‘Enemies of the State’. Curtailing Citizenship Rights and Counterterrorism
Max Weber Lecture by
Lucia Zedner, Professor of Criminal Justice, University of Oxford
Wednesday18 March 2015, 17: 00-19.00
Refectory, Badia Fiesolana
About the speaker:
Lucia Zedner is Professor of Criminal Justice, Law Fellow at Corpus Christi College, Oxford and a Member of the Centre for Criminology, University of Oxford.
She was formerly a student and then Prize Research Fellow at Nuffield College Oxford (1984-89) and a lecturer at the London School of Economics (1989-94). She returned to Oxford in 1994, becoming a Reader in 1999 and Professor in 2005. She has served on the Research College of the Economic and Social Science Research Council (ESRC – 2005-08); on the Advisory Panel of The Leverhulme Trust (2013- present) and the Projects Committee of The British Academy (2013- present). She was elected a Fellow of The British Academy in 2012.
Abstract:
Recent estimates suggest that more than 3,000 Europeans have travelled to Syria to fight for the ‘Islamic State’ (IS). UK Prime Minister, David Cameron, has argued ‘It is not only the full force of the law that these people should face … when they take up arms in this way in another country, they become enemies of the state.’ In accordance with this view, current counterterrorism policy seeks to curb the citizenship and mobility rights of those suspected of involvement in terrorism. Exclusion orders, flight bans, passport seizure, and forcible relocation are defended as essential to national security. For some, citizenship appears no longer as a right but conditional upon conduct or a privilege to be diminished or denied. This paper examines these developments and considers the risks to justice, to human rights, and, not least, to security, when citizenship-stripping is used as a tool of counterterrorism. In so doing, it asks what does the duty of the state to protect its people permit?
Fran Meissner (SPS MW Fellow) chaired the lecture
Rainer Bauboeck (SPS Professor) introduced the speaker
Video of the MW Lecture
Video of the interview of Lucia Zedner by MW Fellow Michael Kozakowski