Banishment and the pre-history of legitimate expulsion power

ABSTRACT

In a recent work on denationalisation, the legal scholar Audrey Macklin announced that “after decades in exile, banishment is back”. Over the last decade, as new laws allowing individuals to be stripped of citizenship have sprung up across Western states, many others have also analogised denationalization to this hitherto discarded medieval punishment. My aim here is to explain why banishment disappeared from modern societies so as to understand better the character of its contemporary “revival”. A wealth of historical work on practice of banishment has appeared in recent years. But these studies tend to focus on the use of the practice during specific historical periods. Here, I use this diverse scholarship to assemble a unique picture of the development of banishment over the longue durée. I suggest that while banishment proved itself compatible with varied ways of conceptualising citizenship and societal purposes across the ancient, medieval and early modern worlds, the rise of territorial state and nationalised conceptions of membership in the nineteenth century undermined the punishment. Modern denationalisation, I argue, revives banishment but only in a highly modified and constrained form that, paradoxically, denies to the state the formal right to expel its own members as a punishment.

KEYWORDS:

• Banishment
• citizenship
• history
• denationalization
• states

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to many people for helpful advice on this piece over a number of years. I would particularly like to thank, in no specific order, Bridget Anderson, Tom Scott-Smith, Alexander Betts, Rainer Baubock, Rutger Birnie, Guy Goodwin-Gill, Benjamin Gray, Diletta Lauro, Audrey Macklin, and Chimene Bateman. The anonymous reviewers for this journal also provided extremely helpful comments and saved me from several errors.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The closest piece to my own (in English) is an excellent discussion of the history of expulsion power in its many forms by William Walters (2002). Walters’ piece discusses banishment but only as one amongst a range of collective expulsion practices.

2. After WWII, a number of international treaties were signed including the Universal Declaration on Human Rights (1948), the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966), and the Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness (1961), that legally and morally enshrined a degree of protection for citizens against expulsion and reinforce the impermissibility of banishment. I consider these developments in (Gibney, forthcoming).