Irregular Citizenship Anti/Deportation and Struggles for Political Subjectivity A book proposal by: Peter Nyers Manuscript Details Irregular Citizenship is approximately 78,000 words. The manuscript is complete and available for review. Aims of the Book Irregular Citizenship explores the possibilities and impossibilities of enacting citizenship in the context of deportation and anti-deportation. The book features stories about struggles over removal and return, deportation and repatriation, rescue and abandonment. Utilizing the analytic frame of ‘acts of citizenship’, the book emphasizes that these struggles for rights, recognition, and return are fundamentally struggles over political subjectivity – of citizenship. Deportation has again taken a prominent place within the immigration policies of nation-states. But its significance lies well beyond being an increasingly favored policy option for the managers of migration. Equally important, although less understood, are the social responses to deportation, in particular the growing movements against deportation and detention, and for freedom of movement and the regularization of status. This book brings deportation and anti-deportation together with the aim of understanding the political subjects that emerge in this contested field of governance and control, freedom and struggle. However, rather than focusing on the typical subjects of removal – refugees, the undocumented, and irregular migrants – Irregular Citizenship looks at the ways that citizens get caught up in the deportation apparatus and must struggle to remain in or return to their country of citizenship. The transformation of ‘regular’ citizens into deportable ‘irregular’ citizens involves the removal of the rights, duties, and obligations of citizenship. But unlike unmaking citizenship through official revocation or denationalization, irregular citizenship is commonly achieved through informal, extra-legal, and unofficial means. Citizenship is not revoked so much as rendered unworkable. Irregular Citizenship investigates the contested practices that go into transforming citizens into de facto irregular migrants The theme of contestation is central to the book’s argument. This is because the focus on struggles over citizenship in the context of deportation allows for some new insights about the enactment of political subjectivity. There is a large literature on irregular migration, including important studies of how irregular migrants are engaging in struggles for rights, recognition, and regularization. These studies