2021 Statelessness & Citizenship Review 3(1) citizens’ 53 and the questioning of their allegiance to the state and its national values. 54 The concluding chapter by Janie Pélaby and Réjane Sénac provides a summary of the key points highlighted throughout the book, but more importantly, attempts to identify the challenges denationalisation poses to liberal democracy. Denationalisation is considered a ‘borderline case with regard to liberal democracy’. 55 Picking up from the introduction’s citizenship dimensions, Pélaby and Sénac identify the risks denationalisation has, especially through the increased focus on the ‘thick concept of membership’. 56 The protection of the political community — the ‘us’ — is then provided through ‘the shared meanings and conceptions of the good publicly declared to unite the citizenry’. 57 Anyone who falls outside of this, therefore, does not belong and is categorised outside of the membership: ‘Those citizens whose beliefs and behaviours are suspected of being incompatible with the values deemed to be the cornerstone of national identity are perceived as endangering social cohesion and political unity.’ 58 Cosmopolitanism, especially in the protections provided by universal human rights, is increasingly challenged through the rise of patriotism in light of national security. Citizenship revocation presents a weakening of these legal protections, especially as many courts have ‘validated’ revocation’s exclusionary function. 59 Consequently, they argue, liberal democracy is increasingly challenged by certain tensions, including ‘between unity and diversity, and in the opposition between perfectionist and neutral state action.’ 60 When States Take Rights Back presents a well-written and thoughtful debate on what denationalisation does to conceptions of Western citizenship. The main strength of the volume is that it forces the audience to look past the security and counter-terrorism box that denationalisation is currently put in. It also leaves the reader with the need to rethink what these policies do to notions of identity, belonging and citizenship, and to reflect on what kind of society we want to live in. This leads to two main criticisms of the volume: It is very much a Western perspective on notions of citizenship, and the format of the book is mainly limited to the academic world. First, the Western focus as a limitation, although acknowledged, is one that should be addressed. More first-hand accounts of what denationalisation does to transnational identities and conceptions of citizenship need to be considered, in addition to what the countries at the other end of the line — those dealing with the individuals who have been stripped of their Western citizenship — are confronted with. Additionally, it is not just the West that uses denationalisation to rid themselves of the ‘unwanted’, but also states in the Global South, for example several Gulf states or India. Therefore, denationalisation is not just a Western phenomenon and needs to be looked at from different understandings of citizenship and membership. Secondly, and also more importantly, When States Take Rights Back leaves the reader with many topics that 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 ibid 104. ibid. Janie Pélaby and Réjane Sénac, ‘Citizenship Revocation: A Stress Test for Liberal Democracy’, in Émilien Fargues, Elke Winter, Matthew J. Gibney (eds), When States Take Rights Back: Citizenship Revocation and its Discontents (Routledge 2020), 109, 110. ibid 114. ibid 114. ibid 120. ibid 121. ibid 120. 174