In Suad Aldarra's award winning memoir I Don't Want to Talk About Home: A Migrant's Search for Belonging, the central question is not simply where home is, but who has the power to define belonging. The memoir follows Aldarra's journey from Saudi Arabia to Syria, Egypt, the United States and ultimately Ireland, examining displacement, migration, gender, memory and the emotional costs of crossing borders. Yet it also implicitly raises another question: what role do documents, citizenship regimes and state bureaucracies play in determining whose stories count and whose mobility is permitted? In the book, we learn of the different paths Suad and her now husband Housam have to take because they each possess different documents, based on their birth and heritage. The inherent chance, the luck, good and bad, that emanates from these different circumstances raises questions about inequities that are inherent in laws around the world, but why do they exist? These were questions I was interested in exploring when I wrote the grant that created HIDDEN: The history of identity documentation in European nations, a network funded by the European Cooperation in Science and Technology organisation (CA21120).