to offer protection to states and does not offer oversight to states in regards to their migrant expulsion policies.
The principle of sovereignty allows the state to create categories of inclusion and exclusion, whereby one class of individuals may be recognized as citizens and the other as non-citizens. This lack of inclusion is further stratified by international law, which, controversially, does not consider citizenship and thus legality as matters external to the state. This philosophical approach is congruent with modern capitalism, where the global economy allows a state to quickly find alternate global economic partners in order to adjust to economic sanctions. The majority of multilateral institutions from the World Bank to the IMF operate under such a philosophical approach whereby state sovereignty is recognized and respected. The Security Council is a system of states and, thus, is a system of power.
Within this system, the structures of the state that allows ethnic cleansing to occur, is not viewed as a system of power to be avoided. The global system absorbs the negative humanitarian consequences not due to the goodness of international actors, but precisely because the global system lacks a core mechanism to force actors to internalize the consequences of their actions.
The SHRR assumes a lack of accountability. This is untrue, as accountability, by design, is systematically excluded. The international order economically, geo-politically, and militarily, bleeds the crisis state’s neighbours and humanitarian donors, while state-powers “create safe spaces” to protect the civility of the state that is cleansing.
This is why the global system is best positioned to manage the consequences of exclusion, not prevent it. It can fund and operate refugee camps and offer humanitarian assistance. It can negotiate and implement ceasefire agreements. But it cannot and will not force a state to recognize those it has constitutionally and politically ignored. This is why this essay does not treat the SHRR as a policy proposal, but a standpoint. Its collapse when the idea is confronted with real exclusion and the structure of the international order exposes the logic of ethnic cleansing—profitable, enduring, and politically unaccountable. As long as the international order fails to find mechanisms to protect individuals when states change the rules of citizenship, the protections that exist will always fall short.
The author is a third year student of the NALSAR University of Law, Hyderabad.
Image Credits: Markus Winkler
Constitutional Law Society 
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