POMEPS & MENA Initiative Workshop, Pardee School of Global Studies, Boston University
Workshop Date: Friday, March 26, 2027
While citizenship is often understood as a source of rights and protection, states increasingly use citizenship policies to marginalize, discipline, expel, or contain populations viewed as undesirable or threatening. This workshop examines historical and contemporary forms of “weaponized citizenship,” including denaturalization, forced nationality attribution, and the strategic deployment of citizenship against targeted populations. It also examines how these practices can produce or deepen statelessness, alongside more structural forms of exclusion embedded in the laws, institutions, and administrative practices that determine whose membership is recognized, documented, transmitted, or denied.
We are particularly interested in the interplay between citizenship and migration, while placing questions of membership rights and statelessness at the center of the analysis. This includes (but is not limited to) state efforts to render long-term immigrant communities, ethnic minorities, and even previously naturalized or native-born citizens into “illegal immigrants” without status or meaningful protection. We are also interested in how the stripping, suspension, or forced attribution of citizenship can itself become a push factor for migration, displacement, and exile. Such practices may involve denaturalization campaigns, the withdrawal or suspension of citizenship rights, coercive nationality attributions, offshore or externally imposed citizenship schemes, or the use of citizenship policies to circumvent obligations toward refugees and stateless populations. But exclusion need not take the form of overt denaturalization or revocation. Gendered and racialized citizenship laws can make some populations systematically more vulnerable to insecure status, the inability to transmit nationality, or statelessness, while administrative practices surrounding birth registration, documentation, marriage, and family status can shape who is able to establish and exercise membership rights in the first place. We are therefore interested in both intentional forms of weaponized citizenship and more structural forms of exclusion, and in how the two intersect.
The workshop seeks to better understand both the motivations and consequences of weaponized citizenship and statelessness, as well as the broader theoretical implications for our understanding of the shifting contours of the state. We are especially interested in the conditions under which citizenship becomes weaponized. What political, economic, technological, or security transformations precipitate these practices? How do gender, race, ethnicity, class, or migration status shape vulnerability to the denial, non-transmission, or loss of citizenship rights? How do war, regime instability, economic crises, demographic anxieties, or new identity management systems (ex. biometric national IDs, digital databases, and passport infrastructures) reshape state capacities to monitor, classify, include, or expel populations? How are citizenship attributions and denationalization policies used to consolidate regimes, discipline political opponents, reshape demographic balances, or advance broader political and economic projects? What forms of precarity, exclusion, or statelessness emerge through these processes? How do citizenship policies intersect with border enforcement, migration control, securitization, and projects of nation-building? How do affected populations navigate, contest, or resist these forms of exclusion?
We invite contributions focused on the Middle East and North Africa, from a range of disciplinary and methodological perspectives. We welcome both historical and contemporary work. The papers should be approximately 3000 words, and should be drafted in line with the POMEPS AI Policy governing acceptable use of Generative AI. The papers will be revised after the workshop for publication in a volume of our open access journal POMEPS Studies, and selected contributions could be developed into chapters for an edited volume on the same theme.
To apply, please complete this Google Form, including your academic affiliation and an abstract of no more than 500 words, by November 1, 2026.