‘Swanning back in’? Foreign fighters and the long arm of the state

Bordering intimacy

“…Against the monstrous violence of 'jihadi terrorism' , this violence was felt to be not only appropriate but in fact worthy of being celebrated. The government (and their lawyers) argued that these subjects became enemy combatants, situated as they were within 'war zones' (see Webb 2017). We learn here that the exceptional act of joining ISIS begets the exceptional act of removing citizenship, which is then accompanied by a spectacular yet normalised act of violence and death.…”

“…Contemporary scholarship on deprivation has sought to reveal how this works as an aberration of settled forms of British citizenship (Gibney 2014;Ross 2014;Sykes 2016;Webb 2017) -that is, as a particular, exceptional fusion of racialised immigration practice and security logics that have emerged out of the War on Terror (also see Kingston 2005;Bauböck 2014;Joppke 2016;Choudhury 2017;Gibney 2017). There is good evidence to support this position.…”

Constraining Denaturalization

“…And yet, recent political efforts target naturalized citizens nevertheless, spurred in part by a growing anti-immigrant animus, manifest in many ways, including in the turn towards expanding the conditions under which citizens and in particular naturalized citizens, can lose their citizenship. This expansion is perhaps most evident in the case of terrorist crimes (Boekestein and de Groot, 2019; Joppke, 2016; Webb, 2017); of late, many states have adopted or revitalized legislation permitting denationalization or denaturalization in cases where citizens are accused of, or convicted of, terrorist acts, and in some cases, legislation targets only naturalized citizens. Political theorists have examined these cases and not reached agreement; for some, it is never justified, whereas for others there is at least a limited set of cases where it may be permissible, for example, in cases where an individual dual-citizen terrorist commits crimes in one of her countries of citizenship, with the support of the other (Akhtar, 2017; Barry and Ferracioli, 2015; Bauböck and Paskalev, 2015; Cohen, 2016; Honohan, 2020; Lenard, 2018).…”