The Shamima Begum case: Citizenship Stripping and Belonging in Britain

Event date
23 May 2019
Event time
15:00 - 17:00
Oxford week
Venue
Wharton Room - All Souls College
Speaker(s)
Devyani Prabhat

Dr Prabhat will deliver a talk on Britishness and Belonging based on her book Britishness, Belonging and Citizenship (Policy Press 2018).  She will analyse the cancellation of citizenship of Shamima Begum and present what this case signifies in terms of issues of belonging and substantive citizenship as well as the human rights framework around statelessness. 

The talk will provide an overarching analysis of other instances of citizenship stripping in the UK ( such as Pham and Al Jedda) as well carefully laying out concerns about arbitrariness, discrimination and the threat to equal citizenship. 

Dr Devyani Prabhat is a Reader in Law at the University of Bristol Law School, UK, with legal practice experience in Constitutional law. She holds a LL.M and a PhD from New York University and is an Attorney at Law, New York. She researches and teaches Migration, Citizenship and Nationality from a socio-legal and comparative perspective.

She is an ESRC research grant holder on British Citizenship and the Practice of Nationality laws (2014-2017). Project website: http://www.bristol.ac.uk/law/research/centres-themes/citizenshipandlaw.html. The project focused on the processes of gaining, holding and losing of citizenship and the role of nationality law practice for long term residents or British citizens. She supervises doctoral students researching on citizenship, migration, children's rights, human rights, the legal profession, and sociolegal theory and methods. 

Dr Prabhat's book Unleashing the Force of Law: Legal Mobilization, National Security, Basic Freedoms ( Palgrave Macmillan Socio-legal Studies Series) has won the Birks Prize for Outstanding Legal Scholarship (Society of Legal Scholars ) 2017.

 The book was shortlisted by both the Society of Legal Scholars (2017) and the Socio-Legal Studies Association (2016) for book prize awards.  

 Her latest book on British Citizenship with Policy Press (2018) titled Britishness, Belonging and Citizenship is available open access at 

: http://www.oapen.org/search?identifier=647390

Dr Prabhat works closely with practioners and civil society actors in a number of countries. for e.g. she has just edited a book on British Citizenship (Elgar: forthcoming 2019) which is based on academic-practitioner collaborations in the field of immigration law. 

She is a member of Border Criminologies, Oxford Law Faculty, and serves on the Executive Committee of the UK Socio-Legal Studies Association. 

Found within

Criminology