ETHNIC AND RACIAL STUDIES 2019, VOL. 42, NO. 16, 45–62 https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2017.1411965 Unmaking citizens: passport removals, pre-emptive policing and the reimagining of colonial governmentalities Nisha Kapoor and Kasia Narkowicz Department of Sociology, University of York, York, UK ABSTRACT With the intensifying securitization of Western borders in the global War on Terror citizenship rights are increasingly fragile. Measures introduced by the British government to deal with the terrorist threat at home include citizenship deprivation, temporary exclusion orders as well as passport removals. Whilst citizenship deprivation has provoked critique for its potential violations of international human rights conventions on statelessness, cancellations of passports have not been subjected to the same kind of critique. Drawing on recent debates and interview data we demonstrate the alignment of citizenship deprivation and passport removals and conclude that these measures serve the same goal: of unmaking citizens. In this paper, we discuss findings from novel empirical research with individuals who have been removed of their British passports to illuminate the racialized dynamics of this process and the reconfiguration of racial governmentalities. ARTICLE HISTORY Received 15 September 2016; Accepted 14 November 2017 KEYWORDS Citizenship; passport removals; war on terror; racial exclusion; Islamophobia; coloniality Introduction Citizenship, it seems, is being formally institutionalized as a privilege, not a right. Even as its premise as a universal entitlement has always been subject to numerous limitations and qualifications based on raced, classed, gendered and sexualized exclusions (Goldberg 2002; Mills 1997; Welke 2010), of late it appears that in the name of national and global security greater conditions are to be placed on this nominal right, such that citizenship itself becomes a disciplinary device. In a defiant counter to the human rightsbased discourse, numerous Western states have made moves to tie citizenship rights to conduct and behaviour emphasizing its provisional nature and invoking citizenship deprivation as the ultimate punitive measure with CONTACT Nisha Kapoor Nisha.Kapoor@warwick.ac.uk © 2018 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.