ABSTRACT
Introduction This chapter draws upon Anderson, Gibney, and Paoletti’s (2011) contextualization of deportation, citizenship, and the boundaries of belonging. According to these authors, deportation serves to highlight how nation-states “conceptualize both who is a member and who has the right to judge who belongs” (2011, 547). They further define deportation as “an act of membership definition” (2011, 556). Legal vulnerability to deportation means the loss of the right to stay and the severing of the relationship between the state and the individual. Citizenship, then, is a frontier of sorts, determining both belonging and membership. Examining deportation is crucial to understand the legal conception of citizenship and how states draw a dividing line between inclusion and exclusion. In many cases, deportation “encourages contestation over the question of membership” (Anderson et al. 2011, 556).
