In its strictest sense, citizenship is a legal status that means a person has a right to live in a state and that state cannot refuse them entry or deport them. This legal status may be conferred at birth, or, in some states, obtained through naturalisation. However, the research presented in the roundtable provides an array of different perspectives on the topic of citizenship, encompassing denationalisation, dual citizenship, migration and citizenship in Africa, labour politics and urban citizenship in Argentina, and colonialism.

Citizenship Stripping and the Liberal State

Matthew Gibney’s research explores the various incarnations that expulsion power takes in modern liberal states and the issues it raises for communities ostensibly committed to principles of freedom, equality and human rights. 

Since September 11, 2001, most Western countries have introduced laws or updated old ones to enable citizenship stripping from suspected or convicted terrorists – usually those with a second nationality and frequently Muslim men of immigrant backgrounds. A notable recent case is Shamima Begum, who had her UK citizenship revoked after joining ISIS in Syria at the age of 15. 

The idea that citizenship status is a contingent one, one that can be taken away at certain times, is as old as citizenship itself. Gibney charts the evolution of denationalisation in Western states since the early 20th century, noting that denationalisation is typically a second order manifestation of anti-immigrant sentiments that intensifies during wartime when citizenship becomes securitised. Deactivisation targets come from ethnic, national and religious groups who are perceived as foreign despite their legal citizenship. 

Liberal principles have facilitated citizenship removal – evident in the compatibility between a contractual view of citizenship and denationalisation. The idea of a contract, particularly in the case of naturalised citizens, has often underwritten the state’s right to denationalise. The disloyalty shown by the spy or jihadi is seen as violating this contract. 

Liberal principles can also have a constraining role, as in the period after 1945 when denationalisation fell prey to an explicitly anti-racist liberalism that promoted citizen equality. Denationalisation had been tarnished by its association with totalitarian regimes. And international moves to reduce the causes of statelessness further restricted its practice. 

However, a significant shift occurred in the 1960s when states began to accept dual nationality among their citizens. One unanticipated result has been that states now have citizens who they can denationalise without making them stateless. 

Read more about Professor Gibney’s work on denationalisation at the Refugee Studies Centre.

Dual Citizenship, Upward Mobility, and Return Migration

For her doctoral research, Julia Schweers examined the return migration of dual citizens and the global inequalities associated with citizenship. Analysing the socio-economic worth of dual citizenship for naturalised immigrants, she focused particularly on immigrants who return from the Global North to their country of origin in the Global South. 

Citizenship studies have shown that naturalising in the Global North generates a clear socio-economic boost for immigrants from the Global South and also a boost to their global mobility rights. What citizenship studies had not considered was that naturalised migrants might not want to stay in the Global North forever. At the same time, scholars of return migration were puzzled by the fact that volunteer return migration, although normally associated with savings, educational qualifications, and networks in the Global North, often does not lead to upward mobility after return.

Schweers wanted to explore the value of dual citizenship in the everyday lives of returnees. Focusing on Ghana, she found that it enhances socio-economic upward mobility after return. Ghanaian dual citizens could leverage their second passport not only in the Global North but also for everyday life in Ghanaian society. She found that the advantages of dual citizenship in Ghana are closely tied to the concept of 'capital' (as defined by Pierre Bourdieu), encompassing social, economic, and cultural capital, i.e. in the form of better-paid jobs, better access to networking events, and better access to prestigious consumer goods. 

Dual citizenship takes on the form of capital because of global inequalities between states and the different sets of civic rights and socio-economic opportunities that states offer their citizens.

Dr Schweers’ DPhil thesis is available online here.

Mobility, Uncertainty, and the Rescaling of Political Community in Sub-Saharan Africa

The idea of citizenship and possible benefits of it for migrants in sub-Saharan African cities are examined by Loren Landau, with a focus on Nairobi, Johannesburg and Accra. Africa is the fastest growing continent population-wise and its cities are the fastest growing. Historically, cities are where citizenship began, the social contract, the social welfare state. Landau asks what kind of citizenship is going to develop out of these circumstances, and will it look anything like the kind of citizenship that we think is good or that we think people should have.

The cities studied draw people in because the possibilities are better than elsewhere, but not because there’s work waiting for them. And most people – whether citizens or new immigrants – don’t get anything from the state, not even physical security. So what are people’s rights in these African cities? How do people claim rights? To work? How do you get the rights, if you want that, to shape the place that you’re living in? And what does this mean ultimately for scholars who are trying to address questions of inequality, and for migration studies or citizenship studies more generally.

Initial findings suggest that formal citizenship and documentation hold little practical significance for individuals, including refugees and asylum seekers. Those more able to move internationally tend to have more skills, more social capital and more money than rural domestic migrants. Further, the act of mobilising, especially as refugees and migrants, to claim citizenship is often counterproductive. This process highlights your status as a migrant, rendering you vulnerable both socially and politically. 

As for the things we tend to associate with citizenship, such as participation and recognition by the state, almost no-one wants that, largely because they are not planning a future where they are. They see citizenship and the need to participate as binding and going against what they want. This will cause tensions with those people who are invested in the place. This is something that will raise real questions in the future. Formal citizenship is not what really matters to most people in these situations. What they really want is citizenship recognition elsewhere in the future.

Find further information on Professor Landau’s research here Mobility, temporality, and Africa’s future politics and here Atlas of Uncertainty. 

Collective Labour Politics and Urban Citizenship in Latin America

In her work, Dolores Señorans focuses on precarious workers’ trade union organising in Argentina through an ethnographic study of migrant garment workers in the Unión de Trabajadores de la Economía Popular (UTEP, Popular Economy Workers Union), the first union in the country representing unwaged workers. She examines how the experience of making a living in cities became the basis for the emergence of a distinctive form of trade union politics that challenged traditional forms of union representation. 

UTEP was created in 2011 by Argentina’s largest social movements to represent a wide range of workers that they define as part of the popular economy but who are more typically classified as informal or precarious workers, including street vendors, rural workers, recyclers, and garment workers. The union has become a significant political actor in Argentina, with even elected members of congress from its ranks. It’s also an interesting case because it counteracts a widely held argument in the literature on precarious labour, which posits that workforce dispersion inevitably results in disorganisation and the weakening of collective organising. 

Señorans’ focus is twofold. On the one hand, beyond scholarly and popular views that often describe popular or informal economies as zero surplus, marginal or in more positive views as alternatives to market economies, she situates them at the centre of capitalist accumulation, but also of the possibilities to transform it. On the other hand, she tries to show that the social ties and forms of paid and unpaid labour also make for the possible development of collective organisations that seek to extend citizenship and transform supply chains. 

UTEP’s citizenship claims and practices reflect a work–city nexus, advancing neighbourhood improvements while fostering union growth and allowances between workers of diverse occupations, sectors and national origins. The union slogan – Land, Growth and Work – encapsulates this articulation of life, labour and urban space, and points to the way the union is reimagining the historical association between dignity, work and citizenship in Argentina. Señorans draws on this long tradition of union politics and access to social citizenship but redefines it to the new conditions of the working class.

Further details on Dr Señorans’ research can be found here: Plural experimentations: migrant labour and collective politics in the city of Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Decolonisation and Being Lost in Transnation

Simukai Chigudu gave us a taste of his forthcoming book When Will We Be Free?, a work of literary nonfiction that combines memoir, political history, and cultural criticism to show how colonialism continues to shape politics, society and culture in Africa and in Britain, and to explore what it really means to decolonise.

Chigudu read a preview of the book from its opening passages. He related that in his home country of Zimbabwe, they call him a ‘born free’, because he belongs to the first generation in the modern history of his native land that never lived under direct colonial rule. He has never been denied the vote based on his dark skin, nor has he been subjected to a Draconian internal passport system. But even though he was born free, colonialism has marked the landscapes of his life and placed him at the crossroads of multiple, sometimes conflicting identities.

For example, when mid-way through his first year as Associate Professor of African Politics in ODID in 2019, he had been invited to give a lecture at Cambridge University about decolonising African studies. On the train to Cambridge, he was called by a member of Zimbabwe’s ruling party, Zanu PF, about a second invitation he had received, to be an expert witness before a Parliamentary Select Committee about an unfolding political and humanitarian crisis in Zimbabwe. The call was to remind him to be a patriotic citizen: “You’re the only Zimbabwean on that panel. It’s important that you represent our people fairly.” This moment encapsulated the complexities of his position as he was under pressure to critique colonialism one day, and then resist the pressure to tow a nationalist line the next. 

Throughout his life, Chigudu has been labelled in ways that underscore his fractured identity. He commented, “The irony of being called upon as a representative of ‘my people’, albeit under subtle duress, did not escape me when for most of my life I’ve been read by the world as quite the opposite.” Black Zimbabweans have called him a ‘salad’, someone who grew up in the country’s formerly white neighbourhoods, was privately educated and had adopted white cultural habits like eating salad. White Zimbabweans have called him a soutpiel, someone with one foot in Africa and one foot in Europe. Americans have said he sounds British and British people have asked him why he speaks so well. Some have concluded that he’s the whitest black man they know. For him, decolonisation is not just an intellectual exercise but a deeply personal journey—one of being lost, and perhaps never fully found, in transnation.

When Will We Be Free? be published by The Bodley Head and Crown in 2026. Find out more about Professor Chigudu’s research here.

Conclusion

So where is citizenship likely to head over the next few decades. Is it likely to become more contingent for example? There seem to be practical and legal limitations on the use of denationalisation that are difficult to overcome. States have good reason to avoid a world where they dump their own unwanted citizens upon each other. However, there is evidence from France and the UK that denationalisation power might be expanding to non-terrorist areas. The Far Right in many countries have long seen denationalisation as an issue that conveniently combines their tough stance on crime and their anti-immigrant agendas, and with right-wing populism on the move, a new age of citizenship loss may just be beginning. And on the theoretical side, perhaps scholars need to be open on a normative level to what kinds of citizenship, belonging, membership, people are looking to achieve. 

This post draws on an ODID Research Roundtable on Citizenship held in Michaelmas Term 2024. ODID Research Roundtables are intended to create productive conversations around shared intellectual interests, methods, and practices in the department. Each roundtable seeks to cut across the department in terms of the seniority of speakers, disciplines, geographical regions, and the location of participants in degree programmes and research groups.