Should citizenship be conditional? Denationalisation and liberal principles

This paper begins by considering the prehistory of denationalisation by briefly tracing the evolution of banishment as an idea and as a practice. It then turns to consider how denationalisation power emerged and became consolidated in the UK and the US in the first half of the twentieth century. Its focus then shifts to the nature of liberal objections to the power, in particular to concerns about denationalisation's link to statelessness, its creation of two classes of citizenship, and its arbitrariness.

In an effort to disentangle contingent from intrinsic objections to the practice, the revocation of citizenship provisions in the UK's Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act of 2002, which attempted to create a denationalisation power that takes account of liberal objections, are considered. In the final section of the paper, I consider the effectiveness of this Act in accommodating liberal concerns in order to shed light on the likelihood of reconciling liberal principles with forms of conditional citizenship.