Effects of Stripped Citizenship: Mechanisms of Arbitrary Denationalization

• In Event: Between Humanitarian and Security Approaches to Migrants and Minorities

Abstract

What are the effects of arbitrary denationalization on the everyday lives of individuals? Between September of 2021 and January of 2022, 42,000 dual-national Colombian-Venezuelan citizens lost their citizenship due to an administrative decision. Due process rights were not respected, nor were normal administrative procedures, resulting in a rare case of massive arbitrary denationalization. Denationalization amounts to stripped citizenship and is quite rare on a massive scale but leads to a dramatic breakdown of the expectations of the certainty of citizenship (Macklin 2018) and is rightfully a cause of alarm. The effects of denationalization have received relatively scant attention, possibly because of the difficulty inherent in study this phenomenon.

This paper presents the fruit of research conducted in Colombia among a theoretically stratified sample of binational individuals who were arbitrarily, massively, and suddenly deprived of their nationality, amounting to getting stripped of their citizenship. Individuals from this theoretically stratified sample provided life course-type and in-depth interviews which co-authors conducted using oral history and ethnographic tools. The interviews were structured around key milestones in two, and sometimes three distinct times: before losing citizenship, during their loss of citizenship, and in some cases, after having recovered citizenship. This allows analysis of different causal pathways through which nationality deprivation had an effect on individual and family lives. Interviews are thorough and include economic, sociological, psychological, and narrative prompts around the milestones. The interviews were triangulated with a second set of interviews with non-profit lawyers specializing in migration issues who assisted hundreds of cases of stripped citizenship.

Access to this hard-to-reach population was possible because the interviews were conducted as part of an innovative, community-engaged mixed research project, with academic and litigation goals. Besserer Rayas spent over a month in situ in Colombia assisting non-profit immigration lawyers, and designed, coordinated, and drafted, along with co-author Smith, a report that served as an amicus brief in Colombia’s highest court as well as in the Inter American Human Rights Commission in defense of those arbitrarily deprived of citizenship.

Findings show the multiple effects of the arbitrary deprivation of nationality through distinct causal pathways linking loss of citizenship with impacts on multiple dimensions. Impacts have a range of effects, but they show, in all cases, serious harm. The different effects amount to: precarization of jobs, loss of income, stress and anxiety, fear of authorities, food and housing insecurity, and in some cases, unjustified arrests and prison detention. Authors also identify the “Joseph K effect” (after Kafka’s The Process) whereby those affected become disoriented and fearful of authority and of their vulnerability towards hard to decipher acts of authority.

Denationalization or nationality deprivation is rare in the 21st century, though there are worrying examples across the world—in Assam, India; the Dominican Republic; among the Rohingya; and in the UK as a result of counterterrorism measures and in the case of the “Windrush scandal.” Academic studies have mostly either produced valuable interventions from normative citizenship theory (Macklin 2018; Owen 2018; Gibney 2014, 2017) or have focused on its use for antiterrorism or national security ends in its individualized form (Macklin and Baubock 2018; Kapoor 2018). This paper makes several contributions to the literature: 1) it systematically analyzes the effects of nationality deprivation and lays out a map of causal pathways, 2) it introduces a novel case, unknown to the literature of mass and arbitrary denationalization in the 21st century.

The case of denationalization in Colombia is of particular relevance for the study of this phenomenon because it is devoid of some of the characteristics accompanying other, better-studied cases. There is virtually no deportation regime in Colombia, meaning a low risk of expulsion even after denationalization. Furthermore, there are no religious or racial characteristics driving or structuring denationalization.

Authors

• Andres Besserer Rayas, The Graduate Center, City University of New York

• Robert Courtney Smith, Marxe School of Public and International Affairs, Baruch College, and Sociology, Grad Center, CUNY