Noora Lori with any meaningful membership rights in any state.237 They are allowed to continue residing in the UAE, but as “foreign residents,” and they do not have membership or residency rights in the Comoros Islands. The passport recipients were informed that these documents were issued as a temporary step in their regularization process as they continued to undergo security vetting as naturalization applicants.238 Likewise, Beaugrand’s work on stateless populations in Kuwait shows a similar dynamic,239 with indigenous minorities forced to obtain passports from other states (like Iraq) in order to continue residing in Kuwait, or risk being criminalized as “illegal” migrants. In both cases, the forced attribution of foreign citizenship enables political elites to prevent targeted individuals from enjoying the robust welfare services with which these oil-rich states provide their citizenries. On the flip side, all of the Gulf monarchies have used the forced withdrawal of citizenship (through denaturalization, passport revocation, and travel bans) to quell dissent and punish political activists.240 It may be tempting to equate coercive citizenship practices with authoritarian states, but Kingston reminds us that liberal democracies are also ‘guilty of using and benefitting from oppressive nationality.’241 While Kingston’s contribution focuses on how liberal democracies can “game the system” and circumvent their own commitments to international human rights frameworks, we might also draw upon a larger literature on denaturalization that identifies how advanced liberal democracies have strategically weaponised citizenship to withhold membership rights from specific groups. As Weil’s work on the United States in the early Twentieth century has documented,242 denaturalization—often couched in terms of national security—has been strategically used by political elites to sway election outcomes, police ethno-national boundaries and entrench racial hierarchies, and criminalise the activities of opposition groups (especially anarchists and socialists). Gibney’s work on more recent denaturalization cases in the United States and United Kingdom shows how liberal states continue to use forced nationality withdrawals to target groups that are considered security threats (especially Islamists).243 Another example of how elites justify forced withdrawal of nationality on the basis of perceived security threats is Israel’s sweeping 2008 law that sanctions the withdrawal of citizenship from anyone who commits an act that constitutes a ‘breach of loyalty to the State of Israel.’244 Critics have pointed out that this law245 (and more recent expansions of it246) have not be used against Jewish Israelis who committed violent crimes and are instead being used to pave the path for denaturalisations of Arab Israelis as a form of collective punishment and demographic engineering. Studies on statelessness in the Dominican Republic247 and Myanmar248 are helpful for underscoring the fact that the pattern of who is targeted in cases of weaponised citizenship is not only deeply racialized but also highly gendered. As Hackl points out, such tactics are ‘modes of controlling and rank-ordering minorities’ that render citizenship “conditional” rather than inalienable for specific groups in ways that cannot be reconciled with liberal principles of equality and inclusion.249 Moreover, almost every one of these examples has ramifications on other states. Extraterritorial withdrawal of nationality burdens other states by either creating stateless people there or by shifting responsibility (also for terrorists and criminals) towards them often based on a merely putative or secondary citizenship. 237 238 239 240 241 242 243 244 Lori 2019. Id. Beaugrand C. (2017), Stateless in the Gulf: Migration, Nationality and Society in Kuwait, Bloomsbury. Babar, Z. (2017), ‘The “Enemy Within”: Citizenship-Stripping in the Post–Arab Spring GCC’, Middle East Journal, 71(4), 525–543. Kingston 2022. Weil P. (2013), The Sovereign Citizen – Denaturalization and the Origins of the American Republic, University of Pennsylvania Press. Gibney M. (2013), ‘Should Citizenship Be Conditional? The Ethics of Denationalization’, Journal of Politics 75:3, 646-658. Levush, R. (2008), Israel: Revocation of Citizenship, Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/global-legal-monitor/2008-09-08/ israel-revocation-of-citizenship/. 245 Bossow A. and Zeltouni S., ‘Israel’s New Citizenship Deprivation-Deportation Pipeline’, Verfassungsblog, 21 February 2023, Israel’s New Citizenship Deprivation-Deportation Pipeline – Verfassungsblog. 246 McKernan B., ‘Israel votes to strip citizenship from Arabs convicted of terrorism’, The Guardian, 16 February 2023, Israel votes to strip citizenship from Arabs convicted of terrorism | Israel | The Guardian. 247 Petrozziello, A.J. (2019), ‘(‘Re)producing Statelessness via Indirect Gender Discrimination: Descendants of Haitian Migrants in the Dominican Republic’, Int Migr, 57: 213-228. 248 McAuliffe, E. (2023), “The Ancestral Line is through the Father”: The Gendered Production of Statelessness in Rural Myanmar’, Law & Social Inquiry, 1-31. 249 Hackl, A. (2022), ‘Good immigrants, permitted outsiders: conditional inclusion and citizenship in comparison’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 45:6, 989-1010. 43 Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies