The right to return

A young British teenager from Bethnal Green in London was groomed to join Isis in Syria. Now, the same teenager, Shamima Begum, has said that she wants to return to Britain to lead a normal life again. The cases of Begum and Hoda Muthana from Alabama, US, have been moved into the centre of the debate about citizenship in the West. Both the US and UK have responded to the requests of the two women to return to their homelands by revoking their citizenship. Both women travelled to Syria to join Isis around five years ago and have now declared their wish to return. British Home Minister Sajid Javed has publicly stated that Begum has no right to return. Javed has declared that Begum should return to Bangladesh, where her parents are from, but the question of ‘returning’ to Bangladesh is a non-starter. She has never lived in Bangladesh and has little ties to the country other than her parents. Bangladesh, for its part, has refused to grant Begum citizenship.

There are many contractions within the debate in the UK and US. US President Donald Trump has asked Europe to take back any citizen who joined Isis, but has refused the same right to any US citizens who did so. There is little doubt in the fact that the response from both states has been shameful to say the least. The right to citizenship cannot be revoked with such ease – despite the fact that the state retains a right to prosecute anyone who joined Isis. To start with, both girls were in their teenage years when they joined Isis, which raises the question of grooming and how much agency these girls had when they went to Syria. But there are also broader questions about the racial dimension of whose citizenship is revoked and why. The point is less to defend the decisions these girls made, and more to say that the mistakes people make are not enough to end their right to citizenship. In revoking their citizenships, the US and UK governments are admitting that there is something fundamentally rotten in their claims of having pluralistic notions of identity. There is a need to question the kind of exclusionary ideas of citizenship that are becoming dominant in the West.