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"The Precarious Lives of Syrians: Migration, Citizenship and Temporary Protection in Turkey" is a book that focuses on the situation of Syrians living under temporary protection in Turkey. The authors argue that temporary protection regulations often place Syrians in greater precarity, without permanent pathways to residency or citizenship. The book is based on extensive ethnographic research and interviews with Syrians, highlighting their experiences and perspectives. It also explores how Syrians actively negotiate and resist their precarious conditions through community initiatives and onward journeys to resettlement elsewhere. The authors emphasize the need for refugee rights and protection to be the starting point for any reforms to the international refugee system. [Extracted from the article]

What are 'acts of desertion', how do they feature in contemporary border struggles, and what might an emphasis on such acts bring to the analysis of the politics of mobility? This article seeks to address these questions in the context of the Sonoran borderzone, which crosses Mexico and the US. It develops an analysis that sheds light on contemporary border struggles in terms that acknowledge both the intensity of security practices as well as the significance of migratory acts, without pre-fixing the relation between the two. The analysis shows how 'acts of desertion' involve differentiated dynamics of abandonment and renouncement, which demand appreciation of the ambiguities of contemporary border struggles. As acts that variously involve a dynamics of refusal, the article argues that acts of desertion challenge the limits of liberal citizenship, without wholly transcending its limitations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What happens to citizenship when the nation and the state are no longer assumed to be the inevitable starting points from which politics is defined? This paper considers how a refusal of the nation as political community and a questioning of the state as guarantor of rights and responsibilities reconfigure our understandings of citizenship. We do this by taking as a metaphor and analytical entry point an art installation developed by artist Tomás Saraceno titled 14 Billions (Working Title). Forming an exaggerated version of a black widow spider's web, this installation offers us a way of engaging politics in relational terms. Inspired by this installation, we ask: how are the categories of citizenship and community troubled or reconfigured when we address sociality and politics from a relational perspective? In which ways does 14 Billions prompt us to address questions of spatiality, power, coexistence, and contestation differently from those accounts of citizenship that remain wedded to the state as a contained geographical unit and to the nation as an imaginary of political community? And finally, how might this web installation suggest an intervention into the broader problematic of 'citizenship without community' that forms the focus of this theme issue? We address these questions by way of an engagement with the 'lines', 'gaps', and 'tension points' presented by 14 Billions and argue that an understanding of citizenship as based upon membership appears inadequate when we address politics through a web. In so doing, we contend that the provocation of citizenship without community presents a challenge that does not simply demand a shift from the nation to the state or the reaffirmation of a rights-bearing subject; rather, this provocation leads us to argue that politics involves more than a search for inclusion and recognition, whilst the web installation offers us a way in to thinking about politics through heterogeneous sites and moments of encounter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In October 2005 200 delegates from twenty-eight countries in Europe gathered in Brussels to take part in an event for sex workers' rights, which involved a three-day conference, the presenta-tion of a Declaration on the Rights of Sex Workers in Europe in the European Parliament, the drafting of a Manifesto, recommendations for policy makers, a party, and a demonstration. The sex workers' mobilisation appears, at first sight, to be an exemplary form of active citizenship. Nevertheless, despite engaging European institutions, being active participants, and making use of the language of rights, we argue that the sex workers' mobilisation challenges the conception of active European Union (EU) citizenship. In particular, we show how sex workers activists question territorially and culturally bounded practices of EU citizenship by enacting mobilities that exceed the instituted forms of free movement and that bring to bear a mode of sociality that is enacted through exchange relations between strangers. Specifically, we suggest that the concept of 'acts of citizenship' is better equipped than juridical or practice-orientated accounts of citizenship to engage a critical analysis of the ways that European citizenship is made and remade by the sex workers. Furthermore, we claim that the case of the sex workers demands attention be paid to the complex ways in which 'mobilisa-tions of mobility' entails the disruption and enactment of European citizenship 'on the ground', rather than a simple extension of European citizenship beyond its existing bounds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article draws attention to the limitations of the UK's integration and cohesion agenda and introduces an alternative analytical approach that focuses on solidarity, mobility and citizenship over cohesion, integration and community. Developing such an approach through analysing the City of Sanctuary network and the Strangers into Citizens campaign, the article has two interrelated objectives. First, it aims to shed critical light on the assumptions regarding community that inform the UK's integration and cohesion agenda, which involves a series of contradictions that exclude asylum seekers and irregular migrants as subjects of integration and cohesion. Second, it aims to offer some reflections on how these assumptions are challenged by the City of Sanctuary network and the Strangers into Citizens campaign, based on the activation of mobile solidarities that cut across established social hierarchies. In so doing, the article suggests that the UK's approach to integration and cohesion is flawed because it overlooks engagements and solidarities in which cultural categories and legal distinctions are extraneous, while at the same time it privileges the collective engagements of established residents over those whose presence may be more fleeting or less definite. In order to demonstrate the inadequacies of such an approach, the article shows how minor acts of citizenship that are mobilised by City of Sanctuary and Strangers into Citizens enact a mobile form of solidarity based on participation through presence. This, the article argues, potentially serves as the grounds for a critical alternative to an approach that assumes that intensified movements and diversities induce hostility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines recent struggles over the mobility of Roma across Europe in terms of the insights that these provide into the limits of European Union (EU) citizenship. Showing how the struggle to deport and contain Roma citizens across Member States of the Union reflect a broader series of limits regarding EU citizenship, the analysis questions any simplistic assumptions regarding the progressiveness of European citizenship over national citizenship. Rather, it points to the constitutive tensions between citizenship as derivative of the nation-state and citizenship as formed through free movement provisions, and reads these tensions as important in understanding the conditions under which contestations of the limitations of EU citizenship emerge. Focusing specifically on the struggles of Roma and Sinti activists in Italy, the article goes on to suggest that questions of mobility are critical to the transformation of European citizenship through 'acts of citizenship' that contest the limits of an EU citizenship regime. This is not understood in the sense that free movement automatically or inevitably rights the wrongs of territorial or nationally-inscribed regimes by including those who are excluded. Rather, the article argues that mobilisations of Roma around mobility are important both in contesting the internal differentiations of EU citizenship, as well as in reconfiguring the limits through which such a regime is inscribed as such. This occurs through acts whereby exclusionary processes such as criminalisation are transformed into claims to social justice. Such claims might be said to take on new significance when developed at the European scale, since claims to social justice in this regard become 'transnational' in the scope of their enactment. However, the transnational cannot be understood in a fixed or spatially-contained sense when viewed through the lens of mobility, but is perhaps better understood as a means of questioning received ways of thinking and enacting politics that are confined to the individual or to the aggregate constitution of nation-states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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European citizenship is marked by a tension: between a citizenship that is derivative of the nation-state and a citizenship that is defined by free movement. Approaching this tension as symptomatic of a deep-rooted contradiction between integration and mobility that is constitutive of modern social formations, this article develops a political sociology of mobility that challenges territorial and culturalist accounts of European citizenship. It does so by exploring the political enactment of European citizenship by marginalized subjects, whose engagement in relations of exchange serves as the ground for acts of European citizenship that ‘mobilize mobility’. This is illustrated by an analysis of the 2005 Declaration for the Rights of Sex Workers in Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The European Union is often seen as a laboratory for a post-national polity. Leaving aside important discussions regarding exclusionary citizenship practices at the European level, this article draws attention to the on-going importance of member states' citizenship traditions, which constrain the development of post-national citizenship in the EU. Considering the cases of Germany and the UK, the article shows how longer-standing citizenship traditions continue to play an important role in mediating relations between citizens and migrants. This, we suggest, remains the case despite changes to citizenship law over the past decades that have brought the two traditions closer to one another. Specifically, the article examines the on-going influence of each citizenship tradition with reference to political debates surrounding migration since 11 September 2001. It argues that divergent processes of 'securitising' migration reflect the respective citizenship traditions of the two member states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]