Citizenship has long been studied with a focus on immigration, as scholars have examined its multiple meanings and traditions mainly by addressing the question of who is allowed to join a political community. In Revoking Citizenship, Ben Herzog radically shifts this focus by turning attention to the exclusionary practice of expatriation. Perhaps one of the reasons that expatriation has often been neglected in studies of citizenship is the tendency to associate it with despotic and totalitarian regimes such as Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia. But Herzog reminds us that expatriation has long been a standard practice in many democratic states. His nuanced historical account illuminates the legal, political, social, and symbolic meanings of expatriation in the United States from the colonial era to the more recent debates during the War on Terror, including the well-known story of Yaser Esam Hamdi, and highlights expatriation as by no means an archaic remnant of a bygone era.

Why was expatriation introduced, and why do democratic states maintain this practice? The brief answer lies in the “national world order,” according to Herzog (p. 4). Multiple allegiances, exemplified by dual citizenship, challenge the hegemonic principle of nationality, and expatriation is instituted as a solution to this problem. More specifically, this practice has to be understood in relation to the distinctive characteristics of modern citizenship introduced by the French and American Revolutions. Modern citizenship, Herzog argues, represents “a shift from membership being perceived as a biological condition to membership as a social construction” (p. 29). Biological attributes do not altogether disappear, but what emerges with modern revolutions is the quite novel idea that citizenship can be acquired and renounced on the basis of individual choice. Modern understanding of citizenship also has a dark side, however: Once it becomes possible to imagine that citizenship could be detached from the assumption of allegiance to one’s birthplace, then the state can also “demand the reverse” and assume “the power to revoke citizenship from persons who did not deserve…to be members of the polity any more” (p. 42).

In the American case, modern conception of citizenship emerges as a result of the break with the British notion of perpetual allegiance, as Herzog underscores in Chapter 2. A voluntaristic understanding of citizenship can be seen, for example, in the introduction of the oath of allegiance in 1795. But that oath also represents the anxieties about “divided national loyalty” (p. 30). If the contractual understanding of citizenship breaks with the essentialist tradition of unchanging loyalty, it also operates according to a national logic that considers multiple allegiances to be a problem. In addition, he argues, it would be wrong to think of the American transition from the essentialist view of citizenship to a contractual one as a linear process; more precisely, the American system represents the superimposition of one view on the other (p. 33), interweaving liberal, republican, and ascriptive or ethnic approaches to citizenship (pp. 22, 52).

The dark side of the shift to voluntary allegiance as the basis of membership comes into full view in Chapter 3, as Herzog examines various legislative initiatives related to repatriation in the United States since the early nineteenth century. One of the most troubling cases is the act of July 1, 1944, which allowed the renunciation of citizenship within the U.S. territory. Under the chimera of voluntary renunciation, 5,589 American citizens of Japanese descent were stripped of citizenship and interned in camps (p. 46). This act perfectly illustrates the author’s argument that the contractual understanding of citizenship continued to coexist with the essentialist one in the United States, as individual choice was invoked along with such criteria as race in delineating the boundaries of membership (p. 48).

Revoking Citizenship is to be commended not only for turning attention to the much neglected topic of expatriation but also for the way it approaches this topic. Herzog adopts a sociological perspective, instead of a legalistic one, in order to explain the social contexts and symbolic meanings of expatriation. Accordingly, he examines not only the laws that were put in effect but also the legal initiatives that failed. Take, for example, Patriot Act II, which was drafted by the George W. Bush Administration in order to expatriate any citizen affiliated with a group designated as a “terrorist organization.” This proposed legislation did not reach Congress, but it deserves attention as a document demonstrating that expatriation continues to be viewed as a legitimate form of punishment for treason (p. 115), despite the Supreme Court ruling that it is unconstitutional to revoke citizenship as a punishment (p. 81). In addition to situating expatriation in a broader political and social context, Herzog examines a wide range of primary sources to demonstrate how this practice has been shaped over the years by the actions of various actors at domestic and international levels. For this purpose, he analyzes changing international norms regulating nationality and expatriation (Chapter 4), different interpretive frameworks adopted by the U.S. consular offices in settling questions related to national allegiance (Chapter 5), the Supreme Court rulings that have significantly limited the U.S. government’s power to revoke citizenship (Chapter 6), and the decisions of the U.S. Board of Appellate Review in contested cases of expatriation since the 1980s (Chapter 7).

One of the book’s key findings is that the U.S. practice of expatriation undergoes a crucial change starting with the late 1950s. Herzog’s analysis offers insights into the Supreme Court rulings that placed significant constraints on the government, but it leaves more to be said about the broader domestic and international factors that are at play. In Trop v. Dulles (1958), the Court ruled that it was unconstitutional for the government to revoke citizenship as a punishment (p. 81), and in Afroyim v. Rusk (1967) and Vance v. Terrazas (1980), it further established that the loss of citizenship should be based on an individual’s voluntary renunciation (p. 82). These decisions eventually led to changes in legislation, even though the Congress delayed the process significantly (p. 87). But why did the judicial branch set these constraints on the sovereign power to revoke citizenship at this particular moment in time? Herzog locates the answer to this question primarily in “the ‘agenda of rights’ promoted by the Warren Court” and emphasizes “the commitment of justices in the 1960s and 1970s…to a tolerant society” (p. 81). But this answer is not entirely satisfactory, given that the Court does not act in a vacuum, isolated from the broader political and social context. Particularly important in this regard are the changes at the international level, which are discussed in Chapter 4. As Herzog notes, prior to World War II, forced expatriation was deemed to be a legitimate state practice in efforts to deal with dual citizenship, which was perceived as a threat to the national order (p. 57). After World War II, the international community instead began to see statelessness as a problem, forbidding expatriation in cases where it leads to statelessness (p. 66). While Herzog does discuss these international developments after World War II, he does not state whether they have had any impact on the ways that expatriation is viewed and practiced in the United States.

Addressing this question might have also allowed the author to engage more directly with the literature asserting that the rise of human rights norms radically transforms sovereignty and citizenship. As can be seen in arguments about “postnational membership” (Yasemin Soysal, Limits of Citizenship, 1994) or “the decline of citizenship” (David Jacobson, Rights Across Borders, 1996), some scholars have argued that the universalistic discourse of human rights shifts the basis of entitlement to rights from citizenship to personhood, allowing noncitizens to exercise many of the rights formerly associated with citizenship. Herzog does not directly address these claims, but his analysis suggests that they are highly questionable: Forced expatriation is still perceived as a legitimate state practice as long as it does not lead to statelessness (pp. 57, 68), and “truly cosmopolitan citizenship, which grants rights to all people regardless of nationality, religion, residence, and political belief, does not exist” (p. 131). Although the recent tendency to accept multiple allegiances comes close to a “post-national ideal” (p. 132), dual citizenship is far from being “universally perceived as a positive status” (p. 68), and the War on Terror underscores “how fragile and temporary” this recent trend can be (p. 112). Given that Herzog’s account has so much to offer in response to the argument that the rise of human rights has led to a radical reconfiguration, if not the decline, of citizenship and sovereignty, one expects him to engage with this scholarly debate more directly.

Finally, some of the theorists Herzog invokes sit somewhat uneasily with his historical account. One example of this tension can be seen in his turn to Carl Schmitt to discuss the legislative initiatives related to revocation of citizenship in the United States. According to Herzog, the introduction of such initiatives, especially during military conflict, indicates that even a democracy regulates and secures national allegiance by invoking a state of exception and creating an enemy (p. 54). Schmitt’s position suggests, however, that the sovereign power to decide the exception cannot be checked and regulated by legal norms. It would be difficult to adopt that position given Herzog’s argument that the sovereign practice of revoking citizenship has been significantly constrained since the 1950s, especially with the rulings of the Supreme Court. A similar tension can be seen in Herzog’s turn to structuralist theorists, such as Louis Althusser and Pierre Bourdieu, to argue that expatriation is a necessary consequence of “a global ideology” of national order (p. 133) or the “game” of sovereignty (p. 139). Within such a structuralist view, it would be hard to account for the variations across states; as Herzog’s comparative analysis of the United States and Canada in Chapter 9 highlights, a state’s attitude toward dual citizenship can significantly change depending on its involvement in military conflict (p. 125). In addition, a structuralist perspective would have difficulty in explaining how the meanings of sovereignty and citizenship can change over time as a result of multiple factors and how that change can affect repatriation policies—a point that is vividly illustrated by the author’s in-depth analysis of repatriation.

None of these remarks should take away from the valuable contribution that Herzog makes to the contemporary debates on citizenship. His compelling account of expatriation shifts our attention in the right direction, demonstrating why and how citizenship remains “the right to have rights,” to use Hannah Arendt’s famous phrase, despite various domestic and international changes that took place since the time she wrote about statelessness. Revoking Citizenship is a powerful reminder that it might be too hasty to announce the end of sovereignty or the decline of citizenship.