Description
It is difficult to uncouple citizenship revocation from the security framing through which it is often presented. This practice has become synonymous with terror. While governments explain the stripping of citizenship by ramping up the security narrative, the academic debate largely focuses on how such a practice may be justified. Yet, in the immediacy of unfolding cases of revocation, there is a lack of critical engagement with the UK’s history and the imperial repertoire that allows for revocation to exist. In my research, I ask how the study of citizenship revocation may be informed by historical analysis of practises relating to Empire. Specifically, in this paper, I analyse the UK Immigration Acts of the 1960s and 1970s, Acts that rendered thousands of citizens de facto stateless. Using archival research, I examine government documents and parliamentary debates between 1960 – 1973 and I identify a new categorisation used informally by government officials in which they classified citizens as ‘belongers’ and ‘non-belongers’. These new terms, which never appeared in legislation, were presented in government documents and parliamentary debates as self-explanatory terms to distinguish between the tiers of citizenship, between those who apparently had a right to be in the UK and those who did not. Through this historical analysis, the paper looks beyond the security-driven narrative associated with revocation and asks how a citizen becomes a non-citizen or in this case a non-belonger.
