Beyond the ‘West’: Understanding citizenship revocation in a global context ‘loyalty’.13 According to Janie Pélabay and Réjane Sénac, such a discourse induces a process of ‘ethicisation of citizenship’, consisting in the ‘reaffirmation of the moral and cultural preconditions for the political community’s survival’.14 Importantly, Pélabay and Sénac further explain that this process of ethicisation has not been dissociated from the exclusion of certain ethno-racial minorities who become suspects of not sharing the same values as the ones that ‘loyal citizens’ would cherish. This, then, points to a close correlation between the ethicisation of citizenship and its ethnicisation. The reaffirmation of morally and culturally ‘thick’ visions of national of membership becomes inseparable from the stigmatisation of certain ethno-racial minorities – Muslims emerging as a prime target – and the creation of hierarchies of a priori more or less loyal citizens.15 In the West, in contrast to the countries covered here, nationality laws do not premise citizenship on ethnicity or religion, but the stigmatisation of ethno-racial minorities nevertheless accompanies the revival of citizenship revocation. Hence, any opposition between Western and non-Western cases needs to be nuanced. Protections against arbitrary practices of citizenship revocation Another commonality characterises the very functioning of citizenship revocation in the case studies here. As Jasmine Burnley notes of the example of Myanmar, the citizenship revocation of the Rohingyas is not the result of an ‘individual procedural act’ as usually happens in contemporary Western countries. It emerges as a more ‘gradual process conducted through both administrative practice and legal change’. Burnley’s observation can be extended to the other cases. People are either effectively deprived of their citizenship, or put at risk of losing it, through a combination of bureaucratic decisions and/or legislative amendments rather than through formal individual procedures of citizenship revocation. Interestingly, such formal procedures exist in these countries, but are rarely used. Contributors further shed light on the poor procedural safeguards that individuals enjoy when faced with citizenship revocation. They all point to the wide discretionary power of public authorities to issue or to check the documentation required to prove one’s citizenship status, and to the risks of citizenship revocation and/or denial of the rights associated with citizenship that this generates. Clearly, the average low level of documentation of the population in the countries analysed is a common background against which arbitrary practices of citizenship determination occur, sometimes leading to citizenship revocation. Moreover, when appeal procedures exist, claimants face difficulties in contesting the decisions taken by public authorities. In India, Mohsin Alam Bhat and Aashish Yadav explain that people excluded from the NRC in the state of Assam have the possibility of appealing before Foreigners Tribunals. However, the authors observe that those tribunals have ‘deviated from standard rules of evidence and procedure at the cost of due process’, as judges consider it perfectly legitimate to deny citizenship to individuals due to errors in the transcription of names and dates. Combined with the absence of recognition and/or implementation of international conventions constraining state action,16 the poor state of procedural 13 See Sykes, P. (2020), ‘Denaturalisation and Conceptions of Citizenship in the ‘War on Terror’’, in É. Fargues, E. Winter & M. J. Gibney (eds.), When States Take Rights Back: Citizenship Revocation and Its Discontents, 62–76. Op cit.; Irving, H. (2020), ‘The Concept of Allegiance in Citizenship Law and Revocation: An Australian Study’, in É. Fargues, E. Winter & M. J. Gibney (eds.), When States Take Rights Back: Citizenship Revocation and Its Discontents, 93-108. Op. cit. 14 Pélabay, J. & R. Sénac (2020), ‘Citizenship revocation: a stress test for liberal democracy’, in É. Fargues, E. Winter & M. J. Gibney (eds.), When States Take Rights Back: Citizenship Revocation and Its Discontents, op. cit., 113. 15 See Winter, E., & I. Previsic (2020), ‘The Politics of Un- Belonging: Lessons from Canada’s Experiment with Citizenship Revocation’, in É. Fargues, E. Winter & M. J. Gibney (eds.), When States Take Rights Back: Citizenship Revocation and Its Discontents, 44–61. Op. cit. See also Choudhury, T. (2017) ‘The Radicalisation of Citizenship Deprivation’, Critical Social Policy, 37(2): 225–244. 16 On this point, see Iseult Honohan’s contribution to this symposium. European University Institute 47