Please note: the in-person event is only open to current students, staff, and faculty. Otherwise, please register to attend the virtual lecture.

Recent Work on Race and Ethnicity in Contemporary Politics - The political science department is pleased and excited to announce a lecture series on "Recent Work on Race and Ethnicity in Contemporary Politics." The series will feature scholars pursuing research at the very cutting edge in political science.  Three lectures have been scheduled for this Fall, all of which will be on Zoom. We hope to have additional speakers in the Spring, with a format to be determined.  We warmly encourage you to attend any or all of the lectures in this series.

Hana Nasser - "Islam and the Return of Banishment"

In recent years, several democratic states have had to address the issue of returning “foreign fighters” who migrated to Iraq and Syria to join the Islamic State and have since sought to return following the organization’s defeat. Many western democratic states have responded to returning foreign fighters by revoking their citizenship, thereby preventing their return, and in some instances, rendering them stateless persons. Political theorists have written about the normative
dimensions of the state’s use of revoking citizenship as a punishment for joining a foreign terrorist organization. Many of these theorists argue that the revocation of citizenship is a contemporary form of the archaic punishment of banishment, which completely severs the tie between a citizen and her state, and due to its permanent quality, deviates from more humane forms of punishment that aim at the reform and reintegration of an offender into society.

Nasser's research asks what these recent cases of citizenship revocation reveal about the democratic state’s continued investment in citizenship as an affective and legal category. She will discuss why Muslim citizens, in particular, have disproportionately been subject to citizenship revocation, and why Islamic-oriented forms of political violence have been met with this particular punishment. One case that illuminates the racialized and gendered dimensions of the revocation of citizenship as a punishment is the case of western women who joined the Islamic State (dubbed “ISIS brides,” or “jihadi brides” by the media) and have had their citizenships revoked. She argues that analyzing the case of the “ISIS brides” reveals the need to approach the punishment of the revocation of citizenship from an intersectional perspective, whereby gender and Islam’s racialized status in western societies coincide in the democratic state’s determination of the normative subject of western citizenship.

Nasser is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Politics at the University of Virginia. Her research interests are in continental political theory and critical race and gender theory. She is interested in the place of Islam in public political life in western democratic states and political theories of punishment. Her dissertation, "Statelessness and the Return of Banishment" examines the gendered and racial dimensions of the rise of global statelessness. She was the assistant editor of the journal, Political Theory from 2020-2021.