‘How can you appeal something you don’t know about?’ : Enforced ignorance within UK citizenship deprivation cases involving ‘ISIS-associated’ individuals

Abbas, Madeline-Sophie (2025) ‘How can you appeal something you don’t know about?’ : Enforced ignorance within UK citizenship deprivation cases involving ‘ISIS-associated’ individuals. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies. ISSN 1369-183X

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Abstract

Drawing on empirical insights from NGOs working on statelessness affecting ‘ISIS-associated’ individuals, I examine how UK legislative changes following the introduction of the Nationality and Borders Act 2022 rework terms of (non)knowledge production, enabling citizenship deprivation orders to be made without notice. I advance the concept ‘enforced ignorance’ to capture legalised epistemic injustices facing targeted individuals, whereby ignorance of deprivation orders prevents them from appealing decisions. Enforced ignorance functions through ignorance, secrecy, silencing and uncertainty, comprising relational racialised epistemic practices that undermine rights and accountability. These dynamic and unstable circuits of (non)knowledge involve spatio-temporal-affective control over material-discursive sites of knowledge production. Convergence of racialised citizenship and security measures legitimise deprivation against Muslims as threatening others that can be made stateless without proving citizenship access elsewhere.