2 The Unmaking of Citizens Shifting Borders of Belonging Kristy A. Belton and Jamie Chai Yun Liew introduction The world’s population currently stands at 7.8 billion, and every day millions are born who automatically acquire the citizenship of a particular state. Few question the routineness of the citizenship acquisition process (whether through a citizen parent or through birth on a specific state’s territory). Even fewer question the necessity of possessing citizenship or the state’s sovereign right to determine who should belong and how. We generally take the particular rights, freedoms, and protections associated with citizenship for granted and cannot fathom what a world without citizenship, at least as currently conceived, would look like. Yet citizenship is not necessarily a neutral and stable status upon which to base rights, freedoms, and protections. It is also not a status available to all. As this chapter illustrates, citizenship is precarious and has never been a secure foundation upon which to base human rights. In the securitized world of the twenty-first century, this instability has heightened, especially for minorities. To make this argument, the chapter is divided into three sections. The first section explains how citizenship arose in international practice and law and how states translated international practice into defined nationality laws in the domestic sphere. This section highlights how, before it became a status to which human rights attached, citizenship was, first and foremost, an international ordering principle. The second section demonstrates how states have historically excluded various groups, typically minorities, from enjoyment of full citizenship status, thereby endangering the access of these groups to human rights enjoyment. The third section provides contemporary examples of citizenship deprivation and denial, highlighting the myriad justifications that states use to deny and deprive people of citizenship. 23 https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108914994 Published online by Cambridge University Press