Month: August 2019

UK: Was Jack Letts’ deprivation of citizenship really necessary?

It’s not hard to imagine why Jack Letts was eventually also deprived of his citizenship. The government had experienced pressure. They had to explain why they hadn’t yet deprived Letts had of his citizenship while Begum has lost her months ago, even though Begum had no other nationality, while Letts was a binational.

The juxtaposition of Shamima Begum’and Jack Letts’ case was one more example of the extent to which politics of citizenship are stained with racial power inequalities, where the white subject appears to have more rights than the non-white and non-Christians. The difference was just too blatant. Although the government had claimed that Begum’s deprivation of citizenship was legitimate because she could potentially acquire Bangladeshi nationality through her mother, the Bangladeshi Minister of Foreign Affair had been quick to comment that Begum was not welcome in Bangladesh and that there was no way she would acquire Bangladeshi nationality. De facto, Begum has thus become stateless with Sajid Javid’s decision to deprive her of her citizenship, making her deprivation of citizenship an illegitimate deed from the UK government.

In parallel, Jack Letts was known to have committed the same crime—both Begum and Letts had joined ISIS—but Letts was not immediately deprived of his citizenship, while he did have another nationality: he was a Canadian British dual national.

For the UK government, the easiest way to make up for the unequal treatment was to repair the inequality by also depriving Letts of his citizenship. He had also joined ISIS. Had admitted that he had been an enemy of Britain. And there is this law, allowing the state to deprive a citizen of their citizenship when the state consider them a fundamental threat to the country. The rhetoric about foreign fighters is clear: all citizens who travelled to Syria are considered fundamental threats to the country. So, the government had all the tools to also deprive Letts of his citizenship.

That was the easiest way. But that shows what kind of stamina the government is prepared to display. Don’t get me wrong. In this case, the stamina is weak, very weak.

I can imagine the pressure experienced when faced with the fact that one’s political play is stained by racism. This was not about subtle power relations. This is in plane face. But does the government really think that the racist stain on their politics of citizenship is by now resolved?

I do believe they are cleverer than that. Perhaps, they believe that for some of their electorate, Letts’ deprivation of citizenship will resolve the anger and set the doubts at rest. Perhaps they even believe that Begum’s family will lose their appeal based on the ground of unequal treatment between their daughter, the girl from Bethnal Green, and the boy from Oxford.

But sooner or later, they will have to face the fact that the very nature of a law such as the law allowing for citizenship revocation is profoundly disturbing for our democratic lives.

When the state reserve themselves the right to deprive a citizen of their citizenship based on claims of security and enmity, we should not only be concerned about questions of statelessness. Statelessness is a symptom of something way deeper. Something that I call, using Hannah Arendt’s term, the totalitarian infection of our democracies.

Begum’s deprivation of citizenship is certainly doubly disturbing because she has become de facto stateless. But Letts’ deprivation of citizenship is disturbing too. Certainly, terrorism is a grave matter that needs to be dealt with the greatest care. But everyone knows that depriving citizens of their citizenship is not making the state safer, nor is it making the social body friendlier.

To the contrary. Depriving citizens of their citizenships makes it harder for the state to know where those potentially dangerous citizens are, and to proceed against them. By revoking their citizenship, the state also revokes itself the tools to bring those citizens in front of a criminal justice court. In other words, the state dumps those citizens they say are the most dangerous to the rest of the world. Since borders are not hermetic, it could well be that those citizens will still reach home. It may—or may not—have the gravest consequences for society.

That is one: the deprivation of citizenship makes society, whether national or international, rather less safe than more safe.

And then there is the co-lateral damage. It is unquestionable that those institutional norms legitimizing acts of citizenship revocation by state send a repressive message to social groups with dual citizenship, and even more so to those with a non-white and non-Christian background. For how can a teenager understand the state’s persistence to revoke Begum’s citizenship, if not by concluding that the country they live in make some citizens more vulnerable to the loss of citizenship than others? For everyone with dual nationality or a non-white and non-Christian background, the deprivation of citizenship becomes the token of a potential threat to their own safety. Indeed, the deprivation of citizenship reveals that citizenship might be a privilege more than it is a right. And that the contingency of the privileged ones follows a spectrum of norms of oppression that we know all too well.

I do understand that it requires tremendous stamina for a state to reverse denaturalization laws so that it is no longer possible for a state to deprive a citizen of their nationality once they have acquired it. It requires admitting a certain number of faults: first of all, the fact that the government made believe that the deprivation of citizenship would be an effective security tool; second, the fact that the deprivation of citizenship threatens fundamental human rights, such as the right to have a nationality; third, the fact that the deprivation of citizenship also erodes fundamental principles of the rule of law, starting with the principle of equality before the law; and fourth, the fact that the deprivation of citizenship is a symptom of the racist stain on our politics of citizenship. Now, everyone knows that admitting one’s faults requires tremendous courage and strength.

So, in a moment of pressure, where fatigue is lurking, I can understand the choice for the government to cosmetically masking inequality rather than to fundamentally question their doings. Many of us might do the same in our daily lives. Who doesn’t take the painkiller if that may delay the annoyingly difficult and fundamental examination of our body? The decision to make oneself vulnerable, perfectly knowing the pain that one will go through, and perhaps even knowing that the pain might become even greater than one can imagine, is a difficult decision.

But if that pain could provide some relief for ages-old pains of oppression, then it must be worth it. In the long run, fostering belonging will always benefit the public good.

Surely, abolishing citizenship revocation laws would be just the beginning. But at least it would be a beginning. And it can be done. Others have done it. Canada is the most recent example that comes to mind.

So, let us imagine. Instead of depriving Jack Letts of his citizenship, the UK government would have redressed Begum’s citizenship, and with hers, the citizenship of the more than 150 citizens who have been deprived of their citizenship in the past decade. And the government would have apologized to the communities who felt increasingly threatened of un-belonging. How much time would that take? Pragmatically, a couple of minutes, some hours at best.

Stories are dangerous, said the Judge

Photo by Robyn Budlender on Unsplash

It was an afternoon in early summer 2019, in Amsterdam. We were celebrating our teaching program’s fifth anniversary, just as much as I was saying goodbye to those colleagues who had been my community for the past four years. Sipping a beer and laughing at students’ jokes, I was chit chatting with a colleague who happen to be a judge at the Dutch supreme court—one never just happens to be a judge, but one happens to have a colleague who is a judge at the supreme court. My colleague judge was asking me about my new research project that had just started in London.

“I’m writing about denaturalization law,” I answered.

I’ve been writing about denaturalization law for years now, so that has become my primary reflex answer. Judges do know what is at stake in denaturalization law—they know the stakes of the principle of equality before the law; they know what is at stake when depriving someone’s of their citizenship rights; they also know that security is a tricky topic that can sometimes bring democratic ideals into shaky grounds. I saw in his look that he was interested and that he understood why such a topic was worth years of research. That look changed slightly when I added: “But denaturalization is more a tool to write about something else. What I really do is to show that law and politics are driven by affect and emotions. And then I also want to make the argument of fiction as methods of inquiry and communication within the academia…”

Where most of my academic colleagues up to now had reacted positively intrigued—who wouldn’t want to see creativity come back in an institution of knowledge and education?—I sensed that my colleague judge had his doubts about it.

“Stories are dangerous,” he said, pausing. “Stories are a huge problem in law, making it very difficult for judges to know where to draw the line—a line that they do have to draw.”  

I agreed. Stories are dangerous. But the point is, stories are as old as human communication. So, I told my colleague judge that my starting point was precisely to see the dangerous potential of stories. In fact, it was when studying such a repressive measure as the deprivation of citizenship, studying the logics that has justified practices of denaturalization throughout history, that had made me realize the power of imagination when it becomes captured in language. Repression is indeed based on stories. Stories drive people to do the most horrific things imaginable. Wars; Slavery; Genocides. These are based on stories. Stories make people believe that some people are better than others. Worse, stories make people believe that some people are more human than others.

The arguments in stories are no rational arguments. Instead, the arguments are anecdotes, figurative language—metaphors in particular—framing…all ingredients needed to make a good story.

Stories are nothing new in law and politics. They’ve always been there. And yes, they are dangerous.

So, we better learn acknowledge their presence and learn to recognize them.

“You’re very right,” said the judge.

I’m certainly not the first to claim that law and politics are intricately related to storytelling. For instance, Ronald Dworkin is famous for understanding the law by means of the chain novel metaphor. Central to his law philosophy, the chain novel metaphor represents law as literature, but then literature of a specific kind. It is a collective work, for which novelists write in chain, each continuing the chapter of the previous writer. This means that each writer must interpret the work of their predecessor, as well as add their perspective on the story unfolding. It is no free writing though: in Dworkin’s vision of law as a chain novel, each writer must respect the logic and the chronology of the work as a whole. No postmodern experiments, not poetical interludes—at least, not in the guidelines.

What I like about Dworkin’s vision of the law as a chain novel is that it makes salient how the law is “doing language,” to speak in Toni Morrison’s terms. “We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may the be measure of our lives,” she reminds us in her Nobel Prize Speech. When seeing the law as a chain novel, we must pay tribute to the work of interpretation that goes hand in hand with working with the law. And we must acknowledge the creativity involved for laws to be drafted in the first place. 

Yet there is another layer to acknowledging the stories that make our laws and drive our politics. Uncovering stories is one thing, writing stories is another. But they go hand in hand; they are the two sides of the same coin. If stories yield power, they are also empowering, and perhaps even more so when they are stories about power relations, of those power relations that require a story to uncover them.

More than any academic text will ever be able to do, stories yields the potential for readers to relate to the complexity rooted in the politics of law, or in the law of politics. Elizabeth Dauphinee’s book The Politics of Exile is a wonderful example. Her “meditation on the aftermath of the war on Bosnia” does a tremendous job at plunging the reader into the context of the war and its atrocities. No academic text could have made us experience what is at stake in circumstances of life and death, such as when a man deserts an army. Dauphinee’s creative text does. It is a page turner in which the narrator makes us feel the soldier’s line of flight. But The Politics of Exile does more than that. It also makes us feel how complex it is to write on the aftermath of war in the first place. Because, how could one possibly write about the aftermath of war when not having experienced war in the first place? Can war be known to those who have not experienced it?

Dauphinee’s work makes us feel the existential negotiations of a writer who feels the urge to expose power in its most destructive form. Just as it makes us feel the writer’s anxiety when negotiating their ability and responsibility to find truth. The voice examining the aftermath of war necessarily needs to remain plural, and open for radical transformation. Creative writing is indeed a great tool to achieve such complexity without having to name it complex.

More than any juridical comment will ever be able to do so, stories allow for people like you and me to understand what is at stake in norms of belonging and repression. Stories empower the dispossessed to connect, to speak, to speak-back. Stories are paranoiac as much as they are reparative, to speak in Eve Sedgewick terms. They are paranoiac because they seek the (com)plot behind our governing norms. But a good story is always stronger than its plot, yielding layers of connective emotions that make us practice our job at being human. And that is what makes them reparative.

Photo by S O C I A L . C U T on Unsplash

Welcome

Welcome to my blog!

A researcher and writer at the crossroads, I love to run the extra mile to uncover the political stories of our pasts and futures.

I’ve created this blog as a platform for crossing genres and languages. It is a space to share the bits and pieces of research that often find no way out; the bits and pieces that lead to the bigger story, whether mine, or yours.

The blog is part of my research project titled “Mobilising Affects: Withdrawal of Citizenship and Politics of Security” that has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 839538. The project takes place at the School of Politics and International Relation, Queen Mary University of London.

In a nutshell, my research project focuses on the mobilization of affects in politics of security and the withdrawal of citizenship. I draw on historical cases as the basis for evaluating possible consequences of intensified withdrawal practices for regimes of citizenship today. I combine archival research with working affect across the social sciences and art practices.