In the introduction of a recent work on the denationalization of terrorists across the West, the legal scholar Audrey Macklin announced that "after decades in exile, banishment is back" (Macklin 2015). Over the last decade, as new laws allowing individuals to be stripped of citizenship have sprung up in states including the UK, Canada, Australia, Finland and the Netherlands, many others have also analogised denationalization to this medieval practice (Sassen 2015;Lenard 2019; Pillai & Williams 2017). By allowing states to deport their own citizens or, if present overseas, to prevent their return, denationalization, like banishment, enables states effectively to disown their members (Macklin 2015; Gibney 2013a;Mantu 2015).Scholars have recently given a great deal of attention to the question of why citizen banishment qua denationalization has returned to our political lexicon. Citizen expulsion has important implications for ideas of equal citizenship, democracy, and norms relating to statelessness