BOOK REVIEW WHEN STATES TAKE RIGHTS BACK: CITIZENSHIP REVOCATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS, EDITED BY ÉMILIEN FARGUES, ELKE WINTER AND MATTHEW J GIBNEY (ROUTLEDGE, 2020) 140 PAGES. PRICE £96.00 ISBN 9780367896454 LOUISE TIESSEN * Citizenship deprivation has increasingly come into both the academic focus and the public eye 1 — as the debate around the case of Shamima Begum has shown. 2 Consequently, this volume on denationalisation and its consequences is especially timely. When States Take Rights Back: Citizenship Revocation and its Discontents, edited by Émilien Fargues, Elke Winter and Matthew J Gibney, looks at various aspects of citizenship deprivation that go beyond the current focus on denationalisation linked to counterterrorism. 3 It includes a combination of perspectives — historical, sociological, political and legal — and case studies to exemplify and emphasise the authors’ key points. Fargues and Winter introduce the volume with an overview on the current academic debate on denationalisation, especially the legal and normative debates. While outlining the various contributions, they pose the following questions denationalisation as a policy raises, which guide the discussions in this volume: how far can governments go in extending their leeway to revoke citizenship? What strategies do they follow? Do these strategies vary from one state to another? Are there limits to citizenship revocation that states have to obey? 4 Thus, the overall aim is to develop a discussion on the different dimensions of citizenship as a concept that goes beyond the normative and legal discourses on denationalisation. 5 Fargues and Winter outline three dimensions of citizenship that act as the basis of understanding of the concept of citizenship: the ‘legal bond’ (rights and duties); ‘practices of participation’ (good versus bad forms of behaviour); and ‘identity and belonging’ (symbolic level, imagined community). 6 * 1 2 3 4 5 6 The author is a PhD candidate at the University of Kent, Canterbury, UK. She is also the CoFounder of the Deradicalization and Security Initiative GmbH in Germany. Amct3@kent.ac.uk. Citizenship revocation, citizenship deprivation, and denationalisation are used interchangeably throughout the book. It is also used interchangeably in this review. Dominic Casciani, ‘Shamima Begum Cannot Return to UK, Supreme Court Rules’, BBC (online, 26 Feb 2021) <https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-56209007>. Émilien Fargues, Elke Winter and Matthew J Gibney (eds), When States Take Rights Back: Citizenship Revocation and its Discontents (Routledge 2020). Émilien Fargues, Elke Winter, ‘Conditional Membership: What Revocation Does to Citizenship’ in Émilien Fargues, Elke Winter and Matthew J Gibney (eds), When States Take Rights Back: Citizenship Revocation and its Discontents (Routledge 2020) 1. ibid. ibid 2.