'Fortier writes with such sensitivity and perception on the impact of the UK government's regimes of citizenship and naturalization. This book illuminates the precarities and uncertainties of racialized citizenship and raises important questions on the injustices involved in process of determining who is deemed worthy of citizenship.'
>'By forensically examining scenes of uncertainty where non-citizens await becoming citizens, Fortier brilliantly illustrates how governments engage both citizens and non-citizens through insufferable games of conferral, deferral and repeal.'
>'This vital contribution dismantles taken-for-granted understandings about contemporary citizenship to lay bare the inherent uncertainties, insecurities and inequalities at its heart. You'll never look at citizenship the same way again.'
>'In this brilliant book, Fortier examines the uncertainties in which citizenship is enmeshed and their effects on states, would-be citizens and those charged with managing the process of citizenship. These uncertainties condense long histories and shifting political, cultural and emotional pressures, making citizenship carry a formidable burden of desire and anxiety.'
>Uncertainty is central to the governance of citizenship, but in ways that erase, even deny, this uncertainty. This book investigates this uncertainty from the unique vantage point of 'citizenisation' twenty-first-century integration and naturalisation measures that make and unmake citizens and migrants, while indefinitely holding many applicants for citizenship in what Fortier calls the 'waiting room of citizenship'. Fortier's distinctive theory of citizenisation foregrounds how the full achievement of citizenship is a promise that is always deferred: if migrants and citizens are continuously citizenised, so too are they migratised. Citizenisation and migratisation are intimately linked within the structures of racial governmentality that enables the citizenship of racially minoritised citizens to be questioned and that casts them as perpetual migrants.
Scrutinising life in the waiting room enables Fortier to analyse how citizenship takes place, takes time and takes hold in ways that conform, exceed, and confound frames of reference laid out in both citizenisation policies and taken-for-granted understandings of 'the citizen' and 'the migrant'.
