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Seemingly mundane bureaucratic papers – such as birth and marriage certificates – are official proof of legal identities and relations to kin, usually issued by the state of origin. For Syrians who have sought asylum in Germany, these documents are necessary during the asylum procedure and beyond, for certain bureaucratic procedures and the recording of crucial life events. Retracing the crafting of these documents in Syria, and their encounter with German bureaucracy, captures the depth of the entanglement between the Syrian and German citizenship regimes, as well as their discrepancies in relation to paperwork and legality. Drawing on ethnographic research with Syrians in Lebanon and in Germany, this article argues that the legal production of legality in Germany can only be achieved through legally ambiguous, if not so-called illegal, practices in Syria. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When parents pursue transnational labour migration, challenges arise around ensuring the social belonging of children, especially ‘gift children’ who are conceived or born abroad as a result of out-of-wedlock relationships or sexual assault. Families we interviewed in Lombok, Indonesia, displayed complex social ingenuity to ensure the gift child’s social belonging. Caregivers described how they address discrimination by manipulating and falsifying family histories in identity documents, including census forms and birth registration. These family strategies drive home the local role of identity documents as a tool to enhance belonging rather than as proof of legal identity. We spotlight the time lag between birth and obtaining an official birth record as a crucial space in creating ‘citizenship from below’ in communities with high out-migration and low birth registration rates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article seeks to promote an integrated approach to the study of citizenship policies, which pays due attention to their potential impact on migrants whose self-recognition are formally delimited by legal definitions. Through a novel approach that makes use of naturalisation processes as an empirical entry point into the narratives of citizenship embraced by Turkish migrants, this article investigates the role of dual citizenship policies in three European countries: Spain, the Netherlands and the UK. The evidence from the sample group displays a process of ‘self-bargaining’ prior to the naturalisation decision, which calls into question the link established between legal and emotional bonds of citizenship. The Dutch example demonstrates how Turkish migrants cope with the ban on dual citizenship by downplaying the identity-conferring role of citizenship status. This leads to a decoupling of legal and emotional aspects of citizenship and thereby to the adoption of a thin sense of citizenship. While Spain represents an in-between case that has a tolerant implementation despite ade jureban, the British example shows how the process of ‘self-bargaining’ can result in the widening of emotional landscape, when dual citizenship is allowed. A thick sense of citizenship is therefore not only preserved but it can also be extended to the citizenship of the country of residence. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper explores the lived experience of citizenship of working-class girls from a marginalised ex-mining town in northern England engaged as community researchers in participatory action research. The research aimed to better understand the relationships within their local community. Qualitative methods were used to examine the girls' experience of the research and its impact on their sense of community, which is discussed using the lens of 'lived citizenship' (Kallio et al. 2020). We conclude that children's experience of participatory research approaches can be understood as subjective or lived citizenship. This contributes to understanding how they perceived their acts of citizenship, particularly in relation to others in their community. Supporting the international literature on subjectivity in citizenship studies and the critical appreciation of intersectionality in in participatory research, this paper demonstrates how such involvement can lead to positive subjective outcomes in groups experiencing marginalisation, such as working-class girls. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing upon empirical research conducted in Patras in 2015, this paper investigates the multiplicity of visible and invisible practices migrants have employed to challenge, negotiate, or evade the pervasive border regime and (attempt to) claim their freedom of settlement and movement. The paper will make two interrelated contributions. Theoretically, it will critically explore the concepts of 'acts of citizenship' and 'imperceptible politics' through the lens of visibility to analyse the nuances and differences between them and reinstate their importance in capturing the vitality of migrants' agency. Empirically, the paper will investigate the interplay of visibility and invisibility both in the development of the European and national border regimes and in the fragmented formation process of a migrant political subjectivity. In capturing and analysing the ever-changing development of migrants' movements and struggles, as well as their multiple ways of being political through visibility and invisibility within, beyond, and after citizenship, the paper contributes to the ongoing dialogue between two broader bodies of work: Critical Citizenship Studies and Autonomy of Migration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last decades, scholars have increasingly called for the 'deterritorialization' of the notion of citizenship. The realities concerning citizenship have changed with new expressions of transnationalism. However, whereas the main body of research has focused on the transnational aspects of citizenship among migrants in the form of their transnational political practices and dual nationalities, their descendants have received far less attention. This paper examines the political practices of Kurdish migrants' descendants in France and Germany and their narratives of identity and citizenship. We employ migrant descendants' political activism as an empirical entry point to gain insight into the meanings they attach to citizenship. The paper draws from two qualitative datasets collected in France (2015–2017) and Germany (2015–2023) with individuals of Kurdish background, who were born to migrant families arriving from Turkey in the 1980s and 1990s. The findings show that national contexts – both in grandparents'/parents' country of departure and the country of arrival – and the transnational, diasporic and even supranational space (EU) shape migrant descendants' political activism, identity construction and consequently resonate in the meanings they attach to citizenship. This study highlights the need to approach migrants' descendants as transnational citizens in their own right. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that the pairings of citizenship and immigration, territory and mobility – pairings often considered distinct to or even opposite of one another – are critically interconnected. These links are particularly visible in the experiences of Chinese-born children of U.S.-born fathers. These children secured jus sanguinis birthright citizenship from their fathers, fathers who secured jus soli birthright citizenship under the Wong Kim Ark decision. They were 'immigrant citizens' who were allowed to immigrate to the United States only because they were U.S. citizens. Wong Kim Ark's children, along with other Chinese Americans under exclusion, upend the assumed teleology of immigration preceding citizenship and the association of citizenship with territorial presence. Although they were targeted by U.S. immigration authorities, Chinese immigrant citizens fought for their right to migrate between China and the United States. In the process, they exposed some of the ways in which presumed distinctions between citizenship and alienage were blurred during Chinese exclusion, as well as the ways in which citizenship is legally constructed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

More than a decade of multi-actor conflict in Syria has resulted in a complex patchwork of legal identity documentation issued by state and non-state actors. This paper considers the legal identity practices pursued by the Kurdish-led Self Administration governing large swathes of territory in the north of the country. Specifically, the paper studies the forms of identity documentation the Self Administration does and does not provide to people present under its control. Beyond this, the paper focuses on how this system coexists with that of the central state, reflective of the Self Administration's broader approach of compromise combined with competition, to operate as a de facto authority respecting the overall sovereignty, yet challenging specific policies, of the central state. Against the backdrop of somewhat contradictory accusations of collaborating with the Syrian government and simultaneously seeking independence from it, the Self Administration has refrained from mimicking the state while expanding its own de facto 'jurisdictional subjecthood'. Practices of legal identity consequently help to elucidate necessary nuance in understanding the relations between the Self Administration and the government in Damascus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Citizenship and the posthuman have not been often theorized together. In this paper, I want to think about their coalition both as a new episode in the efforts of politics for citizenship, including knowledge politics, and as a source of rebalancing power against governmental and corporate interests in citizenship politics. Here, I seek to address two questions: (1) What is posthuman citizenship? (2) What does posthuman citizenship bring to analysis of intersectional, complex, and multi-layered struggles of citizenship? Section I of the article addresses possible conceptual connections between citizenship and posthumanism at the posthuman political system level. Section II concentrates on a posthuman genealogy of citizenship to show why posthuman citizenship is a much-needed ontopolitical praxis. Section III details the main principles of posthuman citizenship with respect to mediation of rights, political agency, and political responsibility. The paper contributes to the understanding of politics of/for citizenship with two concepts: augmented political responsibility and posthuman deeds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the centrality of passports and identification documents (or their lack thereof) in peoples' everyday lives and life chances, particularly in the contexts of forced displacement and protracted conflict. While the production of largely internationally unrecognized passports reasserts the logics of the globally dominant modern nation-state order, it also lays bare the problematic, fragile, and performative qualities of that system. I argue that the bureaucratic processes of document production for wartime migrants reveal the racializing effects of codified legal and ethnic classifications. As such, the production of passports and legal identification documents plays a formative role in the ethno-racial exclusions embedded in statecraft projects. This paper invites readers to consider how passports and identification documents affect multiple aspects of life, including access to work opportunities, mobility, and housing—and how people creatively traverse the confinments of these documents and their bureaucratic categories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Even though an individual's right to legal identity has been internationally codified, in certain instances, the legal identity and associated documents may lack widespread international recognition. This is the case in aspirant (de facto) states such as Abkhazia, South Ossetia and Transnistria. This paper argues that certain legal identities become liminal due to the nonrecognition of the conferring authority, and/or the associated legal identity documents. The recognition of legal identity documents can change based on where a person is located (territorial jurisdiction), the administrative authority issuing the documents, and the authority assessing the legitimacy of the conferred legal identity documents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to explore citizenship practices among racialized youth in a 'priority' neighborhood in Toronto. Based on 16 months of ethnographic research, this paper examines an under-researched element of youth citizenship and belonging; the role of spirituality. Informed by the works of anti-racist feminists and Indigenous scholars, this paper examines how youth draw on spirituality in their daily lives to cope with everyday oppressions. For these youth, spirituality intersects with their art and informs their sense of activism or what they refer to as 'artivism'. This paper argues that spirituality can inform a type of citizenship that questions systemic injustices while simultaneously acknowledging the importance of self-care. It produces a form of inclusionary politics steeped in spiritual practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that settler colonialism structures Indigenous rights in Brazil and shows how Indigenous peoples have also engaged Indigenous rights to interrupt settler colonialism. To this end, it turns to the 20th century (re-)emergence of officially extinct Indigenous peoples in Brazil's Northeast Region and the central role of the toré ritual in this process. While the toré reversed the settler colonial logic of Indigenous elimination and dispossession, the Indigenous (re-)emergences also operated within the possibilities of settler policy. Lingering in the tense gap between citizenship's limits and possibilities under settler colonialism, the article argues that the toré, by mobilizing bodies, land, culture, and memory, underscores the performative aspect of citizenship and the role of embodied practices in decolonization. Stressing the imbrication of the performative, the material, and the political, the paper offers a Brazilian perspective on debates on Indigenous refusal and the politics of recognition, challenging their simplistic dichotomization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper looks to the historical imbrication of racial and caste supremacy with citizenship, drawing attention to the inherent coloniality of citizenship in post-imperial Canada and India. We examine the transition from explicit to insidious, unofficial forms of institutionalized racial/caste supremacy. Explicit forms of supremacy have established and normalized forms of hierarchy that ascribe tiers of citizenship, even after legal guarantees of supremacy have been removed. We seek to examine the coloniality of modern citizenship to (a) better historicize the ongoing colonial violence of citizenship within post-imperial places and (b) penetrate the shield of fragility to help citizens come to terms with their unearned privileges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the issue of heroism as a sufficient condition for the acquisition of citizenship. I define heroism as exceptional, supererogatory, and risky acts of altruism and heroic citizenship as the reward for a heroic action carried out by a non-citizen resident of membership rights. I mobilize in particular the case of Mamoudou Gassama, 'the Spiderman of Paris', who was naturalized by the French President in 2018 after saving a child. While such positive outcomes for people in precarious legal and political situations are valuable, I provide a critical analysis of the ideological scaffolding and political meaning of heroic citizenship, i.e. how it is publicly justified and practiced. I argue that heroic citizenship constitutes a fiat of citizenship that reproduces a problematic picture of citizenship, relying on three ideological tropes: nationalism, sovereigntism, and moralism. Heroic citizenship represents the other side of a broader policy trend that has transformed citizenship into a privilege to earn. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the administrative category 'ungeklärte Staatsangehörigkeit' ('unclear nationality') and its implications for citizenship rights in Germany. An unclear nationality represents a de facto statelessness but does not concede the rights established for de jure stateless people. It impedes naturalization in Germany and complicates access to a travel document and settlement permit. The paper analyses the (re-)production of unclear nationality and traces its effects on the life of a woman born in Germany with an unclear nationality since birth. Her experiences disclose the difficulty of navigating the German bureaucratic system and its discretionary power. Her experiences also reveal how a state of limbo is perpetuated over generations, confining individuals in a territory whose bureaucratic apparatus views them as foreign. Unclear nationality thus functions as a technology of exclusion: by placing the person in a yet-to-be determined nationality, it interpellates them not as subjects of rights but objects of clarification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses how kinship in its intersection with the law shapes female migrants' gendered vulnerabilities, but also their political subjecthood. My ethnographic fieldwork in Athens from 2017–2020 with young adult Syrian women shows that female migrants prefer to remain undocumented in Greece, because so-called 'illegal' smuggling routes remain their best bet for reaching Central/Northern Europe. I read their strategies of 'self-il/legalisation' as 'ambivalent' yet 'generative' political acts. By selectively and simultaneously working with and against the EU's border regime and kin-related legal and socio-cultural structures, acts of self-il/legalisation oppose the infantilisation of women as secondary to male citizens, and of non-citizens as outsider, non-political subjects. I argue that in doing so, female migrants enact an ambiguous political subjecthood that defies classic binaries of the personal/political, citizen/refugee, law/culture and legal/illegal, and also unmask the false claims to rationality, modernity and neutrality upheld in the EUs migration and asylum regime, exposing instead its racialised and heteropatriarchal foundations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The tension between citizenship and democracy is well documented in the literature on citizenship. The paper revisits it through the lens of populism. It engages with the critics and proponents of the phenomenon and it argues that the juxtaposition that they all stage between the people and the citizens does not just intensify the tension between the exclusionary politics of citizenship and democracy's universalising aspirations, but it also threatens to restrict the appeal of citizenship to mainstream liberal theory. The paper concludes by suggesting that the kind of affectivity, which democratic mobilisations draw on, and that one associates with the 'people', is often missing from citizenship practices – and this further undermines the connection between citizenship and democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Understandings of citizenship have increasingly come to include the recognition of family care and reproduction as practices of citizenship and a recognition that migrants who are not citizens nonetheless engage in many practices of citizenship within their host state and rely on their host state for the fulfilment of basic human rights. This paper conceptualizes this intersection of immigration and reproduction as precarious reproductive citizenship, arguing that gaps in entitlements for pregnant precarious status migrants constitute reproductive injustice and present an important challenge for how we understand citizenship and human rights. This conceptualization is illustrated through interviews with women concerning their experiences of pregnancy and new motherhood while having precarious immigration status living in Montreal, Canada. It highlights three employment-related policies: employment discrimination protections, maternity and parental leave, and childcare. In each case, immigration status (directly or indirectly) acts as a barrier to accessing protections and programs meant to support gender equity and overall family thriving. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Finnish-Russian dual citizens are the largest group of multiple citizens in Finland. Building on thematic interviews and drawing on Sara Ahmed's work on cultural politics of emotions, this paper examines how emotions related to Russia and Russianness influence the way young Finnish-Russian dual citizens perceive their status and opportunities in Finland. The findings imply that emotions indeed play a significant role in shaping the way the young dual citizens use their citizenships. Due to the negative emotions related to Russia, many dual citizens tend to conceal or control their Russianness in public spaces. As a result, dual citizens' Russianness is increasingly becoming a private matter, whereas in the public sphere they aim at improving their status by trying to pass or act as Finns. Conceptually, this paper draws attention to the momentary and contextual nature of belonging. Depending on the context, an individual's sense of belonging can rapidly change from feeling at home to feeling out of place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on how immigrant activists interact with the host state in socio-political spheres where they exercise their citizenship. Located in Taiwan's New Southbound Policy (NSP), this paper adopts the concept of 'act of citizenship' to analyse Vietnamese activists' interactions with the NSP. This paper finds that the NSP appropriated immigrant women's motherhood and family relationships in order to boost tourism and facilitate Southeast Asian language acquisition in the short term and to enhance Taiwan's relationship with Southeast Asia in the long run. In response, immigrant activists utilised the NSP to build their own capacity and to realise their acts of empowerment, compassion and contestation in the family and public domains. They not only improved individuals' wellbeing but also made the Taiwanese state accountable for gender bias and inequality. These findings offer a much needed gender perspective into immigrant activists' dialectical relationship with the migration state of Taiwan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the use of the term 'gachul (absconding from home)' in courts and immigration policies to punish the behavior of marriage migrant women who enter South Korea after marriage and then leave their husbands. The study focuses on penalized mobility outside migrants' marital homes, which is interpreted as deviance from the expected family role. By conceptualizing home as a confinable space, the paper discusses migrant women's exclusion from citizenship based on their contribution to the family. The paper draws from cases heard in criminal courts and laws and policies, paying attention to the conflation of criminal, immigration, and family laws and the effect on marriage and family. Notably, it highlights cases of uxoricide, marital rape, and international child abduction. The cases reveal that judicial and executive bodies penalize marriage migrants' departure from home, regardless of the justification for their actions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

India is the largest emigrant origin country in the world. The majority of Indian emigrants work in low-wage employment in the Gulf Cooperation Council countries. This paper contrasts India's policy responses directed at migrants living in the Gulf countries with policies targeted at those in the Global North. India has extended substantive rights and symbolic inclusion to Indian citizens and (descendants of) former citizens residing in the Global North. However, while it established a social protection framework for low-wage emigrants in the Gulf, these emigrants are often unable to access other substantive citizenship rights and are mostly ignored at the symbolic level. Through critical approaches to the study of diasporas and the lens of boundary work, this article analyzes how emigrant origin states (re-)define belonging through differentiated emigration and emigrant policies. It shows that the Indian state links inclusive/exclusive boundaries of (symbolic) national membership, inherent in emigration and emigrant policies, to classifications regarding emigrants' social identities, in this case class and religion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham has been one of the main beneficiaries of the fragmentation of state power in Syria, developing from a transnational jihadist group affiliated to al-Qaʿida to a locally rooted actor and de facto state power. This paper considers how the group has enacted a performance of sovereignty and statehood that has developed over time, and how central legal identity has been to these efforts. It examines how Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham has attempted to perform as the legitimate governing actor using control over identity documentation and also how this performance engenders a relationship between ruler and ruled in Idlib. Each act as an authority reproduces the group as the state power. But in few other areas of governance is the act so explicit, the performance so overt, as in the use of legal identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper harnesses the strengths of the recent affective turn in citizenship studies. It makes three contributions to the literature. First, against proponents and critics of neoliberalism who neglect the reinventions of citizenship under 'neoliberalism', it emphasises the politics of hope advanced by socially excluded people. Second, while sympathetic to the affective turn in citizenship it addresses what it believes to be its key limitations: a neglect of the care people expect from the state and the feelings of solidarity that remain central to citizenship. Third, by reflecting on the experience of neighbourhood in Sao Paulo, the paper challenges the overwhelming focus of the affective citizenship literature on the Global North by drawing on perspectives from a key city in the Global South. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Moving as a French or Dutch citizen to Belgium should be easy, given the freedom of movement of EU citizens. Reality paints a different picture, however. This paper analyses the practices of Belgian municipalities and the Immigration Office as to the registration of EU workers, self-employed, jobseekers and their family members. It is based on a desk study, a survey among a sample of municipalities as well as semi-structured interviews with municipal officials, the Immigration Office and other stakeholders. The paper adopts a legal understanding of 'procedural justice', focusing on dimensions of equal treatment and transparency. It shows that the achievement of procedural justice for EU citizens is impaired by divergent and at times questionable practices by street-level bureaucrats. These practices indicate, among others, that varying levels of 'deservingness' of residence in Belgium can be observed within the category of mobile EU workers. Furthermore, increased digitalization and the use of intermediaries in the registration procedure facilitate and reinforce differential treatments among EU citizens and their family members. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a global climate where refugees are increasingly seen as a threat to national security, the business sector has become a key actor at the forefront of engagement with refugee populations. A pertinent example is the case of Germany. When German chancellor Angela Merkel opened borders for refugees in the summer of 2015, many German companies regarded her move as a welcome way to overcome labour shortages and future demographic bottle-necks. In turn, business leaders became key actors in the development of integration policies. This paper discusses if business sector engagement with refugee integration in Germany through the Wir Zusammen [We Together] initiative has resulted in altered conceptions of citizenship as practiced in everyday encounters. Focusing on business engagement through providing apprenticeships or other work opportunities, the paper demonstrates that the business sector can indeed play an important role in transforming refugee lives more broadly, beyond labour market participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the complex citizenship regime in contemporary Bosnia and Herzegovina, its historical origin and social implications. It argues that the Bosnian citizenship regime, established in Dayton in 1995, actually implies existence of a plurality of regimes and conceptions of citizenship in this country, which frames political outcomes and affects the status of human rights. This paper provides an analysis of the legal structure of Bosnian citizenship, its bifurcated nature and corresponding political effects. It also analyses different visions and conceptions of citizenship and examines their relation to country's ethnic politics. In addition, this paper looks at not only Bosnian citizenship through the prism of post-conflict arrangements, but also regional influences and policies that determine citizenship's various dimensions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the notion of 'citizenship as shared fate' as a potentially inclusive and real-world responsive way of understanding Indigenous citizenship in a non-ideal world. The paper draws on Melissa Williams' work on 'citizenship as shared fate,' and assesses some of the benefits and drawbacks of using this notion to understand citizenship in Indigenous and modern state contexts. In particular, the paper focuses on the challenges that existing non-ideal circumstances – past and enduring injustices and unequal power relations – bring to the understanding of 'citizenship as shared fate', and the normative constraints for realizing such citizenship in our contemporary world. By developing this notion in light of Indigenous claims for justice, the paper proposes three side constraints to the notion of 'citizenship as shared fate,' including its openness to different views of history, the role of history in shaping the future, and acknowledging – and countering – prevailing power relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples. The paper concludes by looking at some of the implications of the reconceptualized notion of 'citizenship as shared fate' for the shaping of Indigenous/non-Indigenous relations in the Nordic/Sápmi context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China has reformed the way it nurtures a generation of citizens for the new era of the Xi administration. School curricula have been reformed and more teachers have been trained to deliver political – ideological education. While the central authorities play a crucial role in forging a vision of the 'ideal' citizen from the top down, the enactment of centrally promulgated policies and curricula is complicated. This study explores a bottom-up view from the perspective of a group of university teachers, the institutional actors who socialise young people into 'ideal' citizens on the ground. Four themes emerge in the informants' narratives: ideological commitment, abilities, developing a global outlook, and the influence of traditional culture. The paper concludes with a discussion of the interplay between socialist, traditional, and neoliberal rationalities in the making of Chinese citizens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper attempts to trace the Hui Muslim minority who has been recently undergoing a dual process in identity transformation. A new ethnic governance highlighted by citizenship over religious rights as well as the state's campaign of Sinicization of Religions has been promoted to create homogeneity. Beyond the long-existing system of minzu, Sinicization and citizenship has become a new double-edged tool in managing ethnic minorities and faith communities. Under the campaign of Sinicization, expressions of Islamic religious practices are endorsed only if they are culturally compatible in Chinese characteristics. While all ethnic groups are preferentially treated and culture differences respected in multi-ethnic China, Muslims like other ethnic minorities are increasingly identified within the common framework of citizenship in which all nationals are citizens with equal standing, de-emphasizing the plurality of interethnic and cultural differences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I present the mobile commons and migrant commoning as the constituent power of a Europe-to-come. The theoretical basis for the proposed conceptualization comes through a well-known dispute around the concept of the 'nomos' that involves Carl Schmitt, on the one hand, and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, on the other. I revisit this argument, and suggest that it expresses a difference between two ways of constituting Europe. The Schmittean line is organized around current policies of enclosures of borders of EUrope. The nomadic line today takes shape in a migrant (auto)nomos that resists enclosures, institutes mobile commons and possibly transgresses the concept of citizenship to the institution of commonship. I draw on contemporary theories of the commons and commoning to develop arguments for a nomadic approach to European belonging. Besides contributing to the debate on mobile commons, the article intervenes in the discussion on the future constitution of Europe in the context of migration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that one useful way to think about the relationship between racism and borders is to say that racism produces hierarchies of (non)citizenship. In the first section, I work these arguments through in relation to my research with the friends of family of deported migrants, examining how witnessing deportation both reaffirms and produces hierarchies of (non)citizenship. These examples offer an invitation to trace and theorise the dynamic relationship between bordering and race-making. I then go on to examine how citizenship is centrally imbricated in race-making at the global scale. There, I historicise citizenship as a global regime for the international management of populations, suggesting that citizenship does similar kinds of work to race under empire. Taken together, these two points raise questions about whether we can and should imbue citizenship with radical and emancipatory potential. Is the articulation and celebration of non-national citizenships a useful framing? I remain cautious, and this paper is intended to underline that caution by approaching the question from one particular vantage point – one in which the theorisation of and struggle against racism is made central. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper examines the developments in citizenship studies over the past twenty-five years through the lens of 'citizenism', understood as a presumed prioritisation of state citizenship as the only form of political relationship between an individual and a state (and perhaps even among individuals) that can be formally recognised. It suggests that while citizenship studies may not be citizenist in nature, the use of the language of citizenship to describe a wide range of political relationships puts those using the core concepts of critical citizenship studies at risk of inadvertent banal citizenism. I start by setting out the language of citizenism as it has been used to date. Writers on the left use it to describe social democratic political movements that function within existing state structures. Underlying the various ways in which citizenism has been used is, I suggest, what can be called 'banal citizenism', which presumes the priority of citizens and of citizenship. I will focus on threads within citizenship studies that seek to trouble this privileging of traditional state citizenship and examine the extent to which they succeed in escaping citizenism. I will conclude that while critical citizenship studies has made a significant contribution to how we think about politics, adjusting the terminology used could make it more powerful. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Asylum-seeking women's liminal citizenship in home countries is a contributing factor to their irregular migration. In this paper, we examine how conditions of gendered citizenship, specifically family violence, exert additional pressures on women to undertake irregular journeys. In examining the narratives of refugee and asylum-seeking women from Iran and Afghanistan, women spoke of multiple instances of family violence in home countries, in addition to the more traditionally understood factors of insecurity associated with irregular migration, such as conflict, torture and war. Using the concept of lived citizenship to examine women's experiences, we contribute to the nexus of knowledge on global mobility, gender and family violence. These findings are important to ensure women who seek asylum have supports and services tailored to them that address these issues within the broader family violence schema in affluent host nations, including within the Australian context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of the paper is to understand the reasons for the spread of fear, the suspension of solidarity, and the securitizing national and local context along the European migratory route. A settlement located on the Hungarian side of the Serbian-Hungarian border, heavily affected by international migration in 2015, is the focus of inquiry. The mayor of the village is a major figure in the Hungarian far-right who mobilized not only the political scene but also various segments of the media to create and legitimize a discourse involving threatened villagers (and more generally, threatened Hungarians and Europeans) and a migrant menace (perceived as non-European, non-white, and non-human). Based on an ethnographic inquiry, the paper reveals the variety of discourses and attitudes which emerged as immediate reactions to people on the move appearing in large numbers in the village. These initial reactions included empathy and a willingness to help which rapidly disappeared. The paper analyses how welcoming acts and voices were silenced and eliminated, and a hegemony of fear was constructed. It contributes to the special issue by showing how fragile solidarity with refugees can be, and how its elimination can occur if social precarity and far-right politics are combined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines so-called verification commissions in Brazil that have to decide whether those who applied for affirmative action vacancies for black candidates 'correctly' declared themselves as such. Analyzing three repertoires through which the commissions take this decision, the paper shows how the subject that is entitled to affirmative action – the cotista (quota candidate) – comes into being in these classification practices. Discussing the tension between the idea of a social gaze – due to which 'everybody' knows who is black in Brazil – and that of a skilled gaze one has to learn in order to work in a verification commission, I show how the latter arises from the attempt to handle the contradictory demands the commissions are facing and how it helps to 'objectivize' the commissions' decisions. By way of conclusion, I point out how my study can contribute to a better understanding of processes in which citizenship rights are granted 'through the body'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper interweaves an ancient conceptualization of movement and mobility with the paradigmatic case of early twentieth-century Chinese migration to the USA in order to explore migrants’ ability to both re-interpret institutional control of movement and generate identities that garner institutional and community acceptance. By not ‘settling’ migrants into the discourse of (undocumented) immigrants, the paper (i) develops a framework for the study of migrants–state interactions that goes beyond claims to citizenship and demands for rights and (ii) explores practices and means through which migrants gain access to restricted territories and maintain presence in otherwise unwelcoming communities. The paper argues that such practices explicate the autonomy of migration: a phenomenon that is constitutive to processes of political transformation and is critical to the study of state sovereignty, citizenship rights, and political agency. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper contributes to the study of cultural citizenship by laying the foundations for a concept of culture regime. Depicting culture as a malleable concept that encompasses both particularistic and universalistic elements, the paper emphasizes the potential of the concept of culture regime to bridge those of citizenship, language and ethnicity regime. While presenting narrow conceptions of culture as ethnic identity as a defensible compromise in the context of comparative empirical research, the paper discusses how the study of culture regimes could integrate broader approaches to culture by incorporating other forms of cultural claims and identities that go beyond ethnic traits. In doing so, the paper aims to promote an inter-disciplinary dialogue on cultural citizenship, arguing that some of the differences in cross-disciplinary approaches to culture owe to methodological rather than ontological considerations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2019, India made the unprecedented move of listing 1.9 million people in its northeast state of Assam as illegal migrants from Bangladesh in a new National Register of Citizens before passing the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, which overtly discriminates against the country's Muslim minority. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork, this paper investigates the reality of precarious citizenship under India's increasingly anti-migrant regime, particularly for Bengali-speaking Muslims. Going beyond the predominant notion that illegal migrants acquire documentary citizenship through fraudulent means after crossing the porous border between India and Bangladesh, this essay reveals a reverse scenario: those living with citizenship rights and in a regular social world are subjected to the gradual process of detection, detention and 'deportability' in India. This paper employs the concept of precarious citizenship to unravel this complex and oscillating world of legality and illegality, citizenship and noncitizenship, and the predicaments of life as a Bengali-speaking Muslim in India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Assam, India, the National Register of Citizens (NRC) population enumeration process excluded about two million people from the final list. The NRC dropouts referred to in this study as 'paused citizens' are locked in a condition that is legally and socially ambiguous, hovering between citizens and stateless. This essay seeks to highlight the experiences of 'paused citizens' who have been thrown into this opaque and paralysing situation as they attempt to manage their precarious status, illustrate the tangled web of citizenship regimes, and the binary distinctions between inclusion and exclusion that are mediated by documents. A closer examination also reveals how the systems of power and control operate and how people trapped in time alternate between feelings of purposeful waiting and senseless stasis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mobile maritime peoples have lived itinerant lifestyles across Southeast Asia for centuries. In times where non-state spaces are diminishing and individual rights depend increasingly on a recognised legal identity, their livelihoods and traditions are affected by state practices surrounding citizenship. Drawing on fieldwork in southern Thailand, this paper explores how the lives of the Moken have been affected by the way state-based legal identity and citizenship regimes are enacted. In doing so, this article presents views held by Moken communities about their life and the challenges they face in accessing Thai citizenship despite legal reforms in the recent years. More than other populations, mobile peoples allow us to see the 'problem of citizenship' and the effects arising from its practice in different localities. Our research highlights the importance of considering the agency and choices of (formerly) mobile peoples in the implementation of state-based citizenship and legal identity regimes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China does not permit dual nationality, meaning migrants in Australia must evaluate the benefits of Chinese versus Australian citizenship. Decisions about competing citizenship statuses are informed not only by this prohibition of dual nationality but also by individuals' classed positions. By comparing the choices of trade skilled migrants from different backgrounds in China, this paper shows that homeland social class is a key factor in decision-making processes, particularly the uniquely Chinese spatial expression of class manifested through the hukou system and the differential local citizenship this entails. An analysis of representative cases illustrates the complexities of evaluating memberships acquired through migration and nested memberships resulting from local citizenship with China. People from different backgrounds and, importantly, different places in China's socio-spatial hierarchy value their Chinese legal status differently. The differential effects, both material and symbolic, of membership in or exclusion from urban centres in China form a critical part of individuals' calculations, over and above the national-level membership within which local hukou citizenship is nested. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper takes up the entwinement of citizenship and the political in the writings of Engin Isin in the context of the Palestinians in Israel. It opens with an invitation to think with an artwork by the Palestinian artist Durar Bacri as a staging of fugitivity through a refusing of that which has been refused. Out of this I pose the question of whether such an act of refusal is political or not. I start by thinking with this artwork to unpack the settler colonial nature of Palestinian citizenship in Israel and how the figure at the centre of the painting is refusing the citizenship that is being refused him. From this I posit that not only is there a refusal of citizenship, but more there is an 'end' or limit to the political itself, and with it the political subject. I conclude with a discussion of a fugitive sociality and its implications for understanding the struggle of Palestinians in Israel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the last two decades, empirical scholars have asserted that citizenship may include memberships in political communities other than the nation-state. This paper is based on fieldwork (2015–2017) on the rights of Internally Displaced Persons in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It provides an empirically grounded analysis of the multiple political communities in which forced migrants take part and how membership in these communities helps them to claim fundamental rights, which the state is unable to provide. We outline various pre-displacement and post-displacement memberships, and show that they have different participation requirements, leading to varying levels of integration of people who are displaced from their communities of origin. The paper provides a methodological contribution to critical approaches to studying citizenship and informal political communities. It also contributes to well-informed policy-making in the humanitarian aid context of Eastern Congo. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Borders are not merely assertions of sovereign territorial demarcations, but indicative of cultural boundaries. This article discusses how the India-Bangladesh Land Boundary Agreement (2015) led to reorganisation of territorial boundaries, whereby the inhabitants had the choice of citizenship between India and Bangladesh that reaffirmed their identity. The subjective differentiation between 'us' and 'them' was negotiated by various cultural elements such as Bangla language; an everyday language symbolizing membership in the constituting communities, kinship and citizenship in the nation. Language was an important attribute that identified them as 'Bengali'/'Bangladeshi' while navigating the trans-territorial national identity. While arguing that the new citizens' construction of 'acts of citizenship' was based on a linguistic identity and everyday languages made claims to citizenship possible, the paper also explores: how does language help negotiate the cultural boundaries of 'us' or 'them' in post Land Border Agreement? How has language (re)shaped identity towards attainment of citizenship? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current moralistic take on adolescent sexuality in Brazil raises the importance of sexual citizenship when examining adolescent fertility policies. Literature on the capacity contract lends a useful lens for understanding the ramifications of the construction of adolescents as sexual citizens. This paper investigates how the conceptualisation of adolescents within the capacity contract may relate to the problematisation of adolescent pregnancy in Brazil. To investigate this, I conduct a Foucauldian discourse analysis of federal level documents. These pertain to adolescent sexual and reproductive health programmes, guidelines and a campaign between 1989 and 2020. To examine the visibility of adolescents and adolescent pregnancy, I conduct a content analysis of health indicators and surveys from health registries from the same period. My evidence shows that adolescents found themselves in contradictory and dynamic positions within the capacity contract. Notably, when adolescents were attributed less agency, they were governed more paternalistically. Their choices and vulnerabilities regarding fertility seemed then more likely to be ignored. I conclude that this way in which adolescents were constructed as sexual citizens may have hindered a holistic policy approach to adolescent pregnancy. This highlights how the capacity contract falls short of protecting those deemed incapable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper assesses the experiences of gay men living and working in rural areas of Ireland and England. Fieldwork conducted in both countries, finds that gay men who live in the rural space share many similar experiences, concerns and worries. While life outside the cities can bring a number of distinct advantages, such as tranquillity, and a more relaxed pact of life, the men also report numerous challenges which include social isolation, powerful hegemonic narratives around rural masculinity, and a pervasive heteronormative culture. The rural context shapes how the men negotiate their sexual identity, and mediates the nature of their sexual citizenship. In assessing the men as sexual citizens, the paper highlights the tendencies of sexual citizenship to promote a de-sexualised, de-politicised, and de-radicalised gay identity; tendencies which are exacerbated by the context of the nonmetropolitan, small town, and rural spaces. The paper concludes that, while the men may be considered, constitutional sexual citizens, with legal citizenship rights, there remains a legacy of stigmatization, which leads to compromised citizenship on a number of levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on newly incorporated citizens' experiences, interviews with numerous state officials, and field observations in the former border enclaves of India inside Bangladesh after their exchange in 2015, I contend that the state of Bangladesh took extraordinary measures to incorporate its new citizens. Such exceptional measures resulted in a category of citizens that cannot be fully grasped by the existing citizenship vocabulary. In this paper I therefore offer the concept of showcase citizens. Showcase citizens represent an exceptionally treated group of citizens who became subjects to special attention from the state in certain spaces at a specific time. The key to our understanding of such 'exceptions' and the unique response from the Bangladesh state, I argue, lies in placing the enclaves within the broader context of post-colonial South Asia, specifically in relation to the imagination of nation and territory, sovereignty, (performative) governance, and state-making. As such, showcase citizens becomes both an analytical tool – which links the imagination of territory, sovereignty, and citizenship in post-colonial South Asia – and a technique of performative governance that combines the formal with the informal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The French Constitution restricts local electoral rights to French nationals and EU citizens. Third country nationals have long been excluded from suffrage as France has maintained a stronghold on nationality and republican values. Academics have called for expansive and liberal citizenships that would allocate political rights to all non-citizen residents, independent of nationality. This paper argues that Brexit and cessation of Britons' electoral rights present a pivotal moment to discuss expansive citizenship and alien suffrage. Taking a bottom-up approach, the paper presents actual experiences of Britons as candidates and councillors in French municipalities. It demonstrates the importance of residency, representation, participation and inclusion, rather than nationality at the local level to underpin claims for expanding electoral rights. These findings foreground an empirical case for further promotion of theoretical ideas that propose expansive citizenship based on effective residency rather than nationality. Consideration is also given to third country nationals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]