Dual Citizenship in an Era of Securitization

This paper discusses a trend in Western countries’ citizenship policies toward revoking citizenship of individuals who engage in terrorist acts. This trend has received some attention in the scholarly literature, but one important point has been left unnoticed: Because it is illegitimate to make people stateless, a precondition for citizenship revocation is that dual citizenship is accepted in the first place. This precondition becomes visible in traditional single-citizenship countries, like Denmark. When Denmark allowed dual citizenship in 2015, the decision reflected two distinct lines of argument: First, accepting dual citizenship would allow Danes living abroad to keep their Danish citizenship, and, second, it would justify a change in Danish legislation, allowing for citizenship revocation of dual citizens who engage in or support acts of terror. This rationale stands in stark contrast to how dual citizenship previously has been theorized. The gradual acceptance of dual citizenship in Western countries since the early 1990s has been seen either as a symptom of an emerging post national era or as a pragmatic adjustment to the transnational realities of migration. The case of Denmark shows that acceptance of dual citizenship can reflect a nation state’s will to punish and expel citizens who have engaged in terror, and as such it can be seen as a tool of securitization and state control rather than an act of liberalization.