Citizenship Stripping as Alternative Border Control : Syrian Counter Perspectives

The recent global debates on ‘citizenship stripping’ for associates of the Islamic State terrorist group have been characterised by emotive responses propagated by the Western tabloid press. Knee-jerk reactions tend to dominate in place of nuanced discussions and evidence-driven policy articulations. Citizenship stripping has been considered to constitute a ‘return of banishment’ – that is, exiling problematic individuals beyond the borders of a limited political community. Recent practices of citizenship stripping by states do not only reinforce their own borders against those they consider to be a national security threat, with implications for processes of justice, as highlighted in the Shamima Begum case. They also institute and maintain other systems of outsourced governance and externalised border control, e.g. the use of detention in camps run by non-state Kurdish actors in Northern Syria. However, rarely have the perspectives of Syrians on this issue been heard, despite the fact that their lives are evidently more directly affected by these citizenship stripping policies since they are left to manage the humanitarian, security and social impacts of former ISIS members now stranded in their country