Shifting Borders of Belonging 29 are the citizens of other states even though they have no citizenship by operation of law to any state. The next section describes how even those with citizenship status may fall on the wrong side of state interests and lose this purportedly fundamental status. citizenship deprivation It is one practice to deny individuals citizenship,17 as in many of the aforementioned examples, and it is another practice to deprive individuals of the citizenship they hold. Citizenship deprivation (or withdrawal)18 has its roots in former practices of exile and banishment. Although states are no longer permitted to allow their citizens to become charges on other states, they are allowed to withdraw citizenship on a number of grounds, including committing a crime or engaging in acts deemed “threatening” or “disloyal” to the state, seeking refuge elsewhere, converting to another religion, or failing to renew a passport, among other reasons.19 Moreover, the 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness,20 which aims to reduce statelessness globally, is clear that citizenship deprivation is permissible when an individual has acted “inconsistently with his duty of loyalty to the Contracting state” by rendering services to another state, acting in a way that is “seriously prejudicial to the vital interests of the state,” or declaring allegiance to another state, among other reasons.21 As long as these grounds are not “arbitrary” (and it is not always clear what a state will deem arbitrary in practice), the state has the sovereign right to deprive a person of his/her citizenship and render the individual stateless.22 Moreover, states that engage in citizenship withdrawal typically deny that they are rendering individuals stateless. They argue that the individuals deprived of citizenship are dual nationals or have the ability to apply for citizenship in another state through operation of that other state’s law. As the following examples show, however, this is not always the case. 17 Citizenship denial largely consists of preventing access to citizenship, whether through the refusal to grant identity documents (such as birth certificates) or the refusal to apply a given law to an individual to recognize him/her as a citizen. 18 It is also known as citizenship stripping, citizenship revocation, denationalization, and denaturalization. Denationalization occurs when citizenship is taken away from someone who acquired citizenship through jus soli or jus sanguinis measures. Denaturalization occurs when citizenship is taken away from a naturalized citizen. 19 See Belton, Statelessness in the Caribbean, pp. 30–38. 20 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness, August 30, 1961,. 21 Ibid., art. 8.3(a). 22 See S. Jaghai, “Citizenship Deprivation, (Non) Discrimination and Statelessness: A Case Study of the Netherlands (Institute on Stateless and Inclusion, 2017),” p. 9, https://files.institutesi.org/ WP2017_07.pdf. As Jaghai observes, “There seems to be tension in the application of international law at the domestic level regarding the principle of non-discrimination and the prohibition that deprivation of nationality cannot lead to statelessness” (ibid., p. 14). https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108914994 Published online by Cambridge University Press