Books Against Borders

Anti-colonial & Abolitionist Reading

Citizenship, Counterinsurgency, and the Right to Protest

As states increasingly wield the mechanisms of the border to suppress protest and Palestinian solidarity, we explore the history of border controls and policing as colonial counterinsurgency.

The realities of ongoing colonial violence are today plain to see. As colonial powers line up in support of Israel’s genocide of Palestinians, the deep underlying nationalism of the colonial states and their tactics of ‘Othering’ and dehumanisation are made evident, both in their warmongering and profiteering abroad and in the policing of solidarity and ‘belonging’ domestically.

To explore this, I want to think about the ways in which citizenship and status are wielded by the state. Through counter-terrorism, immigration control, and suppression of protest, states like Britain and Germany have increasingly used ‘pre-emptive’ policing, deportation, and citizenship deprivation as a means of population control – starkly visible in the response to mobilisation in solidarity with Palestine – overwhelmingly affecting racialised, Muslim, migrant, or otherwise ‘Othered’ populations; those the postcolonial state fundamentally views as ‘people out of place’ (Sharma 2020, 14). In consistently questioning the ‘belonging’, ‘loyalty’, and ‘character’ of such groups, the colonial logics of counterinsurgency and a systemic dynamic of ‘us’ vs. ‘them’ are brought to the fore.

I will draw on testimonies, experiences, activism, literature, and news stories by and about those who have suffered the sharp end of such persecution and suppression, both citizens and non-citizens alike. Indeed, there are significant limitations to the citizen/non-citizen binary, as the promises of citizenship are increasingly precarious, inaccessible, and differently experienced. I therefore centre the ‘multi-status’ framework used by de Noronha, emphasising that this is not a fixed dynamic but a fluid process of status-, subject- and race-making (De Noronha 2019). Furthermore, there has always been resistance to such distinctions, particularly from Black and migrant women. It is these struggles that any critique of the colonial roots of citizenship should look to for inspiration, wisdom, and guidance. 

The Promises and Limitations of Citizenship

“It makes you feel you’re not human, like you’re not deserving of what everyone around you has.”

Desiré [name changed in source text] on the effects of her immigration status

The institution of citizenship has fundamentally been developed to cement the logics of exclusion into law. By dictating access to key services and rights, such as healthcare, work, education and mobility, regimes of status serve to legitimise claims to expropriated, extracted and exploited colonial wealth (El-Enany 2020, 7-8). To understand the way in which this is carried out, it is important to interrogate the foundations of status regimes, thinking about the development of ‘citizenship’ in its current form, the role of colonialism in its formulation, and the responses and experiences of those excluded from or unevenly integrated into it. In this section, I will focus on the context in Britain, though similar dynamics exist across the postcolonial world.

As El-Enany’s work emphasises, immigration and citizenship laws have consistently been developed to set the boundaries of differentiated access to resources (El-Enany 2020). This has always been along racial lines: most notably, with the formal dissolution of the British Empire, such laws were drawn up with the purview of establishing a ‘Britishness’ that was associated with whiteness (Ali 2023, 4-5). We see the same processes of immigration control carrying out superficially ‘race-neutral’ discrimination elsewhere, from the EU to the US (De Genova 2018; Achiume 2022).  

Citizenship is thus part of an ongoing, colonial project of determining entitlement, disentitlement, and exclusion. Significantly, this has always been experienced as the discrimination that it is. In 1982, around 350 mostly Black women came together in London for the conference, ‘Bringing it All Back Home: Black and Immigrant Women Speak Out and Claim our Rights’ during which women discussed the various impacts of immigration laws alongside other issues they faced that were heightened due to their position as Black and migrant women of colour (James 1985). In words foreshadowing the epigraph at the beginning of this section, activist Margaret Prescod stated plainly: ‘Being an immigrant makes all other aspects of your life harder’ (James 1985, 101). Furthermore, she demonstrates how this extends beyond formal status along racial lines, arguing ‘even if you’re born in Britain, if you’re Black, you’re treated as an immigrant anyway.’

There is a co-constitutive relationship between immigration and citizenship law and the racist, colonial logics of ‘us’ vs. ‘them’, in which the ‘native’ is deserving of access to basic services and dignity while the ‘Other’ is rendered undeserving and disposable to the state. We can point to the 1981 Nationality Act, inspired by the likes of Enoch Powell, in tying citizenship to ‘British’ (white) blood (Cowan 2021, 34-35); or the 2014 and 2016 Immigration Acts that codified Theresa May’s iteration of a ‘hostile environment’ (though its foundations had been decades in the making), to the detriment of anybody not considered ‘unconditionally ‘British’’ (Alli 2023, 89). This was made abundantly clear during the infamous Windrush scandal, which illuminated the ways even seemingly ‘deserving’ and ‘respectable’ migrants are subjected to the violences of the border, in which, ‘as ever, the incorporation of black people into the national fold was partial, conditional, and retractable’ (Bhattacharyya et al 2021, 23).

As we see in Desiré’s words above, the dehumanising impact of these policies is palpable. Once again, we must emphasise that this is due to the construction of the citizen as a fundamentally colonial and racial project, under the guise of a supposedly ‘universal’ and ‘race-neutral’ mechanism of the liberal nation-state (Lowe 2015). By attaching basic services, freedoms, and dignity to status; we can see clear how the state ultimately equates humanness with citizenship; and thus those left outside the boundaries of belonging to the (racially defined and policed) boundaries of the state are refused the very category of human. This is of course used to justify imperial wars abroad and racist policing, incarceration, and bordering within the nation-state, as Maynard reminds us with regard to the ‘commonalities of oppression’ behind Black solidarity with Palestine in North America (Maynard 2023). And it is through the hostile and violent practices of everyday bordering, policing, detention and deportation, that we can see the legal and institutional ground for the border as disciplinary governmentality, and the legacies of colonial counterinsurgency.

Deportability and Illegalisation

The very construction of the ‘citizen’, therefore, is rooted in a colonial logic determining who is entitled to the resources and freedoms that supposed inclusion into the nation-state provide. This is furthermore experienced in differentiated ways depending on your perceived proximity to ‘National-Native’ autochthony , in Sharma’s terms (Sharma 2020, 7-8). This section explores how this is carried out through conditions of ‘deportability’ and ‘illegality’.

As De Genova demonstrates, ‘illegality’ and ‘deportability’ are not fixed conditions, but legal and political mechanisms that capture particular social relations between an individual or a community and the state (De Genova 2002, 422). These mechanisms are themselves productive of particular subjectivities and identities (de Noronha 2019, 2417) and conditions of everyday life, as shown above in relation to access to public services, and as Horton and Walia have demonstrated with regard to labour, disciplining workers to suit the needs of capitalism (Horton 2016; Walia 2021, ch.7). The expanding criminalisation of activities within these areas – and, indeed, simply existing as a migrant, Muslim, Arab, Black person or otherwise ‘Othered’ person – has meant that ‘belonging’ is quite literally policed on a day-to-day basis. De Noronha, for example, tells us of the constant police harassment of interviewee Ricardo throughout his life in Britain before being deported to Jamaica, ‘denied access to public space, to freedom of association, and to the presumption of innocence’ (de Noronha 2019, 2424).

Counterterror strategies such as Prevent similarly operate on this basis of pre-determined suspicion, creating additional borders that regularly bring Muslims’ ‘belonging’ into question, even when they are citizens (Ali 2023, 69). The stories on PreventWatch.org capture the frankly absurd policing of children as young as 6 and 10 coming face-to-face with the security state, for reasons as banal as adopting more religious clothing or repeating phrases from a children’s TV show. Furthermore, just as the hostile environment has delegated border policing into various levels of society, including teachers, nurses, and more, so too has the Prevent Duty: one case involved a nine-year-old’s being ‘made to feel like he did not belong in the UK’ after being interrogated by his optician. Far from promoting ‘inclusion’, these practices are clearly intended to alienate, isolate, and punish those considered ‘outsiders’. Further testimonies via HHUGS from victims of the security state tell a similar story. Yusra, for example, describes being cut off from her children and family, and eventually being made homeless, in an experience similar to Jason, a deportee interviewed by de Noronha (de Noronha, 2019, 2420). Sana describes being made to feel ‘subhuman’ during a counterterror raid, before highlighting the contradictions between the rhetoric of ‘assimilation’ and the realities of counterterror enforcement.

The proliferation of such policing is made all the more serious when paired with the expansion and use of citizenship deprivation powers against the spectres of threats to public ‘order’ and ‘security’. Legislation like the UK’s Nationality and Borders Act 2022 (Home Office 2023)  and an incoming immigration bill in France (Chrisafis 2023) gives states increased power to remove citizenship from citizens for various crimes, and indeed in the UK we have seen various examples of this taking place in recent years, most notably in the cases of Shamima Begum; and Abdul Aziz, Adil Khan, and Qari Abdul Rauf, convicted as part of the so-called ‘Pakistani grooming gang’ in Rochdale and currently awaiting deportation. Regardless of the severity of their crimes, the responses by the state are demonstrative of an ascendent perception of ‘citizenship as a ‘privilege’’ (Bhattacharyya et al 2021, 123-125), conditional on conformity to a particular subjectivity in a way that produces and maintains a hierarchy between ‘natives’ and a foreign ‘Other’. As we shall see, this has a long history.


Counterinsurgency and the Freedom to Mobilise

‘I want my rage to elicit love and more love. I want people to stop asking if I love this country. No. Ask if it loves me.’ 

Noor Hindi

The conditionality of inclusion into the nation represents not only differentiated mobilities, but also a differentiated freedom to mobilise. This falls into a tradition of counterinsurgency developed under colonial rule, through which entire groupings of people are rendered suspect, criminal, and deportable on the grounds of their race, religion, or perceived political ideas and beliefs. Through the expansive surveillance of Muslim populations in counter-terror practices, the violent suppression of Black and racial justice organising, and the rising use of these technologies against pro-Palestine activists and organisations, states such as Britain and Germany have utilised criminalisation, citizenship deprivation and deportation to discipline and supress ‘subversive’ activities and groups in a modern form of population control.

The case of Rizwaan Sabir, an academic arrested under counter-terrorism powers while studying at the University of Nottingham, presents a compelling example of this in action. Like 49% of those arrested under terrorism charges between 9/11 and March 2021 – over 2,400 people, disproportionately Black and Brown – Sabir was released without charge (Sabir 2022, ch.9). His recounting of the multiple interrogations, police searches, and border stops illustrate the profiling and constant policing of his ‘belonging’, while the content of such interrogations is particularly illuminating:

“I was interrogated on whether I had attended any political protests as a student, and, in particular, the demonstrations in London against the publication of offensive cartoons of the Prophet Muhammed … I was also questioned about a satirical pamphlet called ‘Picnic at Guantanamo’ that I had purchased from Camden market in London in 2006, pop music CDs, posters on my wall of Dr. Martin Luther King, and a novelty t-shirt gifted to me by a Lebanese course-mate which read ‘Don’t panic, I’m Islamic’ on the front of it.”

(Sabir 2022, ch.7)

Sabir, like others, connects his experience of counterterror policing and surveillance to long history of counterinsurgency tactics and anthropological intelligence-gathering developed under colonial rule (Sabir 2022 ch.23; Manzoor-Khan 2022, 55-56; Balani 2023, 119). We witness a similar logic applied, with an illuminating illustration of the flexibility of race, in the experience of Irish women in Britain articulated by Mary Lennon of the Irish Women’s Group at the Bringing it All Back Home conference. After recognising the relative ‘invisibility’ of Irish women’s position as ‘migrants’ or non-natives, Lennon describes the impact of early counter-terror legislation: ‘if I assert myself, assert my Irishness, assert the right to support Irish struggles, Irish political issues, then I can be harassed under the Prevention of Terrorism Act’ (in James 1985, 74). The ability to ‘assimilate’ or ‘integrate’ is made contingent on silence in the face of the crimes of the coloniser. Anyone who raises their voice is made suspect.

Ali traces the specific targeting of Muslims in this framework back to at least the 1857 Uprising in India, identifying the historic roots of British perspectives of a ‘Muslim conspiracy’ against imperial power, arguing that modern practices like Prevent continue this ascription of ‘collective responsibility … codifying the racial alterity of Muslims and Islam’ (Ali 2023, 42-44). The concept of collective responsibility is essential to understanding the colonial logics at play here, made abundantly clear in the constant calls for Muslims, Palestinians, and Arabs to ‘condemn’ the actions of Hamas, ‘often used as a racialized qualifier to determine whether your opinion and position should be accepted’ in order to justify opposition to Israel’s killing of thousands of Palestinians, and the complicity of states like Britain, Germany and the US (Fernandez and Tufail, 2023). Palestinian-American journalist Hebh Jamal, based in Berlin, argues these calls, made by the German President and Interior Minister, represent ‘loyalty tests’ predicated on a view of Muslims and Arabs as ‘naturally suspect’ (Jamal, 2023). Germany is a particularly terrifying case study of this, with over 800 raids against Palestinians, community spaces and religious centres since October 7th (Jamal, 2023) and at least one activist reportedly receiving deportation orders (Valeske, 2023). Indeed, the linking of Palestinian activism to the border is  overt, whether through the UK’s then-Immigration Minister Robert Jenrick arguing that the mass protests in support of Palestine exemplified ‘mass migration not working’ (Energy, 2023), or through efforts in Germany to tie German citizenship to support for Israel’s right to exist (New Arab Staff, 2023).  When it comes to the state’s interests and those of its allies, the distrusted loyalty of those always-already perceived as ‘Other’ becomes an opportunity for their exclusion from basic civil and political rights, and their expulsion from the nation.

Fundamentally, these practices represent a clear continuity of the dehumanising logics at the heart of citizenship described above: by casting citizenship as a privilege, those who are perceived as outside of ‘National-Native’ personhood are thus also excluded from basic human rights. In looking at the persecution of Black radicals in the McCarthy era US, Burden-Stelly identifies how ‘the trifecta of foreignness, Blackness, and radicalism came to be understood as mutually constituting forms of subversion and sedition against which extreme forms of violence and exclusion were imposed’ with the clear aim of neutralising anti-imperial critique and mobilisation (Burden-Stelly, 2017, 342-343). Similarly, in the 1970s, Black radical women in Britain were acutely aware of the intentions behind changes to citizenship laws: both to encourage people to leave, and to undermine and weaken anti-racist struggle (The Brixton Black Women Group, 2023, 88). While the practice of citizenship deprivation in Britain has thus far been wielded largely against individuals (albeit affecting large parts of the population), examples targeting Muslims in Assam, India, and the Rohingya in Myanmar demonstrate the capacity and will of ‘postcolonial’ states to take the violent ethnonationalist logics of citizenship to the extreme (Walia, 2021, 190-191). Israel, too, is a model case in the weaponisation of status as a mode of population control; these tactics are developed in the Palestinian ‘laboratory’ and subsequently shared with Israel’s allies in what Halper calls ‘the global Israelization of borders and the global Palestinianization of migrants and the poor’ (Halper, 2024). The suppression of pro-Palestinian protest by states like Britain and Germany illuminated above, then, comes not only from the support of an allied foreign power, but investment in the logics and development of the tools of state power – namely, citizenship. The connection to Israel’s ongoing ethnic cleansing of Gaza is not incidental: the differentiation between peoples through citizenship is but one enactment of the colonial project of dehumanisation, domination, and annihilation. 

Conclusion

‘the challenge that we face … really deals with ending our invisibility, with breaking down our isolation, and with reclaiming what’s ours.’

Margaret Prescod

Beyond the simple exclusion of citizens and non-citizens, then, we see state power deployed then in a disciplinary function, suppressing the rights and freedoms of entire ‘suspect’ populations through an expanding field of criminality and deportability, producing ‘monolithic normative notions of national identity’ tied to ethnonationalism, whiteness, capitalism, and silent acquiescence to colonialist and imperialist foreign policy. The right to mobilise, then, is a key battlefield in which the state’s differentiation between those who ‘belong’ and those ‘out of place’ is waged. Through counterinsurgency and an ever-expanding field of ‘suspicion’ against those perceived as ‘out of place’, the state wields the tools of citizenship and status to harass, detain, deport and deprive ‘Othered’ peoples of core rights.

It is essential we situate this once again with the global context of ongoing dispossession and genocide perpetrated through the logics of colonialism and capital. The refusal by the West to recognise the humanity of Fanon’s ‘wretched of the Earth’ is the only way the slaughter of tens of thousands of Palestinians in a matter of months in Gaza is possible; that the ongoing dispossession, displacement, and extermination of peoples across the globe has been possible. The logic of terra nullius continues to drive the states that first used it to justify colonial conquest beginning centuries ago. It is the logic of the Nakba and of settler-colonialism. It is the logic that allows for extraction for profit at the expense of Indigenous life, and ultimately all life unprotected by wealth. And it is increasingly enacted in domestic policies that categorise and dehumanise those within the borders of these states. As states increasingly seek to expand the powers of citizenship deprivation, it is evident that the answer to the violent practices of ethnonationalism and the border is not simply to extend citizenship to a wider group of people, but instead to interrogate and undermine the colonial logics of citizenship: the notion that it is only citizens who deserve rights and access to services and social life. It is only by challenging this concept of entitlement that we can overcome the restrictive categories of ‘natives’, ‘migrants’, and ‘citizens’, and fully make space for the human and beyond.

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Bibliography

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