Sinners, saints, and racialized scapegoats: (Mis)interpellation and subject positions in the face of citizenship revocation in Norway

Abstract

Policymakers across Europe proclaim that citizenship should be earned and deserved. States have raised the bars for naturalization and lowered the threshold for denaturalization, creating new hierarchies of deservingness. While researchers have studied how prospective citizens navigate these hierarchies, the experiences of to-be-denaturalized individuals have remained nearly untouched. Based on interviews with 28 individuals who had immigrated to Norway from Somalia, Palestine, and various Asian countries and were accused of ‘cheating’ their way to Norwegian citizenship, this article examines how they respond to this accusation and (re)position themselves vis-a-vis the law, the state, and the national collective. Analytically, I use the concept of interpellation, which captures how individuals are transformed into subjects through being named by social institutions. I argue that citizenship revocation functions by calling naturalized citizens to become foreigners through the accusation of cheating. Rather than seeing it as a mechanical process, I highlight how the interviewees actively positioned themselves in it. The analysis distinguishes between three positions: (1) the sinners, who expressed guilt and submitted to the authority of the immigration law; (2) the saints, who admitted to minor wrongdoings but felt mis-interpellated, as they aligned themselves with welfare state virtues; and (3) the racialized scapegoats, predominantly Somali interviewees who refused to accept the premises of the interpellation, situating citizenship revocation within Norway’s history of minority scapegoating and expulsion. The article argues that these subject positions speak to different facets of Norway’s history as well as the hierarchical and racialized contours of citizenship.