Description
Drawing on empirical insights from NGOs working on statelessness affecting ‘ISIS-associated’ British citizens, I examine how legislative changes following the introduction of the Nationality and Borders Act 2022 rework terms of knowledge production enabling citizenship deprivation orders to be made without notice. I advance the concept ‘enforced ignorance’ to capture legalised epistemic injustices facing targeted individuals whereby ignorance of deprivation orders prevents them appealing decisions. Enforced ignorance functions through ignorance, secrecy, silencing, and uncertainty, comprising relational racialised epistemic practices that undermine rights and accountability. These dynamic and unstable circuits of non-knowledges involve spatio-temporal-affective control over material-discursive sites of knowledge production. Convergence of racialised citizenship and security measures legitimise deprivation against Muslims as threatening others that can be made stateless without proving citizenship access elsewhere.
