Abstract In many countries across the world, citizenship revocation policies are back on the political agenda. States are either contemplating or adopting legislative changes to increase the power of the executive to take citizenship away from individuals on an array of legal grounds, from fraud in the naturalisation process to involvement in terror-related acts. Amendments to citizenship legislation are also decided with the purpose of excluding entire communities from the definition of national identity and removing them out of the state borders. This symposium addresses the challenges that the revival of citizenship revocation raises for the study of citizenship as a secure and equal membership in a state. It brings together academics and practitioners in an effort to reflect both on the concrete policy implications of citizenship stripping and on its theoretical significance. The symposium also takes an original comparative perspective on this topic, with contributions that go beyond Western contexts represented in much of the citizenship literature. Keywords Citizenship revocation, India, Myanmar, Nigeria, Syria.