Book review: Uncertain Citizenship: Life in the Waiting Room by Anne-Marie Fortier

Uncertain Citizenship: Life in the Waiting Room is a timely intervention that examines how citizenship policies and practices are envisioned, acquired and enacted at meso-levels of governance. The premise of this book is concerned with a core paradox: that the governance and design of citizenship is based on uncertainty, whilst its value is reliant on being narrated as an object of stability. It is through the heuristic device of citizenisation that Fortier firstly unpacks such contradicting rationale of precarity and endurance. As a concept that incorporates both regimes of integration and naturalisation, citizenisation renders visible how “the promise of the certainty of citizenship still operates even as it is normalised as uncertain” (p. 6). Uncertain Citizenship thus explores how citizenisation functions institutionally and socially in twenty-first century Britain, capturing the contradictions on which it is both founded and replicated in specific contexts.