Human Rights and British Citizenship: The Case of Shamima Begum as Citizen to Homo Sacer

Mercedes Masters,Salvador Santino F Regilme

doi:10.1093/jhuman/huaa029

Abstract

Abstract In the post-9/11 context, citizenship in the global North has been reoriented towards the concept of public security. Much of this lay in political rhetoric definitions of who is a threat to the security of a nation state, with a particular emphasis on the ‘threatening Other’. The ‘war on terror’ motivated governments to revoke the citizenship of such persons. In February 2019, the British teenager Shamima Begum was branded as such, and swiftly had her citizenship stripped, which the UK authorities justified as a necessary precaution to protect the nation’s safety. This article asks the core question: how does Britain embed notions of hierarchical human rights, particularly in Begum’s case? The article upholds two key arguments. First, the revocation of citizenship suggests hierarchical notions of humanity, whereby the state’s obligations to its constituents differ depending on each individual’s socially constructed racial and gender identities. Second, the legitimization of exceptionalist security politics suggests the deployment of differentiated conceptions of the state’s obligations to its citizens. The case of the revocation of Begum’s citizenship illustrates how persistent colonialist and stratified conceptions of citizenship enable the demotion of a citizen to a bare human or homo sacer.

Highlights

Shamima Begum, one of the ‘Bethnal Green trio’1 who left Britain to join the selfproclaimed Islamic State (IS) in February 2015, made headline news four years later.VC The Author(s) 2020
Whilst citizenship constitutes a foundational requirement for accessing basic human rights guaranteed by states, British government officials present a different view
Rendering a person stateless through citizenship revocation is a breach of human rights, the British government deploys dehumanizing discourses to legitimize this move

Summary

Introduction

Shamima Begum, one of the ‘Bethnal Green trio’ who left Britain to join the selfproclaimed Islamic State (IS) in February 2015, made headline news four years later. Shifting from the colonial desire of controlling the ‘Other’, especially veiled Muslim women, the subsequent section explores contemporary methods of controlling the ‘Other’ through methods of securitization masked as counter-terrorism Throughout these sections we link the themes to the Begum case utilizing a critical interpretive analysis, assessing themes and discourses surrounding her case with an intersectional approach to uncover the gendered and racialized undercurrents to highlight that citizenship law structurally privileges, and disadvantages, certain demographics of British society. When a citizen from a marginalized group is alleged to have deviated from the individual’s responsibility to society, the state arbitrarily deploys three notable instruments of control: (1) the vilification of the person’s marginalized social identity; (2) the denial of the person’s right to due process of the law; (3) and the revocation of full citizenship Such processes demonstrate contemporary liberal democratic states’ inability to escape from their imperial past and contemporary structures of exploitation, even when their constitutional order explicitly guarantees political equality regardless of the individual’s background. The section discusses the historical relationship between citizenship and rights, in Britain

Citizenship and rights

Attitudes towards Muslim women

Conclusion