Beyond the ‘West’: Understanding citizenship revocation in a global context Émilien Fargues* Introduction Over the past 20 years, citizenship revocation has come back on the political agenda of so-called Western democratic states. Many of these states have either contemplated or adopted 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.1 In some cases, governments have even made an unprecedented use of citizenship stripping, targeting tens of individuals with citizenship revocation orders.2 This renewed political interest in citizenship revocation has not gone unnoticed in scholarship, sparking key discussions on the legal, historical, sociological and political issues that the revival of citizenship stripping raises.3 Recent developments in citizenship laws and practices across the world show that citizenship revocation – understood as the legal and bureaucratic mechanisms through which states make their own nationals lose the citizenship status that they formerly held – is far from limited to Western contexts.4 The case studies here invite us to reconsider the ‘current Western-centrism of the debate’ on citizenship revocation, and to reflect on the development of a global comparative perspective.5 In her commentary, Laura van Waas underlines the several interests that the extension of the comparative perspective to the so-called ‘Global South’ can have. She notably argues that a global focus can allow scholars to reconsider an often-assumed dichotomy between ‘West’ and ‘non-West’ in the field of social sciences and citizenship studies in particular.6 Following Van Waas, non-Western cases should not be treated as a priori ‘distinct or exceptional’. The identification and explanation of similarities and differences across contexts should be the results of empirically grounded research that this symposium seeks to contribute to developing. Drawing on the case studies here, this piece seeks to pinpoint a number of similarities and differences that stem from the uses of citizenship revocation across contexts. It is certainly too early to draw conclusions on the various strategies that public authorities pursue when resorting to citizenship revocation and on the social and political consequences that this entails. More research thus needs to be done – not only in the Global South – on the laws and bureaucratic practices through which states take * Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, European University Institute. 1 For a recent overview in the European Union, see Lepoutre, J. (2020), Citizenship Loss and Deprivation in the European Union (27 + 1). Florence: EUI Working Paper RSCAS 2020/29. 2 In the United Kingdom (UK), journalists reported that the number of citizenship revocations rose dramatically to 104 cases in 2017. See Dearden, L. (2019), ‘Shamima Begum: Number of people stripped of UK citizenship soars by 600% in a year’, The Independent, available at: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/shamima-begum-uk-citizenshipstripped-home-office-sajid-javid-a8788301.html (accessed on 22/11/2020). 3 For an overview of those discussions, see two collections recently published: Birnie, R. & R. Bauböck (eds.) (2020), ‘The Power to Expel: Deportation and Denationalisation in Historical, Legal and Normative Perspective’, Citizenship Studies, 24(3), and Fargues, É., E. Winter & M. Gibney (eds.) (2020), When States Take Rights Back. Citizenship Revocation and Its Discontents. London: Routledge. 4 Citizenship revocation should not therefore be limited to the formal procedures that allow governments to take citizenship away from individuals on a limited number of legal grounds (disloyalty, fraud, involvement in terrorism, etc.). As several of the case studies of this symposium illustrate, citizenship revocation can also result from the redefinition of the rules of citizenship attribution or bureaucratic procedures of citizenship determination. 5 Birnie, R. & R. Bauböck (2020), ‘Introduction: expulsion and citizenship in the 21 st century’, Citizenship Studies 24(3): 273. 6 On this dichotomy, see Chung, E. A. (2017), ‘Citizenship in Non-Western Contexts’, in A. Shachar, R. Bauböck, I. Bloemraad & M. P. Vink (eds.), Oxford Handbook of Citizenship, 433-453. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 44