Waves of Securitisation
The Rise, Fall and Resurgence of Citizenship Stripping Regulations in Europe, 1960–2022
Abstract
The rise of citizenship stripping as part of a broader securitisation trend in the post-9/11 world has been frequently observed in public discourse and academic scholarship. Europe has been on the forefront of this trend with an increasing number of states introducing regulations on security-based citizenship deprivation in national legislation since the early 2000s, often allowing for substantial administrative discretion with few procedural safeguards. Remarkably, there is limited understanding of how new this phenomenon is and what the most common deprivation grounds are. In this paper, we leverage new longitudinal data on the regulation of security-based citizenship deprivation in 47 European states, going back to 1960. We identify two ‘waves of securitisation’, including an early wave focused on disloyalty in the 1970s and 1980s. After a liberalising period in the 1990s, we observe a strong resurgence of security-related deprivation provisions. Closer scrutiny of the language deployed by deprivation provisions confirms a discursive shift from concerns about disloyalty towards state security.
