The University of Sydney Law School

Citizenship and Claims of Belonging in Australian Law and History

What does it mean legally to ‘be’ an Australian?

Analysing what it means, and has meant, legally, to ‘be’ Australian, through exploration of key constitutional cases in which a person’s claim to ‘belong’ was the central issue.

About the project

The issue of belonging is foundational to individual and collective life and is currently in flux. It has never been so frequently and fundamentally legally contested, across disparate areas such as citizens’ mobility rights under COVID-19, the position of Indigenous Australians and the power to unilaterally deprive a person of citizenship.

This project will include original archival research on key constitutional cases in which an individual’s claim to ‘belong’ to Australia was the central issue. It will go behind the decisions and reasoning of the courts, by looking at the court files, other archival records, and records of the contemporary public, parliamentary and governmental reception of the cases. Decisions will be placed historically within associated ideas of each of the case’s eras about Australian society, nationality and nationhood.

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Explore our research themes, projects and partnership opportunities

Our hypotheses

  1. The legal status of citizenship is no mere technicality, but has an emotional or existential core. This is not to deny instrumental or pragmatic considerations on the part of governments and individuals, but to treat citizenship policy and law as overdetermined, with a strong existential aspect.
  2. There is often an imperfect alignment between the formal legal grant and confirmation of citizenship on the one hand and a person’s sense of belonging on the other. Citizenship is a legal status bound up with belonging. Claims to belong have shaped and changed both the law and the ways in which citizenship and the relevant constitutional membership concepts are understood. The changing nature of the legal system’s response to this tension reflects changing notions of Australian nationhood and throws light on what it means to be an Australian today.

The outcomes of this project will include a jointly-authored academic monograph and a jointly-authored work for a wider non-legal, non-academic audience.

Project team


Associate Professor Elisa Aricioni

Professor Helen Irving

Dr Rayner Thwaites