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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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

Private actors play an increasing role in mediating the relationship between States and noncitizens and even in creating or perpetuating exclusions associated with noncitizenship. This paper offers a way to analyse the forms of engagement of the for-profit private sector in migration control and asks what it means for how noncitizenship is constructed. It presents the private sector as acting like a buffer, altering whether and how individuals may engage with a State constructing what noncitizenship means within a State’s territory, and removing so-constructed individuals from a relationship with that State. It shows how this may occur directly or indirectly, explicitly or implicitly. The paper addresses two main concerns: the impact on the State-noncitizen relationship and whether there are some areas of the relationship between the State and the noncitizen that should not be so-delegated. It argues that privatised migration control raises problems for standard justifications of migration control and noncitizenship construction. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Over the last few decades, only a few studies have assessed denationalisation as a way of terminating 'obsolescent' citizenship resulting from the long-term emigration of an individual. This mode of loss of citizenship seems prima facie more legitimate than citizenship revocation as a means of punishment, as it only represents the legal recognition of the disappearance of a genuine link between an individual and a state. This paper explores the legal status of this mechanism (both from international law and national legislation) and differentiates three models (corrective, preventive, and extensive). From a normative perspective, reviewing three democratic theories of citizenship, this paper claims that the most persuasive justification for this mode of loss is the 'all subjected persons' principle. The loss of citizenship of permanent expatriates thereby becomes part of a democratic theory linking habitual residence with possession and conservation of citizenship, with due respect for human rights principles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces a materialist approach to Isin’s concept of ‘acts of citizenship’ to call for an attention to the lively and agential materials that mediate citizenship claims. It describes two ways in which materialism helps progress conceptualisations of citizenship. Firstly, it demonstrates the ways in which a materialist viewpoint forces a reconsideration of ‘acts of citizenship’ as undertaken by heterogeneous collectives, rather than them being the sole responsibility of human actors. Secondly, it suggests that, because acts of citizenship arise out of socio-material entanglements, they may exceed the apparent intentions of human subjects. This paper argues that materials are more than bystanders in claims to citizenship; they actively mediate and facilitate encounters through which political claims are made. This argument is developed through a detailed empirical study of the materials permitted to circulate from Immigration Removal Centres during a community exchange project organised by the charity Music in Detention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to analyze a particular form of noncitizenship – arising from legal long-term temporary migration – that is increasingly significant to the contemporary Australian context and to understand some of its consequences. It argues that traditional pathways of permanent settlement and full citizenship are being disrupted by new temporary migration schemes that create ‘middling’ noncitizen subjects who experience ‘patchwork’ rights and statuses across complex and diverse migration pathways. Through a close analysis of policy narratives and discourses, as well as of the existing literature on the social conditions and emerging solidarities of these noncitizens, the paper shows the various ways that noncitizenship is depoliticized and citizenship contractualized in Australia. These entwined processes of depoliticization and contractualization have intimate effects on the lives of noncitizens, and also limit and constrain the emerging solidarities that seek to challenge their exclusion. The analysis has a number of implications for the ongoing study of contemporary transformations in citizenship in other ‘immigrant democracies’ globally. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper, we analyze online discussion threads related to national belonging in Finland, Denmark, and France. These discussions are all related to immigration and the definition of 'legitimate' citizens. Our approach is empirical: the goal is to show how in-groups and out-groups are construed linguistically and discursively in the data and how the interactants negotiate membership categories and express their opinions regarding them. The most important in-group in the datasets consists of the nationals born in the country, whereas the out-group par excellence is formed by Muslims. The data show how the boundaries of national communities are performatively constructed through the everyday discourse of online fora, which constitute an important arena of societal debate today. This discourse draws its force from the reiteration of stereotypical generalizations and the power attached to the written word in a communication environment enabling an efficient dissemination of ideological discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent literature on international migration focuses on the benefits it confers on migrants in the form of better opportunities and living conditions, as well as on households receiving remittance. Although legal migrants in OECD countries often enjoy more rights than they would at home, this paper also looks at some of the negative aspects for sending countries. The paper uses two cases, the Philippines and Morocco, countries that have elaborated large-scale and successful policies to facilitate the export of labor and the flow of remittances. Despite decades of massive migration abroad, Morocco still has surprisingly poor social indicators, whereas the Philippines, despite much higher social indicators, has significant levels of poverty. Despite the long-term use of this development tool, migration, while opening up opportunities for people who leave home, maybe less positive for those who remain behind. Citing the views of migration experts as well as local voices, this paper examines some downsides of migration, including its use as a safety valve for discontent that may actually delay demands for needed domestic reforms that would broaden social rights at home. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues for a line of inquiry in the intersection between migration studies and STS work around the notion of material politics in alternative spaces. Drawing on multisited ethnographic inputs, I describe arrangements of cooperation coexisting with post-conflict reparation in Colombia and governmental humanitarianism in Greece. I follow material practices transforming objects into arrangements of remembrance and collective support and address the orders enacted by these practices as alternative infrastructures challenging infrastructures of migration control. The notion of alternative infrastructures offers the possibility to epistemically explore an overlooked angle by citizenship studies and STS; it engages with the objects and relations embedded in the materiality of everyday life and its politics beyond the boundaries of instituted forms of citizenship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Information and communication technology held promise for quite a while as a potential instrument for instigating new rhetoric in public discourse, and a would-be generator of social change. This development has been particularly desired in the area of mobility and border control. In this paper, I further my analysis of counter-security technologies used by illegalised migrants, and explore its potential impact on how we conceptualise and engage with irregular migration. I look at the use of information and communication technology (such as smartphones and social media) in developing and adopting counter-accounts around migration that can assist in desecuritisation of the issue, and rehumanisation of border crossers. Ultimately, I argue, counter-security technologies could be instrumental in altering narratives pertinent to people on the move, and their transformation from illegalised non-citizens to (unhyphenated) noncitizens. As such, they are defined by the relationship with the state, in which their human rights and agency will be upheld. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article recounts the story of sanctuary city organizing in Ottawa, Canada to explore the politics and potential of a transformative approach to sanctuary rooted in anti-prison activism and abolitionist feminist thought. More specifically, we have adapted the abolitionist framework of reformist reform and non-reformist reform and applied it to sanctuary city organizing. Analysis of the Ottawa case draws on research with frontline service providers and migrant justice organizers, as well as our own organizing experiences, observations, and adaptive practices as sanctuary city campaigners. The paper also elaborates on the forms of solidarity and citizenship that have emerged or have the potential to emerge in the context of a non-state centric vision of sanctuary that prioritizes grassroots transformative practices over municipal policy and that do not bolster or legitimize the state's capacity to deport, punish, and exclude. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conceptualising citizenship as an act rather than a status enables us to rethink the familiarity of both ‘who’ can be a citizen and the type of ‘practices’ that can be understood as citizenship. This paper focuses on unfamiliar practices of citizenship per se by exploring the liminal site from which intergenerational migrant youth resist the taken-for-granted space of citizenship through a turn towards vernacular music and language. It considers how citizenship is resisted here through the unfamiliar act of turning away from either identifying or, failing/refusing to identify with the nation-state. It explores the effect of this move in challenging narrow national linguistic and ethnic ideologies through the development of non-standard language practice and cross-cutting musical styles. It argues that citizenship is enacted in this move by creating a spaceinvernacular music and language for expressions of hybrid political identity and belonging. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The arrival of migrants on Italian coasts following the so-called Arab Spring in 2011 has led to a multiplication of housing struggles. These struggles are widespread across the country and focus on the occupation of abandoned buildings and their transformation into collective housing spaces to provide an alternative to the formal reception system. This article will focus on the housing struggles in Rome, as the place with the highest number of occupations and the longest tradition of campaigns for the right to housing of migrants in the country. These struggles are the outcome of the encounter of recently arrived migrants with local solidarity movements and build on existing occupation movements and housing struggles. The article explores how the mobilizations over the right to housing intersect with issues such as the social appropriation of urban commons, the regeneration from below of unused areas, freedom of movement, and the contestation of Italian government policies on the relocation of migrants and refugees. The paper argues that housing struggles not only appropriate and regenerate urban commons, but also challenge the reception governance of migration and the policies of border control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After years of frenetic cross-border movement, in 2014, a mother and daughter live in post-Soviet Georgia as practically stateless noncitizens. Recognizing the advantages of citizenship, they commit their limited resources to obtaining citizenship documents. Through an analysis of their attempts to make citizenship claims and build stable lives, this paper argues that the contemporary Georgian citizenship regime fosters a relationship that further destabilizes the lives of already vulnerable non-citizens. It does so by drawing them in with the promise of citizenship – only to deny them. Yet, Georgian citizenship law is neither uniquely malicious nor indifferent; its form of ‘inclusive exclusion’ is an inherent feature of the reigning paradigm of global citizenship. In this context, far from being passive subjects, non-citizens facing consistent official refusals and seemingly flagrant obfuscation actively attempt to both maintain their relationship with the state and transform it in their favor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The proliferation of more restrictive border controls governing global mobility provides important sites of crystallization through which differentiated and stratified rights to movement are produced, negotiated, and reimagined. One such form, the detention of migrants, is often understood through a logic of exception as the exclusion of unwanted migrants from the borders of the political community. Critical scholarship on detention informed by an autonomous migration perspective suggests a more nuanced reading of detention as the differential inclusion of migrants through positions of precariousness, transformations of legal statuses and subjectivities, and control over the direction and temporality of migratory flows. Building on this trajectory, this paper argues that the very meaning of the camp also needs to be brought into the analysis of a politics of migration and of control. For spaces of detention are sites of contestation that can be used by migrants (and those in solidarity with them) as resources to navigate border controls, reimagine political community and subjectivities and through which migrants engage in practices of citizenship. Reflecting on the destruction of the migrant camps in and around Calais, the paper examines three different images of the camp space known as 'the jungle' and draws attention to camp spaces as social and political spaces, in which the struggles to define them are an integral part of what is at stake in the struggle between a politics of control and a politics of migration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper attempts to place the Canadian security certificate program in critical context. The program is a mechanism of arbitrary detention targeted to non-citizens the state has certified as 'threats' to national security. As a mechanism of arbitrary detention the program fully locates Canadian policies inside of, and not in some manner external to, the worst abuses and 'exceptional practices' associated with the 'global war on terror'. To place this program in critical context, the author draws upon the notion of 'exception'. Although the security certificate program does invoke an exceptional practice in the terms made legible in recent discussions in critical security studies, it also points to ways in which critical discussions of 'exception' might be deepened and complicated. To this end, the paper put forwards the notion of the 'legal complex' to highlight the mundane and often contested ways in which the exception is invoked to certify which racialized bodies might be governed as political citizens and which will be governed as 'bare life'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Taiwan holds the Asian record for the proportion of families that involve so-called 'foreign brides'. Marriage migration has brought close to half a million immigrant spouses into the country over the past decades. Most of these women come from Mainland China, Vietnam, Indonesia and the Philippines. This paper discusses how the Taiwanese state and society have actively pursued the integration of immigrant spouses since 2002, with a set of policies that acknowledge the massive migration of 'foreign brides' and the impact of this phenomenon on society. It argues that the attempt to integrate new immigrants is fraught with a discourse that serves to further stigmatize these women, discriminate against them, and, therefore, create an 'Other' that is used to erect the ideology of nation-building in Taiwan. The paper provides a critical analysis of policies, academic discourse and NGOs fundraising strategies to show how these institutions reinforce the idea that immigrant spouses are problematic and, therefore, need to be 'Taiwanized'. This results in a system of differential legal and social citizenship in which immigrant spouses are at the bottom of the social hierarchy in Taiwanese society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on a recently published study on xenophobia in Southern Africa to discuss the hierarchies and inequalities that underpin citizenship. Paradoxically, national citizenship and its emphasis on large-scale, assimilationist and bounded belonging are facing their greatest challenge from their inherent contradictions and closures, and from an upsurge in rights claims and the politics of recognition and representation by small-scale communities claiming autochthony at a historical juncture where the rhetoric highlights flexible mobility, postmodern flux and discontinuity. In Africa as elsewhere, accelerated mobility and increased uncertainty are generating mounting tensions fuelled by autonomy-seeking difference. Such ever decreasing circles of inclusion demonstrate that no amount of questioning by immigrants immersed in the reality of flexible mobility seems adequate to de-essentialize the growing global fixation with an “authentic” place called home. Thus trapped in cosmopolitan spaces in a context where states and their hierarchy of “privileged” citizens believe in the coercive illusion of fixed and bounded locations, immigrants, diasporas, ethnic minorities and others who straddle borders are bound to feel like travellers in permanent transit. This calls for scholarship, politics and policies informed by historical immigration patterns and their benefits for recipient communities. The paper argues in favour of greater scholarly and political attention on the success stories of forging new relationships of understanding between citizens and subjects that are suggestive of new, more flexible, negotiated, cosmopolitan and popular forms of citizenship, with the emphasis on inclusion, conviviality and the celebration of difference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using evidence from early twentieth century St. Louis as an illustrative case, this paper examines the impact of restrictive immigration policies on organizational activity by and for foreign- born persons. A wide array of ethnic churches, nationalist societies, singing clubs and foreign language newspapers flourished in the city during the first decades of the 1900s. The particularities of St. Louis politics aided the longevity of such groups. Despite radical policy change, however, the persistence of these organizations helped preserve many distinctive characteristics of immigrant groups and fostered their ability to act collectively in the political sphere. The historical interpretation presented suggests that citizenship practices giving priority to liberalization of voting may not he the most obvious or effective strategy for immigrant political empowerment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper attends to the relationships and spatialities through which immigration detention centers, though isolating and constraining spaces, are shaped by detainees. I approach the problematic of detainee resistance and agency through both Critical Citizenship Studies and feminist relational frameworks. I do so through a case study of one particular rupture – the 2014 hunger strikes at the Northwest Detention Center. My analysis of the 2014 hunger strikes at the NWDC directs me to conceptualize detainee activism as a process of political subjectivization, though one that is fraught with physical and political risk to both detainees and the order of sovereignty and citizenship. This process is undergirded by and productive of a series of interpersonal and political relations that mediate detainee actions and statements, and constitute them as a rupture in the order of sovereignty and citizenship. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

To further advance the literature which contests the shift from national to post-national citizenship, the aim of this paper is to compare the experiences of two groups of migrants to reveal how national immigration policies remain influential and determine the employment and living conditions of migrants. Reporting evidence from Italy on the different experiences of non-European Union (Tunisian) and European Union (Romanian) migrants employed as seasonal workers in the agricultural sector in Sicily, the finding is that the degree of exploitation they witness in their working conditions is shaped by their citizenship entitlements. The outcome is that it is revealed that (European Union) citizenship status, rather than formal employment, provides greater belonging and security to economic migrants. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Domestic welfare reform and the management of international migration in Britain have been described by David Cameron as ‘two sides of the same coin’. Heightened conditions and sanctions for the benefit-dependent domestic population, both in and out of work, are being harnessed as a means of promoting labour market change and reducing demand for low-skilled migrants – often EU workers, whose own access to benefit is being curtailed. Arguments about the post-national expansion of rights and associated cosmopolitan debate implicitly measure migrants rights against a normative model of citizenship as the yardstick of full social inclusion, but with little attention to how far citizenship itself falls short of this promise. Taking Britain as a case study, this paper considers how the concept of civic stratification can further advance analysis of the link between domestic welfare, migration and human rights in a context of intensifying controls for both migrants and citizens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Citizenship does not equal belonging. In this paper, we investigate how the disjunction between the ‘imagined community’ and the formal citizenry impacts on citizens’ rights. In particular, we analyse decision-making on the family migration rights of citizens in France, Germany and the Netherlands. Our analysis shows that in these three countries, notwithstanding their different migration and citizenship regimes, the reduction of citizens’ family migration rights is based on the same discursive mechanism: the ‘membership’ of citizens of migrant origin who marry a partner from abroad is called into question. As they are excluded from membership of the imagined community, their entitlement to family migration rights is decreased. Ethnic conceptions of national community, intersecting with gender and class, play a crucial role in shaping the rights attached to citizenship in Europe today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Inspired by autonomy of migration and acts of citizenship literatures as frameworks for understanding migration, the paper analyzes the case of Haitian migrants in Brazil. It focuses, on the one hand, on the relational processes of constructing Haitian migrants as ‘humanitarian immigrants’ and, on the other, on the (im)perceptible tactics of survival and mobility enacted by them upon arrival. We argue that the ‘humanitarian immigrant’ label negotiatesstasisby instantiating an ambivalent and depoliticized subjectivity, modulated in-between the refugee and the immigrant worker. Migrants challenge this framing and the precarity of controls created by it through imperceptible tactical interventions that allow them to provisionally escape the inhospitable conditions of reception at Brazilian borders. In their attempts to resist and redefine the terms of their presence, Haitian migrants have actualized a web of solidarity networks that have fostered alternative understandings of migration management and its relation with citizenship as a site of political struggles. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Existing political theory, particularly which deals with justice and/or rights, has long assumed citizenship as a core concept. Noncitizenship, if it is considered at all, is generally defined merely as the negation or deprivation of citizenship. As such, it is difficult to examine successfully the status of noncitizens, obligations towards them, and the nature of their role in political systems. This article addresses this critical gap by defining the theoretical problem that noncitizenship presents and demonstrating why it is an urgent concern. It surveys the contributions to the special issue for which the article is an introduction, drawing on cross-cutting themes and debates to highlight the importance of theorising noncitizenship due to both the problematic gap that exists in the theoretical literature, and the real world problems created as a result of noncitizenship which are not currently successfully addressed. Finally, the article discusses key future directions for the theorisation of noncitizenship. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper focuses on the experience of one specific group of Taiwanese women married to Chinese Malaysian men to examine the contestational process of bidding for citizenship status in an ethnicized polity. Positioned within a trajectory of transnational linkages between origin and host countries, they achieve success through making use of networking links with co-ethnic Chinese Malaysian women who are well-positioned within government bureaucracy, while forwarding an argument based on familial ideology and the (reproductive) citizenship rights of their Malaysian husbands. As noncitizens, they nevertheless engage in socially contributive ‘acts of citizenship’ that signify their suitability as citizens, nonthreatening to social cohesion. Furthermore, they enhance their strategy by ethnic boundary-making efforts aimed at distancing themselves from People's Republic of China wives who constitute a stereotyped and stigmatized ‘other.’ The discussion makes a contribution to the literature on ethnicity, citizenship, and gender. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In 2004, the first citizenship ceremony was conducted in the London Borough of Brent. These compulsory ceremonies for those who have been granted British citizenship had been proposed in the government white paper and then in the 2002 Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act. They were designed to celebrate the moment of achieving citizenships and were one response to a perceived ‘crisis of citizenship’ in Britain. This study examines the texts of the ‘local welcome’ which is given by a local dignitary at every ceremony as a moment of invention of tradition and of narrating citizenship and thereby narrating the nation-state. The study explores how and what the speeches tell us about understandings of citizenship and its relationship to diversity. It explores how history is also represented within the speeches. Finally, the study interrogates the texts' telling of a multi-cultural story. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Issues about migrant rights and protection are raised in cases of return migration when the country that migrants return to prohibits dual citizenship although the migrant has naturalised elsewhere. This article explores the politics of membership and rights faced by former citizens returning to reside in the society they had left. Returning Mainland Chinese migrants with Canadian citizenship status have to navigate China's dual citizenship restriction and the impacts on their Chinese hukou status that confers residency, employment and social rights. This analysis also keeps in view their relationship with the country in which they have naturalised and left, namely Canada. Migrants shuttling between the two countries face a citizenship dilemma as they have limited rights in China whereas their status as Canadian citizens living abroad simultaneously removes them from some rights provided by the Canadian state. This paper thus introduces new and pressing questions about citizenship in the light of return migration trends. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper, we make three interrelated points. First, while much of the recent literature on new forms of citizenship has focused on the diversity of large cities and new forms of migration, we seek to establish rural sites as important arenas for negotiating citizenship. We stress that far from being homogeneous, villages in their struggles over belonging are affected by long-standing diversity as well as global discourses. Second, we seek to complicate the interpretation of the demise of socialism as a radical break manifested in a diminished role of the state. We show that if the central state retreats, local state actors may gain in importance for local negotiations of citizenship. Third, we explore how the local state actors sometimes use their new powers over social rights to recreate boundaries of belonging through public performances tied to the administration of these rights. We go on to explore the normative basis for these performances and indicate that membership is still based on a contribution of work to the common good. This can best be conceptualised as a shifting continuity rather than a sharp break after 1989. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the relationship between the nation-state and migration through the activities of the International Organization for Migration (IOM). The IOM operates at the intersection of nation-states, international human rights regimes, and neo-liberal governance. We find that the IOM enforces the exclusions of asylum seekers and maintains the central role of nation-states in ordering global flows of migration. In addition, we argue that the IOM acts on behalf of nation-states by using the language of international human rights, as though working in the interests of migrants and refugees. In providing a geographic appraisal of the IOM alongside its image and presentation with an analysis of its activities on voluntary returns, we address the new spaces of 'networked' governance that control and order migratory flows in the interests of nation-states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the institutionalized production of precarious migration status in Canada. Building on recent work on the legal production of illegality and non-dichotomous approaches to migratory status, we review Canadian immigration and refugee policy, and analyze pathways to loss of migratory status and the implications of less than full status for access to social services. In Canada, policies provide various avenues of authorized entry, but some entrants lose work and/or residence authorization and end up with variable forms of less-than-full immigration status. We argue that binary conceptions of migration status (legal/illegal) do not reflect this context, and advocate the use of 'precarious status' to capture variable forms of irregular status and illegality, including documented illegality. We find that elements of Canadian policy routinely generate pathways to multiple forms of precarious status, which is accompanied by precarious access to public services. Our analysis of the production of precarious status in Canada is consistent with approaches that frame citizenship and illegality as historically produced and changeable. Considering variable pathways to and forms of precarious status supports theorizing citizenship and illegality as having blurred rather than bright boundaries. Identifying differences between Canada and the US challenges binary and tripartite models of illegality, and supports conducting contextually specific and comparative work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Among other things, modern citizenship denotes an identity that unites and integrates the members of a state into a collectivity. This paper investigates what kind of citizenship identities contemporary European states display and further in their citizenship and integration campaigns toward immigrants and ethnic minorities. It is argued that citizenship identities are increasingly universalistic, resembling the precepts of 'political liberalism' (Rawls) and 'constitutional patriotism' (Habermas). This is paradoxical because what states have in common can impossibly lend a distinct identity to them, binding people to this and not any state. However, especially in confrontation with Muslim immigrants, liberalism tends to transmute from procedural framework for toleration into a substantive way of life, with strong exclusionary and identity-forging implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper explores the mutual relation between cultural citizenship and national homecoming. Using the case study of Russian-Jewish immigrants in Israel, it refines the theoretical debate over cultural citizenship by showing how homecoming migration shapes the homecomers' bargaining power over the local cultural tenets. In particular, the research examines the ways in which the 'Russian' immigrants negotiate the national ethos of homecoming that constitutes the Israeli civic, discursive field, while dismantling it into its root components: affinity to the place, collective memory, and the warrior ethos. Each of these components constitutes a sphere of action that embodies the tension between Israeliness and Jewishness, nationalism and citizenship, and the personal and the collective. Our main contention is that in the case of homecoming migration, the inextricable affinity between citizenship and nationalism shapes the homecomers' cultural citizenship: on the one hand, it secures their right to participate in the local cultural discourse and avails bargaining power, while on the other hand, it neutralizes the homecomers' subversive voice, and reduces their capacity to undermine the constitutive, national tenets. The analysis is based on immigration stories gathered via in-depth interviews that were conducted with 43 Jewish university students who immigrated to Israel from the former USSR in the beginning of the 1990s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Policies that regulate peoples international movement and their state membership have historically made distinctions based on perceived sexual differences, but little is known about the process by which this has happened. This paper explores how and with what consequences migration and nationality policies have been gendered in two quintessential countries of emigration (Italy and Spain), and in a country of immigrants (Argentina) over a 150-year period. I argue that these migration and nationality policies have reflected the dynamics of the political fields in which they have been crafted. Especially before the Great War, laws and official practices that showed a disproportionate interest in men as soldiers and workers, and in women as mothers and as morally suspect subjects mirrored a dynamic of competition over migrants among these countries. A subsequent harmonization of policies reflected a dynamic of accommodation to the realities of a settled emigrant population and dual nationality. In addition, the administrative mechanisms coupled with these laws have operated differently with respect to men and women. The consequences of these laws and mechanisms have persisted even when the letter of the law has ostensibly become gender neutral. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Faced with increasing and diverse migratory pressures in the post Cold War period, European states have created an increasingly complex system of civic stratifications with differential access to civil, economic and social rights depending on mode of entry, residence and employment. Now at the beginning of the twenty-first century, expansion and contraction of rights have occurred within a managerialist approach which, though recognising the need for immigration, applies an economic and political calculus not only to labour migration but also to forms of migration more closely aligned to normative principles and human rights, such as family formation and reunification and asylum. At the same time, states are demanding affirmation of belonging and loyalty, leading to greater emphasis on obligations in the practice of citizenship. The first part of the paper traces the evolution of a managerialist regime and its consequences for the reconfiguration of spaces of citizenship. The second section examines the development of new contracts of settlement and the management of diversity as the state reasserts its national identity and sovereignty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rise of the nation-state has meant a disempowerment of cities as autonomous polities. This paper argues that urban citizenship should be freed from constraints imposed by national and state-centered conceptions of political community. The focus of the argument is on constitutional politics that would strengthen local self-government by redefining boundaries, membership and rights at the level of municipal polities. Reforms along these lines would strive to reunite cities with their peripheries in common jurisdictions; to mitigate the political impact of residential segregation through representation of urban districts in citywide decision-making bodies; to challenge national monopolies in immigration, trade and foreign policy; to establish a formal status of local citizenship that is based on residence and disconnected from nationality; and would allow for multiple local citizenship and voting rights within and across national borders. The conclusion suggests that an urban citizenship that has been emancipated from imperatives of national sovereignty and homogeneity may become a homebase for cosmopolitan democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent advances in citizenship and migration studies have demonstrated the need to explore noncitizens' social, political and legal relationships to the state in their own right. Such a rethinking inevitably requires analysing how both 'citizenship' and 'the state' are enacted and performed in the negotiation of substantive rights. This special issue follows an unexplored path by scrutinizing these interactions between 'citizenship' and 'stateness' in the domain of procedural law, procedural safeguards, and perceptions of procedural justice among a variety of actors. The contributions explore empirically how procedural rules are invoked, altered, disregarded, or reinvented in different sites of interaction, ranging from asylum determination and adjudication to immigration and municipal registration offices. This interactionist approach not only recasts procedural rules as an integral part of citizenship struggles, thereby shedding light on the co-constitution of state and noncitizenship, but also stresses the importance of nuanced analyses of the nexus between procedural and substantive rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In migration law, being informed about legal and administrative procedures constitutes an essential procedural safeguard. Yet, in practice, the transparency of legal practices is often structurally undermined, resulting in the curtailment of procedural safeguards and potentially affecting perceptions of procedural justice. Building on our multi-sited ethnographic research in Germany and Switzerland, we first argue that migrants find it often difficult to anticipate how laws work, contradicting the key procedural law principle of legal certainty. Second, a general trend towards acceleration in migration administration allows limited time for information to reach migrants on the ground, leaving them uninformed about legal procedures. Third, migration law is implemented in an atmosphere of suspicion, which has a negative impact on trust between migrants and state officials – and on transparency. We thus demonstrate how procedural safeguards become empty and routinised, aggravating the structural violence at the heart of the distinction between citizens and non-citizens in interactions with the state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This Special Issue analyses how forced migrants' and non-citizens' kinning and de-kinning practices and their struggles of 'doing family' constitute navigations of citizenship. Forced migrants and non-citizens need to manoeuvre an intersecting net of different bureaucratic, political and legal, but also kin-related social and cultural regimes. In their encounters with state authorities, bureaucrats, and humanitarian workers, and through the material cultures these engender, forced migrants and non-citizens are marked and categorised – often with wide-ranging consequences for themselves and their significant others. This Special Issue traces how legal and bureaucratic inscriptions derive from, but also shape forced migrants' and non-citizens' familial status and intimate ties to fictive, legal or consanguineal kin. Centring on migration and displacement to and in Europe and the Middle East, we combine analytical debates from anthropology, gender, migration and citizenship studies. Collectively, this Special Issue suggests that the nation-state and its migration regime are experienced in relational ways, and impact on migrants' ability to care for and be in relation with significant others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As two of the major countries that received Syrians during the exodus led by the civil war, Turkey and Germany have responded to this wave of migration with different asylum and migration management schemes. These responses have created a significant disparity between the family constellations of Syrian refugees in these countries and have produced different outcomes at the intersections of familial care arrangements and citizenship statuses. This article foregrounds kinship as a system of relatedness founded on gendered care practices, and the 'kin-contract' as the patriarchal scaffolding of familial entitlements and obligations in the lives of Syrian migrants. Based on ethnographic research in Istanbul and narrative research in Berlin and Leipzig, it compares the effects of the migration and citizenship regimes of Turkey and Germany on the experience and consequences of this 'kin-contract' in refugees' lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In The Birthright Lottery, I explored how birthright access to citizenship operates as a distributor (or denier) of opportunity on a global scale. Today, 97 percent of the global population gains access to citizenship solely by virtue of where or to whom they are born. This article shifts the gaze from the automatic transmission of citizenship (which I call the initial allocation), to deciphering the code, or underlying logic, that governs the secondary allocation: the process of naturalization. Counter to predictions of waning sovereignty, tremendous investment is placed on regulating mobility, migration, and access to membership. I identify three core sorting mechanisms that produce overt and covert inequalities in the acquisition of citizenship, which I call the trinity of the territorial, the cultural, and the economic. These intersecting yet analytically distinct dimensions allow governments to develop sophisticated ways to 'filter' admission of different populations, placing a heavy burden on those seeking it. The discussion lays bare the mistaken assumption that we live in a world wherein mobility is purely chosen and easily available—irrespective of race, gender, class, power, and legal regulation. It further suggests ways of reinvigorating the political imagination for rewriting the rules governing access to membership. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anticolonial and Black feminist scholars and artists have made a convincing case that political and social legibility for racially marked peoples requires active and multi-sensory reiteration. To presence what has been effaced or distorted, images, numbers, and texts must be redacted, annotated, rescaled, reframed, relocated, and repurposed. In dialogue with this work, this piece discusses the vernacular of the diasporic art made in English hospices with Black and Brown migrants at the end of their lives. I suggest that such outsider art makes and rehearses migrant belonging in two interrelated ways: by creating temporary niches for rest, recovery, and pleasure; and by bringing into appearance the quotidian, heterogenous times of Black and Brown diasporic belonging that are out of sync with the rights and timelines of formal citizenship. The critical possibilities that attunement to rest and pleasure can precipitate in citizenship studies is an underlying theme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Critiques of 'fantasy citizenship' include calls to migrantize the citizen and denationalize citizenship and migration studies. In response, this essay proposes 'precarious legal status trajectories (PLSTs) as method', with a focus on the work of legal status. This approach captures changes in sociolegal status trajectories, including illegalization, and builds a 'thicker' approach to trajectories. The work of status refers to effort, time, money, and other resources devoted to being present in a jurisdiction, and/or gain access to services and protections. The approach also considers work that does not produce changes and is not counted, and interactions with other actors. This contributes to understanding how precarious legal status trajectories are assembled and contribute to inequalities in citizenship and dynamics of differential inclusion. It migrantizes the citizen in a context where the share of citizens who were precarious noncitizens continues to rise, and when methodological nationalism occludes PLSTs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article seeks to consider the recent popular protests by the indignant in light of an ongoing history of paperless immigration. By taking Spain as a case in point, I shall explore the emergence of a common ground of dispossession and discontent between citizens devoid of political and economic assurances and immigrants who are non-citizens. I shall analyse the ways in which, in both cases, the presence of bodies of the disenfranchised in public space and the physical occupation of the latter reinvents the public sphere through bodily performance. If the paperless were precursors of the indignant, then today they are joined by a substantial economic underclass of subjects deprived of the privileges of citizenship through the failures of the prevailing economic system. Interestingly, the latter have incorporated the former's struggle for rights and recognition into their claims for justice and socioeconomic reform. The means for achieving these ends have, in both cases, been through physical presence in public and especially urban spaces. In this way, the bodies of the disenfranchised weave their way through and against the mainstream, thereby ensuring that marginality remains not on geosocial peripheries but rather as a visible feature of the everyday run. The fundamentally non-violent nature both of recent protests and the non-violent movements of non-citizens coalesce to reinvent the public sphere in terms of a democratic praxis that is performative in its appropriation and refiguring of civic belonging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the burgeoning scholarship on marriage migration and citizenship, extant studies have tended to approach citizenship as an individual-centred concept linked to the nation-state, thus fading the family domain into the background. Focusing on cross-border marriages within Asia, this special issue points to the importance of going beyond the state-individual nexus to conceptualise the family as a strategic site where citizenship is mediated, negotiated and experienced. In this Introduction, we draw attention to the gendered mode of familial citizenship and explicate how it operates locally and transnationally to limit the rights and agency of marriage migrants. We then illustrate how the link between marriage migration and citizenship is mediated through the family as a significant site of negotiation and contestation, and as an important lens for understanding the intergenerationality of citizenship. Collectively, this special issue calls for a rethinking of citizenship from an individual-centred proposition to a family-level concept. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contributes to the scholarship on marriage migration and citizenship by drawing attention to an under-studied group of single marriage migrant mothers who are widowed, divorced, or separated from their citizen-husbands. It examines the ways in which nation-states regulate the dissolution of cross-border marriages and allocation of citizenship rights to single marriage migrant mothers. Drawing on the experiences of 25 mainland Chinese single marriage migrant mothers, this article unravels the dynamic process of citizenship negotiation between top-down state hegemony and single marriage migrant mothers' bottom-up resistance to the exclusionary immigration system in Hong Kong by claiming maternal citizenship through state discretion. As the article illuminates how discretion has been used as a strategic mechanism by both the state and single marriage migrant mothers to negotiate the boundaries and substance of citizenship, it offers insights into how the family becomes a critical site where citizenship is experienced, negotiated, and contested. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]