ABSTRACT
Citizenship revocation has returned to the political agenda. In recent years, many Western democracies have either legislated or considered legislating citizenship revocation for terrorism offences. This paper analyses how Canada’s short-lived experiment with citizenship revocation was represented in political, media and online discourses. Specifically, it identifies who has been interpreted a presumed candidate(s) of citizenship revocation, and analyses the discursive strategies employed to associate these targets with specific ethnic, national, or religious groups. We find that references to Muslims dominated public discourses on citizenship revocation. The articulation of these references reveals that Muslims were targeted not as individuals but as a category, indirectly branding them as less Canadian, and thereby symbolically un-belonging them from Canadian citizenship.
