There is a global pattern of states using subtle and insidious legal mechanisms to threaten the citizenship status of vulnerable national minorities. In India, for instance, policies of citizenship enumeration and adjudication have classified around 2 million persons into varying categories of ‘doubtful’ citizens. While the state has not formally revoked citizenship status, it has nevertheless created complex and arduous legal processes that profoundly weaken it. Using the case of India, this chapter theorizes the antecedents, operation, and character of this form of precarious citizenship. It draws from the tradition of critical citizenship studies to argue that the precarity generated by states through these insidious routes is best understood as ‘irregular citizenship’. Irregular citizens are in the condition of suspended animation marked by ambivalence, uncertainty and ambiguity of citizenship status. States may seek to justify the practices of irregularization in the language of the rule of law. But these practices are constituted by the non-application of ordinary legal norms in the contexts of racializing stigmatized minorities and exceptionalist discourses related to national security. The chapter charts these dynamics in India and shows how India’s institutions – most visibly the courts – have adopted juristic techniques that legitimize irregularization despite being at odds with due process.

The chapter focusses on the membership statuses relevant to the rights to enter and remain in Australia. It analyses the nature and operation of the relevant Australian membership statuses in the period since Federation: British subject, non-immigrant, citizen and non-alien. A central theme is the move away from the centrality of membership in the British Empire toward a more distinct and self-sufficient national citizenship. This historical trajectory overlaps with another; the operation and long, slow demise of the White Australia policy. The chapter also analyses current issues challenging and/or changing our understanding of Australian citizenship: the ineligibility of dual citizens to sit in federal parliament; the citizenship deprivation powers introduced in 2015; the ruling that Aboriginal non-citizens are not vulnerable to deportation; and the rising proportion of residents without a path to citizenship.

Citizenship is not a neutral and stable status upon which to base rights, freedoms, and protections. It is also not a status available to all. As this chapter illustrates, citizenship is precarious and has never been a secure foundation upon which to base human rights. In the securitized world of the twenty-first century, this instability has heightened, especially for minorities. To make this argument, the chapter is divided into three sections. The first section explains how citizenship arose in international practice and law and how states translated international practice into defined nationality laws in the domestic sphere. This section highlights how before citizenship became a status to which human rights attached, it was, first and foremost, an international ordering principle. The second section demonstrates how states have historically excluded various groups, typically minorities, from enjoyment of full citizenship status, thereby endangering said groups’ access to human rights. The third section provides contemporary examples of citizenship deprivation and denial, highlighting the myriad justifications that states use to deny and deprive people of citizenship.

An increasing number of countries, especially the UK, have expanded their legal powers to deprive citizens of their nationality in response to terrorism. The trigger for the mounting focus on this tactic has been the advent of Islamic State and the phenomenon of Foreign Terrorist Fighters (FTFs) travelling to Iraq and Syria. The weaponization of nationality has therefore been adapted to this situation so that citizens can be treated as if they were foreigners. In this way, the FTFs can be divested of citizenship and of rights. This paper will explain these developments against the declining inspiration of ‘cosmopolitan citizenship’. So, the paper first needs to explore notions of citizenship and then to look at the decline of ‘cosmopolitan citizenship’ which provides space for counter-terrorism weaponization. The paper does not contend that cosmopolitan citizenship forbids any weaponization but highlights important provisos which draw attention to human rights and other principled and policy constraints which also must be explored and weighed.