Description
The crumbling of the Islamic State’s Caliphate brought with it the ever-recurring question of what to do with ‘its citizens’. The fear of large waves of returnees quickly became a possible reality. The returnee is constructed around the notion of fear, leading some states in the West to resort to the use of denationalization, or citizenship stripping, to prevent their return. States have argued that denationalization is used as a security measure to protect that state and its citizens from the dangerous other. Much of the literature has focused on the denationalization debate, but not on what role citizenship potentially plays in processes of deradicalization and reintegration. The paper looks at this debate through the lens of categories of citizenship, including the ‘good citizen’ and the ‘failed citizen’. Consequently, the paper provides an important contribution to the debate, as it looks at the consequences of these categorizations for returnee reintegration: Can the ‘failed citizen’ ever become a ‘good citizen’ again?
