In a commentary, SMU President Professor Lily Kong reflected on her visit to the exhibition, The Albatross File, and highlighted how Singaporeans born just years apart experienced different routes to citizenship shaped by separation from Malaysia. She explained that the exhibition deepens understanding of Singapore’s founding years by revealing the complex choices, constraints and agency behind independence. Prof Kong added that the significance of releasing the file now is sharpened by recent global developments, including tensions involving external interventions in sovereign states elsewhere. She said that for Singapore, these are not distant events to be observed with detachment. It points to a world in which norms of sovereignty, territorial integrity, and non-intervention are increasingly contested, and in which power can override principle with unsettling ease.