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N. KAPOOR AND K. NARKOWICZ
institutionalize systems of preventative policing. We go on to discuss the
material impact of passport removals in terms of citizenship status, as illuminated by our participants, and reflect on the continuities with the broader discourse of citizenship as a marker of inclusion/exclusion. The sum of all of these
elements illustrates the deepening and extension of racial governmentalities
with its attendant marginalizations and exclusions.
The legal and bureaucratic regime of passport removal
One of the noteworthy expressions of War on Terror policing has been materialized in terms of enhancements to border control and surveillance which have
included shifts in the management of citizenship. As a mechanism of legal and
social exclusion enacted by the state, while the formal retraction of citizenship
in the contemporary is bound up with issues of national and global security, it
draws on and extends much of the institutional state apparatus developed historically for marginalizing, excluding and expelling racially Othered populations (Balibar 2015; Bhambra 2015). Its retraction for punitive purposes to
assist with counter-terrorism policing is legitimated not simply in terms of
managing the racial composition of the nation-state, in the way in which we
might ordinarily understand the workings of the racial state (Goldberg 2002),
but as recourse for dealing with security “threats to our way of life” (Cameron
2014). In many ways the removal of passports sits within a broader spectrum
of measures, enforced through executive power, which work to deprive or
suspend citizenship, the application of which has been growing in use as
part of the intensification of counter-terrorism policing under the War on
Terror (Kapoor 2018; Macklin 2014; Ross 2014), as illustrated in Figure 1.
Where the exact terms via which some exclusionary measures, such as
Temporary Exclusion Orders, might operate in practice remain practically
and legally uncertain,2 Royal Prerogative powers to remove passports have
some historical precedent, first discussed in Parliament in 1955 (XH v. Secretary
of State 2016) and revisited on several occasions. The provisions were
enhanced significantly, however, when they were updated in April 2013,
and set out in a Written Ministerial Statement by Theresa May (2013). The
revised policy established that there was “no entitlement to a passport and
no statutory right to have access to a passport” (May 2013) and reconfirmed
that the “decision to issue, withdraw or refuse a passport” was at the discretion of the Home Secretary. Whilst it was reasserted that the enforcement
of this measure “must be necessary and proportionate” and that refusal on
the grounds that it was in the “public interest” to do so was to be used
“only sparingly”, the “public interest” criteria for refusing or withdrawing a
passport was itself redefined. The new criteria of assessment would account
for a person’s “past, present or proposed activities” (May 2013, emphasis
added). Largely aimed at targeting British nationals suspected of engaging
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