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In recent years, citizenship revocation has become synonymous with terrorism, regarded as a practice reserved for the most dangerous of citizens. Yet in the UK revocation has a much longer history, spanning over 100 years, with a narrative that extends beyond the nation-state and into Empire. This paper asks what may be learned from a historical account of citizenship revocation? Exploring its emergence as part of the British Nationality and Status of Aliens Act 1914, this account suggests that revocation should not be analyzed in isolation but as a practice embedded in polices of immigration, naturalization, and emigration. This paper illustrates the ways in which these policies code subjects based on race, class and gender in order to govern their mobility. From this study, it argues that citizenship revocation cannot be explained solely through security claims and suggests that the 2018 cases should be considered in the context of revocation's history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2004, the first citizenship ceremony was conducted in the London Borough of Brent. These compulsory ceremonies for those who have been granted British citizenship had been proposed in the government white paper and then in the 2002 Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act. They were designed to celebrate the moment of achieving citizenships and were one response to a perceived ‘crisis of citizenship’ in Britain. This study examines the texts of the ‘local welcome’ which is given by a local dignitary at every ceremony as a moment of invention of tradition and of narrating citizenship and thereby narrating the nation-state. The study explores how and what the speeches tell us about understandings of citizenship and its relationship to diversity. It explores how history is also represented within the speeches. Finally, the study interrogates the texts' telling of a multi-cultural story. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Citizenship tests are arguably intended as moments of hailing, or interpellation, through which norms are internalized and citizen-subjects produced. We analyse the multiple political subjects revealed through migrants’ narratives of the citizenship test process, drawing on 158 interviews with migrants in Leicester and London who are at different stages in the UK citizenship test process. In dialogue with three counter-figures in the critical naturalization literature - the ‘neoliberal citizen’; the ‘anxious citizen’; and the ‘heroic citizen’ - we propose the figure of the ‘citizen-negotiator’, a socially situated actor who attempts to assert control over their life as they navigate the test process and state power. Through the focus on negotiation, we see migrants navigating a process of differentiation founded on pre-existing inequalities rather than a journey toward transformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article takes the naturalisation process as a vantage point to consider how citizenship constitutes a site of emotional investment not only on the part of applicants and ‘new’ citizens but also on the part of the state. The premise of this article is that naturalisation is more than solely the admission of foreigners to the position and rights of citizenship, and it approaches naturalisation as a state practice that needs to be understood within a politics of desire. The article asks three questions: what makes naturalisation a thinkable and desirable means of acquiring citizenship? Second, what do practices of naturalisation tell us about ‘the state's attachment to particular embodiments of desirable citizens’ (S. Somerville, 2005, Notes toward a queer history of naturalization.American quarterly, 7 (3), 661)? Third, ‘who may desire the state's desire’ (J. Butler, 2002. Is kinship always already heterosexual?Differences, 13 (1), 22)? Using policy documents and auto-ethnographic material, the article examines practices through which the state selects its own objects of desire and produces them as citizens, while it also produces itself as desirable. The article concludes that naturalisation distinguishes desirable from less desirable citizens through fantasies of English proficiency and birthright citizenship. In addition, the staged performance of the citizenship ceremony assures the state of its desirability by subsuming ‘as if’ enactments of citizenship. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]