Citizenship deprivation in cases of suspected terrorism

Dr Milena Tripkovic is a Lecturer in Criminology at the University of Edinburgh. In her current research, Milena explores the relationship between crime, punishment and citizenship. By combining criminological, legal and theoretical approaches, she examines the ways in which particular contemporary instances of punishment and penality deviate from ‘standard’ penal practices, consequently undermining the citizenship status of convicted persons. Milena’s book Punishment and Citizenship: A Theory of Criminal Disenfranchisement (OUP, 2019) discusses these concerns in the context of criminal disenfranchisement, while her more recent work on citizenship deprivation has appeared in the British Journal of Criminology and Punishment and Society.

The paper examines instances of de jure and de facto denationalization that arise from (suspected) terrorism by analyzing penal outcomes for affected citizens. The paper first exposes cases of de jure denationalization that confine citizens to global spaces and draws parallels with instances of de facto denationalization that deny repatriation from abroad. The paper then argues that both situations signal state’s avoidance of the duty to punish, deviate from conventional penal aspirations and engender volatile global penality. To support this argument, the paper explores three questions: (i) who punishes, (ii) who is punished and (iii) what the purpose of punishment is. The paper concludes by exposing the emerging features of global neo-colonial penality as they pertain to both its objects and objectives.

This seminar is part of an online open seminar series, hosted by the Centre for Criminology.

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