We have seen a flourishing of critical perspective towards liberal citizenship in recent years. The liberal promise of ‘equality for all’ appears to sit all too comfortably alongside regimes of sovereign power, the government of migration and disciplinary techniques which divide and categorise subjects in terms of ‘belonging’. The birth of such a field of investigation has been extremely fruitful in revealing the how (often violent) ‘exclusion’ is ever present in certain practices of citizenship. What I suggest in this paper is that whilst many studies have been pre-occupied with how exclusion works to problematise the ‘non-citizen’, the ‘migrant’, the ‘foreigner’ (often along lines of race/culture) we also need to look at how other ‘exclusions’ take place and interact. I suggest that it may be pertinent to see how tactics of ‘exclusion’ also work on certain types of subjects who possess formal citizenship. This means thinking about how ‘failed’ citizens are also problematised and disciplined under liberal citizenship, in areas such as welfare reform, policing and in naturalisation policy. In doing this, I suggest that we find a more complicated arrangement appearing under advanced liberal government that works to re-code the boundaries of race and culture as the central referents of ‘inclusion’/‘exclusion’. Instead, I suggest that practices of ‘inclusion’/’exclusion’ in liberal states might be better thought of in terms of a government of ‘moral community’, which likewise produces new referents for ‘belonging’.
