Citizenship Deprivation and the Constitutional State: The Politics of (Un) Belonging

Citizenship deprivation has made a striking return to the political and legal landscapes of liberal democracies. How can we account for this return and the subsequent normalisation of the powers? What explains 'resistances' to this return and variation between state practices? More broadly, what do we learn about citizenship deprivation when we read it through a constitutional lens? This book addresses these key questions through an in-depth, historically grounded, comparative analysis of France and the UK. In the book, citizenship deprivation is revealed not as a narrow counter-terrorism tool but as a racialised migration mechanism embedded in constitutional architectures and rooted in colonial legacies. By connecting citizenship regimes to state's constitutional structures, this book also shows how constitutional stories about citizenship infuse the behaviours of state actors (providing legitimation frames and discourses) and how these stories tie to states' structures, eventually accounting for variations between state practices.

• Publication date: 17 September 2026
• Page count: 224
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Format: Hardback
• ISBN-13: 9781009354721