REVIEW
What does citizenship renunciation express?
Rebecca Buxton (University of Bristol)
Political philosophers often assume that more citizenship is better than less. Or at least, in response to problems of exclusion, we often propose the extension of citizenship as a potential solution. This seems especially true in long-standing debates on immigration, including those on social membership (Carens 2010; Carens 2013), gratitude towards migrant workers (Gerver 2022), and asylum (Price 2009; Owen 2020). The extension of citizenship in these cases is often taken to express something important about the individual and/or their relationship to the political community in question. For Carens, legal citizenship helps to express that someone ought to be recognised in their status as a social member. For Gerver, the extension of citizenship helps existing citizens to express their gratitude to those who have provided essential services to the state. For Price and Owen, citizenship for refugees expresses something important about how we should evaluate states that persecute their own citizens. So, the expressive function of citizenship, while not always blatant, underlies many of our moral positions in these debates.[1]
One of Lior Erez’s central contributions in his paper is to argue that we should also pay attention to the expressive function of citizenship renunciation. The expressive argument plays a clear role in Erez’s view that people ought to be able to renounce their citizenship without having to emigrate. Specifically, they should be allowed to do so because the rejection of political membership allows them to express dissent in a targeted way. Erez claims that “by renouncing citizenship, the individual removes themselves from the political community and thus rejects the rights and duties that are linked to membership specifically” (p. 751). Erez also argues that these expressive claims go beyond those that can be properly captured in democratic accounts. For instance, Erez rejects Bauböck’s criticism that individuals who wish to express dissent can simply do so through democratic processes or through renunciation after emigration (Bauböck 1994, p.90). Erez instead argues that renunciation without emigration allows individuals to express dissent, without incurring extreme costs, while maintaining forms of social membership within the state. This is because their disagreement is supposedly with political rights and duties that go along with legal citizenship, rather than their membership in the social community.
I am broadly sympathetic to Erez’s position. I have defended a similar account, arguing that individuals should be permitted to make themselves voluntarily stateless (Buxton forthcoming). However, here I want to put some friendly pressure on the explicit expressive function of renunciation and what role it plays in the argument. In doing so, I want to ask two questions. First, how should we think about the many reasons that people might have for renouncing their citizenship. Second, what does this plurality of reasons imply for the argument that Erez has made. I conclude by suggesting that relying too heavily on the expressive function of renunciation might imply that states only have a pro tanto duty to respect renunciation claims insofar as they express dissent. If we want our argument to go further than this, then we may have to decouple our arguments for renunciation from expression altogether.
In building an account of the expressive function of citizenship renunciation, Erez demonstrates that this form of exit has (previously unnoticed) special political qualities. As he mentions, others have also challenged Albert Hirschman’s (1970) distinction between exit and voice, claiming that the act of leaving can often be a clear form of political critique (Kirkpatrick 2017). Erez’s claim is that this political critique is also present in forms of renunciation, even when they are decoupled from physically leaving the territory of the state. That is, renunciation allows citizens to do something – express dissent about their political status in a community – without having to physically exit. But how should we understand this claim about expression?
The first option is to say that citizenship renunciation always has this character. That is, whenever renunciation is undertaken, that action expresses dissent. This option is implausible for the simple reason that many people renounce their citizenship all the time for totally non-dissent-based reasons.[2] Some do it to avoid taxes, to make it easier to marry their spouse, or simply to ease their bureaucratic burden. Some people even express regret that they have to renounce their citizenship (BBC News 2013). It seems likely that these kinds of cases vastly outweigh those where the individual renounces their citizenship in order to explicitly object to their political and legal status. One might reply here that even if the individual does not intend or feel any genuine dissent, they nevertheless do dissent through their act of renunciation. But then the question is why we would choose to use the language of “expression” here at all? Whose dissent is this expressive of exactly? So, the idea that citizenship renunciation is necessarily expressive is a non-starter.
A better version of the argument is therefore to say that citizenship renunciation has the potential to express dissent. This more minimal view seems correct insofar as many people do in fact sometimes use their moments of renunciation to broadcast objections to political membership. Recently, for example, many Russians have renounced their legal citizenship in order to express their objections to the invasion of Ukraine (Radchenko 2026). The potential to express dissent is therefore a central feature of renunciation, since it allows us to reject our legal membership specifically. The link to legitimacy becomes important here in understanding the role of dissent in Erez’s argument. Very roughly, it goes something like this: in order to be legitimate, political communities (states, in this case) should allow people to express dissent. One way to express dissent is through citizenship renunciation. Therefore, states have reasons to permit citizenship renunciation (without imposing extreme costs, such as requiring emigration). You might worry that this point about expression is potentially trivial – surely lots of things could be mechanisms for dissent, so what is meant to be special about this case? Because of this, an immediate and intuitive response will be the one given by Bauböck (1994). Individuals can express dissent in many ways, especially in liberal democracies, so why should states have a duty to protect every possible act that might lead to an expression of dissent? Erez’s move here, as we’ve already seen, is to claim that dissent expressed through renunciation is of some special character: it enables us to target the dissent directly at our political status in a community.
One potential worry might be that, because of this argument, the actual target of expression matters more than we might originally think, and that this seems to vary depending on the case. There are many possible targets of dissent expressed through renunciation. For instance, in some examples, the target of dissent seems to be explicitly about acts carried out in my name: individuals renounce their citizenship because their own state has committed some act of atrocity, invasion, or war, in which they want no part. Erez explicitly discusses these cases, relying on the work of Avia Pasternack on theories of collective responsibility (2021). The dissent here is therefore aimed at the individual’s co-authorship in some political decision or regime. For example, one individual renouncing their citizenship from the US stated that they “do not want to be a citizen of a dictatorship” (Williams 2026). In other cases, however, the dissent also seems to be aimed at something more amorphous, such as the institution of legal citizenship itself. Michael Gogulski’s renunciation looks something like this – although he originally abandoned his American citizenship after the US invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, he has also explicitly stated that he hoped to begin a mass movement of people choosing to live without citizenship (Gogulski 2009; GlobalPost 2011). His complaint is therefore not only about co-authorship but seems to also be concerned with the fact of involuntary citizenship in a world of states. Historic examples of citizenship refusal, again, seem aimed in another direction – for instance, some renounce their citizenship because they object to histories of forced inclusion. For instance, Tendayi Bloom discusses the Haudenosaunee Nationals Lacrosse team, who often attempt to travel on different passports and play under their own flag, objecting to their forced inclusion in American citizenship (Bloom 2017).
What this shows is that, even when renunciation does express dissent, it often does so in many different directions. How much does this actually matter? The first question is whether states have a duty to respect renunciation claims (without requiring emigration) when they do not express dissent. The second question is whether the legitimacy argument only applies to cases of renunciation that express dissent aimed at the “appropriate” target: is dissent of any kind enough, or do we need dissent of a specific form?
In response to this kind of concern, we might be able to say that (legitimate) states shouldn’t be in the business of deciding which dissent-expressing renunciation claims to respect and which not to. For instance, free speech and public forms of protest are protected, despite the fact that they are not always direct expressions of dissent. We also might be worried about states deciding which dissent is “appropriate” (although, of course, they do this all the time). We may have good prudential and political reasons to not consider which instances of renunciation target the status of legal citizenship in a community itself. Therefore, states should respect claims to citizenship renunciation insofar as they could express consent, and we do not need to ask further questions about whether they do.
A lingering worry, with which I’ll conclude, is that tying our argument too closely to the expressive character of citizenship renunciation may not go far enough to establish more than a weaker pro tanto duty. Perhaps states need not respect the renunciation claims of people who simply are ambivalent about their membership in a particular political community, people who want to avoid certain duties and rights, but perhaps do not “dissent” in the expressive way that this argument seems to require. Is it not enough to recognise that legal citizenship in a political community is not something that we should be forced to live with forever, if we want to do and be otherwise. Relying on an argument from expression, then, may not get us away from the political naturalism of the current regimes of citizenship.
[1] Voting is another area where expressionhas become increasingly salient in the academic debate (Hamlin and Jennings 2011)
[2] Erez notes this on p. 751: ““While some forms of exit are politically neutral —for example, moving to a different city to be closer to family or emigrating in pursuit of a career opportunity —recent work on the expressive and discursive elements of exit correctly identifies the political expressive value in at least some acts of exit”.