Citizenship, alienation, and the stripping of citizenship from Mujahidin: A Constitutional Justification

The underlying focus of this thesis is the relationship between citizenship and alienation. Citizenship is not a matter mentioned in the Australian Constitution, although immigration, naturalisation and aliens are powers over which the Parliament of the Commonwealth can legislate. The theoretical foundations of the research, centre on the problematic nature of “belonging”, and its relationship to acts which would justify alienation, or ceasing to belong, in terms of a social covenant, in terms of both its creation and its maintenance. The thesis refers to these acts which would tend to justify the declaration by the Australian government as guardian of the social covenant of Australian citizenry that a person has alienated him/herself to the point that he/she ought no longer be an Australian citizen as “acts of alienation”. This point is developed in later chapters, which assert that the understanding of the social covenant promotes itself as the only framework within which the relationship between citizenship and alienation can be understood. It allows for the recognition of the ways in which a breach of the social covenant can justify a loss of Australian citizenship. The focus of this analysis is on the ways in which allowing oneself to become a threat to the social covenant justifies one’s exclusion there from. This thesis discusses that a cohesive theory of social covenant provides a number of useful tools which enable an examination of the relationship between citizenship and alienation.