Émilien Fargues European Union, no fewer than eight member states have either amended or introduced legislation on citizenship revocation with the purpose of fighting against terrorism and protecting national security over the last decade.9 The defence of national security or national unity stands out as the most common motivation of new measures of citizenship revocation across contexts. However, it is important to acknowledge the varieties of threat that political leaders claim to contain when resorting to citizenship revocation. In the UK, ex-Home Secretary Savid Javid recently explained that this should not be restricted to terrorists but should extend to the ‘very worst criminals’ when justifying his decision to deprive of British citizenship three naturalised citizens convicted for a scandal of child sexual exploitation.10 Notwithstanding these varieties of threat, the measure tends to be systematically presented as a ‘potential solution to real or assumed societal ills’ and legitimised through a security discourse.11 Citizenship revocation and the defence of ‘thick’ conceptions of national membership Throughout these case studies as well as in other contexts where citizenship revocation has made a comeback on the political agenda, the identity dimension of citizenship emerges as a common object of securitisation. It is to protect what would allegedly bind the citizens of the same nation together that amendments to citizenship law are generally passed, and that some individuals and groups lose their citizenship status. More precisely, political leaders do not simply claim to protect the nation as a juridicopolitical order of rules and obligations that apply equally to all; they rather defend a conception of the nation that has moral, cultural and sometimes even ethnic connotations. In other words, the identity dimension of citizenship is not reduced to ‘thin and procedural forms’;12 it is invested with ‘thick’ significations that vary from one context to another. The analyses in the case studies provide evidence of the permanence and/or reaffirmation of an ethnic conception of national membership based on kinship and blood ties between members of the national community. As Laura van Waas underlines: ‘Who is worthy of citizenship, who belongs, comes to be linked to narrative constructs invoking indigeneity, ethnicity or religion’. In Nigeria for instance, as MaryAnne Iwara explains, the conception of national membership premised on ethnic classifications can be regarded as a legacy of colonial rule that was incorporated into nationality law at independence. In other national contexts, political leaders have also recently contributed to the reaffirmation of ethnically exclusive understandings of citizenship. In Myanmar, Jasmine Burnley shows that the citizenship revocation and contemporary persecution of the Rohingyas are inseparable from the promotion of ‘taingyintha’ or ‘national races’ as a constitutive feature of membership in the Burmese national community. In India, as Mohsin Alam Bhat and Aashish Yadav explain, the anti-Muslim rhetoric of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has played a key role in the introduction of the National Register of Citizens (NRC) in the state of Assam, with various party representatives agitating fears of demographic replacement of the Hindu population. In Western countries, scholars have noted that the revival of citizenship revocation often operates through a republican/communitarian political discourse based on the defence of ‘shared values’ and 9 The list includes Austria, Bulgaria, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and the UK. See Lepoutre, J. (2020), Citizenship Loss and Deprivation in the European Union (27 + 1), op. cit., 8-12. 10 Troy, D. (2020), ‘Governing Imperial Citizenship: A Historical Account of Citizenship Revocation’, in É. Fargues, E. Winter & M. J. Gibney (eds.), When States Take Rights Back: Citizenship Revocation and Its Discontents, 12. Op. cit. 11 Fargues, É., & E. Winter (2020), ‘Conditional Membership: What Revocation Does to Citizenship’, in É. Fargues, E. Winter & M. J. Gibney (eds.), When States Take Rights Back: Citizenship Revocation and Its Discontents, 1. Op. cit. 12 Joppke, C. (2010), ‘The Inevitable Lightening of Citizenship’, European Journal of Sociology, 51(1): 12. 46 Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies Working Papers