Deportation and the development of citizenship
Researcher(s): Matthew J Gibney
Collaborator(s): Emanuella Paoletti and Dr Bridget Anderson (COMPAS)
Dates: December 2008–present
Donors: John Fell Oxford University Press Research Fund
In the past decade, deportation — broadly understood as the enforced and authorised removal of non-citizens from state territory — has been on the rise across a range of Western states, including the US, Israel, Germany and Canada, as a way of dealing with failed asylum seekers, unlawful migrants, criminals and suspected terrorists. Scholars of human rights and migration and refugee studies have analysed this development primarily through the lens of immigration control.
Aims
This project aims to study how deportation reinforces, re-constitutes and destabilises citizenship. It will examine deportation’s broader social and political effects, exploring the ways in which the rise of deportation reflects and generates changes in conceptions of membership in liberal states, which in turn affect the terms on which immigrants are expected to integrate into Western societies.
Activities and impacts
Presentations and workshops related to this project have engaged various academic, civil society and policy representatives:
- Two-day interdisciplinary international conference involving scholars, policymakers and activists on ‘Deportation and the development of citizenship’, December 2009
- One day workshop on ‘Expulsion, membership and political community: historical and multi-disciplinary perspectives’, May 2009
Selected publications
Gibney, M., Anderson, B., Paoletti, E. (eds) [forthcoming 2012], ‘Deportation and the development of citizenship’, Springer
Gibney, M., Anderson, B., Paoletti, E. (eds) (2011), ‘Deportation and the Constitution and Contestation of citizenship’, Special edition of Citizenship Studies journal, Vol. 15, issue 5
E. Paoletti (2011), ‘Deportation, non-deportability and ideas of membership’, RSC Working Paper 65, Refugee Studies Centre, University of Oxford
M. Gibney, ‘Precarious Residents: Migration control, membership and the rights of non-citizens’, Human Development Research Paper, New York: UNDP, No 10, 2009
Notes
Further funding of £400,000 is being sought for a more in-depth, multi-year, interdisciplinary research project on deportation and citizenship.
