34 Kristy A. Belton and Jamie Chai Yun Liew who had been rendered stateless. This regularization plan created different classes of denationalized persons, led to the deportation of many, and has yet to fully restore citizenship to those who have legitimate claims to it. Whereas in the Dominican case a regularization plan was established for those stripped of citizenship, Bahrain has chosen deportation for many of those it has stripped of citizenship. Since 2012, at least 990 Bahrainis have lost their citizenship through court decisions or executive orders, leaving most persons stateless and leading to their deportation. Among those stripped of citizenship are human rights defenders, political activists, journalists, and religious scholars. Recently, a mass trial convicting 139 people of terrorism charges led to the wholesale revocation of citizenship of those persons. This trial demonstrates that Bahrain’s authorities are increasingly relying on citizenship withdrawal as a tool of repression and as a means to eliminate opposition. conclusion Although citizenship as a status is an accepted international ordering principle, it is not, and never has been, a status that is equally accessible to all. For those who were denied citizenship from birth, citizenship has always been unattainable. For others, their belonging to a particular minority group – both historically and today – has prevented their access to full citizenship in practice, even if they were (or are) nominally recognized as citizens under domestic law. Citizenship is not only unevenly applied as a principle in practice, but it is not a stable, enduring, or permanent status either. Those who have been stripped of citizenship under the rationale of national security and other such prerogatives can attest to this. Perhaps citizenship was never meant to be more than an international ordering principle of people(s) and we have tied notions of human rights, equality and justice to a concept that was never built to hold them. As several authors in this volume attest, concepts of citizenship and noncitizenship perpetuate distorted perceptions of who belongs and how they should be treated. In essence, by bestowing states with the sovereign prerogative to define who belongs where, we have allowed an exclusionary and precarious status to hold far too much influence over people’s life chances and furthered global conditions of injustice. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108914994 Published online by Cambridge University Press