This talk examines the legal making and unmaking of citizenship in Iraq, focusing on the mass denaturalization and deportation of Iraqi Jews in 1950–51 and of Iraqis of Iranian origin in the early 1980s. Since the formation of the modern Iraqi state under British rule in 1921, ruling elites have mobilized practices of denaturalization and expulsion to curb political opposition. Under both monarchical and republican rule, Iraqi politicians routinely deployed the rhetoric of national security threats, treason, and foreignness to uproot citizens deemed politically undesirable. Citizenship laws in modern Iraq have thus served to enforce commitment to the state’s political order and normative values, while eliminating dissent through charges of betrayal of the homeland. Citizenship in Iraq, this talk argues, has functioned as a privilege closely tied to loyalty to the state rather than as an unconditional right. Amid the global rise of nativism, right-wing nationalism, and authoritarianism, this book offers a timely examination of how citizenship can be weaponized to silence opposition and produce precarity through denaturalization.