Coloniality, Belonging and Citizenship Deprivation in the UK: Exploring Judicial Responses

Abstract

In this paper, I interrogate the English case law on citizenship deprivation and its effects on the migrant and diasporic communities most affected by it from a critical postcolonial perspective. I explore how it forms part of state responses to national security that are rooted in racist imperialist ideologies. These underpinnings are ignored in law because such responses are supposedly reserved for exceptional circumstances. This has led to a lack of critical awareness of the wider damage they cause. The damage caused is compounded by the ways that citizenship deprivation constitutes a technology of the politics of belonging. It orientalises people, “othering” and dividing them into those who belong and those who do not based on their differences. This approach leaves racialised and minoritised citizens more vulnerable to losing their citizenship which is a deliberate form of control reminiscent of the longstanding behaviour of colonialist imperialists.