Dual Citizenship in an Era of Securitization

Although dual citizenship was an undesirable status in international law throughout most of the 20th century, a range of nation states today accept dual citizenship. This has been interpreted as a symptom of a post national era in which personhood replaces nationhood as the key basis of rights and membership, as well as a pragmatic adjustment to the transnational realities of international migration. But is acceptance of dual citizenship necessarily indicative of liberalization of citizenship policies or an eroding will or ability of nation states to control its population? This paper argues that we might be entering a new phase in the history of dual citizenship. While several immigrant-receiving countries accepted dual citizenship to facilitate immigrant integration in the 1990s and early 2000s, and both immigrant-receiving and immigrant-sending countries today accept dual nationality to strengthen the ties to emigrants abroad, a new dimension has emerged over the past few years: Dual citizenship may serve as a lever to protect the political community of the nation state from security threats. The argument is based on a recent trend in several Western countries’ citizenship policies, including Australia, Britain, Canada, France, Denmark and Norway, toward revoking citizenship of individuals who support or engage in terrorist acts. Special empirical attention is given to the cases of Denmark and Norway, two traditional single-citizenship countries which recently have accepted or contemplate to accept dual citizenship to allow for citizenship revocation of dual citizens who engage in acts of terror.