2019 Statelessness & Citizenship Review 1(2) expect to be able to benefit from greater protection from the Dutch government, and thus be subject to more effective citizenship. Crucially, the 21-year-old woman conceptualises Turkish citizenship as a threat to her safety, even when living in the Netherlands and possessing Dutch citizenship. Continuing her narrative by saying, ‘It’s really easy to be sent to prison these days. I have friends who were called to court for tweets against Erdogan’, she refers to her perceived risk in terms of the anti-government sentiment expressed through her assertions of Kurdishness, rather than her Kurdish ethnicity per se. In order to address the risk of arrest and lack of protection, the participant plans to renounce her Turkish citizenship but fears that, in doing so, the Turkish government would pose an even greater threat towards her. Embedded within this narrative is the participant’s awareness of states’ authority to govern over their citizens, as well as the fact that efforts to uphold the norm of state sovereignty risk undermining international responses to human rights violations.91 Although the participant suggests that the Dutch government would recognise her hypothetical arrest on political grounds as a violation of her rights, she perceives the legitimacy of the Turkish state to govern over its citizens as posing an obstacle to the capability or willingness of the Dutch state to intervene on the grounds of ensuring protection of the rights of Dutch citizens. The participant’s narrative thus emphasises how citizenship facilitates the ability of states to legitimately exert power on a discriminatory basis among its citizens. It is here important to recognise the state as a political actor with particular interests and thereafter that citizenship can be used as a tool by the state to further these interests, upheld by the modern state system. In contrast to the narrative of the 21-year-old woman, a 54-year-old participant suggests that differentiation within the Dutch citizenship regime is largely along the lines of race, rather than a distinction between single and dual citizens. In the Netherlands, I don’t feel protected by the state. I have double nationality — Turkish and Dutch — but even if I just had Dutch citizenship I can’t feel the safety of a regular Dutch person. When a Dutch person comments on Turkey’s actions, they are safe and they will be protected by the Dutch government. But, whether I have double nationality or not, if I react to some news on Facebook or social media, I don’t feel so safe from the Dutch government to be so free in my speech and thought, even in Holland … The Dutch government is actually not strongly protecting citizens who don’t really have Dutch nationality. So I don’t feel protection. I don’t feel the freedom in the Netherlands to share my opinion over politics in Turkey. 92 The notion of second-class citizenship is here invoked, suggesting that processes of exclusion of certain groups are ongoing even where equal legal status is formally recognised. 93 However, the boundaries of exclusion illustrated by the 54-year-old participant are here conceptualised as a manifestation of structural racism through which the legitimacy of minority citizens’ access to rights is continuously questioned. Here, exclusion is not attributed to Kurdish ethnicity in particular, but rather to racialisation as non-native Dutch. Although both participants above perceive their Dutch citizenship to be less effective than that of other particular groups of Dutch citizens — whether single Dutch citizens or 91 92 93 See Kahler (n 15). Interview with 54-year-old man (Kurdistan-Turkey). Bosniak (n 28) 1305. 298