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This afterword addresses four broad questions raised by this special issue: uncertainty as a mode of governance, the ontological politics of naturalisation, the citizen-noncitizen distinction, and performative (anxious) states. First, taking uncertainty as a mode of neoliberal governance as the starting point of analysis, this afterword invites the scrutiny of the ways in which the artifice and uncertainty of citizenship are concealed or rendered irrelevant in naturalisation processes. Second, the contributions to this special issue consider naturalisation as a social and political process, rather than solely as a legal status. Pushing this conception further, this afterword considers naturalisation as transactional in two ways: on the one hand, migrants navigate a number of formal and informal requirements and ‘tests’, where some transactions are needed along the way, be they financial, practical, or symbolic. On the other hand, transactions will also occur in the translation of political ideology into policy. Third, naturalisation regimes both blur and reify the citizen-noncitizen and the citizen-migrant distinctions. Distinctions which this afterword unpacks by unravelling the assumed separation between citizenship and migration. How are citizens and migrants migratised? How are migrants and citizens citizenised? Fourth, a further element of the analysis concerns how state-citizen relations are enacted and by extension, how the state itself is ‘made up’ and ‘anxious’. The affective politics of ‘anxious states’ are telling of the frames of desire of naturalisation, which are founded on a threefold principle: the desirability of citizenship, the desire for desirable citizens, and the desirability of the state itself.

This article empirically grounds the ‘psychic life of power’ (Butler, 1997) by demonstrating the psychic form that power takes as immigrants or agents of the state make their way through the British ‘citizenisation’ policy – i.e. the ‘integration’ policy that requires noncitizens to acquire ‘citizen-like’ skills and values in view of seeking citizenship or other statuses (e.g. settlement). The framing argument is that an ambivalent relationship between desire and anxiety mediates the state-citizen relationship (following Honig, 2001). Taking this argument further, the article offers an in-depth analysis of how citizenisation policy’s frames of desire (the assumed desirability of citizenship and the desire for desirable citizens) also take the form of anxieties. Drawing on a multi-sited study of citizenisation in Britain, the article explores some of the different forms anxiety takes: fetishisation, enervation, and uncertainty. The analysis reveals how the uneven distribution of anxiety between agents of the state and immigrants not only mediates the state–citizen relationship but also variously enacts the state itself. Attending to the psychosocial dynamics of citizenisation reveals how hierarchies are (re)produced not only discursively and materially, but also through different ‘anxious states’.

This article examines the colonial legacies shaping current language requirements for immigrants applying for settlement or citizenship in Britain. The article argues that common sense understandings of ‘national language’ and monolingualism/multilingualism were developed in the context of imperial expansion, the legacies of which resonate today in a disdain for multilingualism and other Englishes conceived as hampering cohesion. Put simply, other languages and other English are spoken here because English was there. Drawing on interviews with applicants and English teaching professionals, the article discusses how participants variously experience English language requirements. The analysis shows how the colonial legacies supporting the rise of English as a ‘world language’ cast it as the locus of a regime of audibility that establishes a hierarchy between ‘the English’ and the ‘anglicised’. In today’s Britain, the multilingualism of the other is not external and prior to Britain, but rather speaks volumes to and about contemporary Britain.

This article takes the naturalisation process as a vantage point to consider how citizenship constitutes a site of emotional investment not only on the part of applicants and ‘new’ citizens but also on the part of the state. The premise of this article is that naturalisation is more than solely the admission of foreigners to the position and rights of citizenship, and it approaches naturalisation as a state practice that needs to be understood within a politics of desire. The article asks three questions: what makes naturalisation a thinkable and desirable means of acquiring citizenship? Second, what do practices of naturalisation tell us about ‘the state's attachment to particular embodiments of desirable citizens’ (S. Somerville, 2005, Notes toward a queer history of naturalization. American quarterly, 7 (3), 661)? Third, ‘who may desire the state's desire’ (J. Butler, 2002. Is kinship always already heterosexual? Differences, 13 (1), 22)? Using policy documents and auto-ethnographic material, the artic...

After briefly discussing the ‘affective turn’ in citizenship studies, this afterword discusses the political mobilisation of affect to consider when, where, and how affect may be connected to citizenship. It asks: What does it mean and do to speak of affective acts as acts of affective citizenship? I argue that the phrase ‘affective citizenship’ attaches affect to a very specific object: citizenship. Studying affective citizenship requires attention to how some feelings attach themselves to citizenship and to how citizenship itself can evoke certain feelings. But affective citizenship does not occur ‘naturally’: it arises from, requires and/or produces knowledge, labour, and (new) ‘feeling rules’ (Hochschild in de Wilde and Duyvendak). I conclude with a call for more research into the dynamics of affective citizenship that go beyond a simple opposition between those simply conceived of as agents of disciplinary power and those seen as (resisting) subjects of disciplinary power.

In 2007, Channel 4 screened Face of Britain, a documentary about the genetic mapping of Britain. Face of Britain promised to reveal ‘who we really are’ by tracing genetic links back to ancient Celts, Anglo-Saxons, Vikings and Normans. This article situates Face of Britain within the wider racial and national politics that it is invariably caught up in, and examines how ‘race’ and racial thinking are reconfigured in ways that are both ‘old’ and ‘new’. Face of Britain constitutes an interesting case study to examine how ideas of indigeneity are produced and naturalised in scientific discourses and practices. Here, indigeneity is mobilised through three sub-narratives: the ‘vanishing indigene’; the promise of facial recognition; and DNA and national relatedness. The analysis reveals how some people of the British Isles are naturalised as indigenous by virtue of their ancestral presence in this land through a combination of genetic and photographic technologies. In short, blood and soil are intertwined, with ...

‘Community cohesion’ is the preferred framework for managing ‘race relations’ and ‘conflict’ in contemporary Britain. Initially adopted in government policy following civil disturbances in the summer of 2001, ‘community cohesion’ combined visions of shared belonging with strategies of managing diversity. More recent versions still place a strong emphasis on ideas of shared belonging but these are combined with strategies of managing migration and identity which are deployed in view of securing local communities against threats posed by extremism, deprivation, diversity and feelings of ‘white unease’. This article examines how the community cohesion agenda relies on strategies of governance that seek to design particular kinds of human behaviours such as ‘mixing’ and ‘meaningful interaction’, in view of ‘delivering’ cohesion in the community. I analyse the cohesion agenda as a form of governance that operates through mechanisms of subjectivation. However, instead of privileging the responsible, discerning,...

In this paper I examine how new forms of multicultural intimacy are imagined in contemporary Britain, and how they are invested with particular ideals of mixing, loving thy neighbour, and feelings for the nation. I trace these discursive themes in a myriad of social locations and forms—a television documentary titled The Last White Kids, reviews of the documentary in the press, and government policies on community cohesion. A key point of this paper is that racial, ethnic, and cultural relations are not only negotiated and ‘managed’ in literal spatial locations, but also imagined through specific emotional and ethical injunctions, such as ‘embracing the other’ and loving they neighbour. Moreover, these injunctions are imagined in the ambivalent spatial terms of obligations to, and dangers of, proximity—an ambivalence that is inflected with articulations of ‘race’, class, and gender. The analysis thus explores how the imperative of neighbourly love refers to both the desires for and anxieties about what the intimacy stems from and fosters. Who gets close to whom, and under what circumstances, is not left to chance.

This paper explores ways in which we can fruitfully analyse and theorize ‘New Europe’ through migration, in so far as migration is an integral part of the way the world is imagined, and as such impacts on how individuals, communities, nations or multi/international formations such as the European Union imagine themselves and their (co)inhabitants. The article discusses three theoretical strands that relate to the forces of spatiality (scaling), temporality (timing and histories) and corporeality (embodying and ‘the European people’). These must be read as interwoven and impacting on each other in varying ways that are not linear, coherent or permanent. By bridging critical migration studies with mobilities studies, this essay calls for a reconsideration of the fluidity, accessibility and desirability of the assumed mobile world, while it also thinks about migration in relation to the ways in which ‘mobility’ has been variously established as a universal ‘right’.

The articles in this issue were first presented at the inter-congress conference of the International Sociological Association Research Committee 31 (Migration) 'From Emigration to Immigration Countries in Europe: New Patterns', which took place in Cerisy-la-Salle, France, in June 2005. Attracted by the conference title and focus, we wanted to explore the implications of a typology that distinguishes and characterizes countries in terms of their emigration or immigration flows. Without denying that migration developed in unprecedented ways in the twentieth century, we wanted to interrogate the ways in which the envisioning of Europe as one of the 'primary regions of immigration in the world' (as stated in the call for papers) impacts on political, economic, cultural and ideological practices in Europe and, more specifically, how it may impact differently in different European countries. How is Europe re(con)figured in terms of migration flows? What does it mean to declare that countries have changed from being spaces of emigration to spaces of immigration? What does it mean to deny that one is any such space? How does it relate to 'new' discourses of national and continental identity and becoming? How do migrants relate to, and negotiate, such narratives? The articles in this issue together interrogate discourses, narratives, imaginings, envisionings and their impact on, and relationship with, political, economic, cultural and ideological practices. Following Foucault (1997, p.68), we could consider how im/migration is conceived as a 'shock' that interrupts established histories of national and continental uninterrupted continuity. In Il faut defendre la societe´, Foucault distinguishes between two types of political functions of historical discourse: one that seeks to tell the story of uninterrupted sovereignty, and one that recounts stories of servitude, domination and exile. While we question Foucault's assumptions about the existence of a unified European history (cf. 1997, p.68 inter alia), we take from his intervention the argument that immigration is presently conceived as interrupting the idea of Europe in unprecedented ways. In this sense, our aim is to interrupt a narrative of a pre-social homogeneous, united and continuous European whole comprising unified national European entities.

This article examines public declarations of national pride and accusations of national shame printed in English national newspapers in the four weeks following the publication of the Parekh Report, in October 2000. A key aim of this article is to consider the role of emotions in policing the terms of belonging and entitlement to citizenry. I discuss the effects of displays of emotions on the kind of national community, and national subject, that is being imagined. First, I examine the role of emotions in distinguishing between legitimate and illegitimate patriotisms. The pride/shame debate reveals how the politics of pride seek to eradicate shame via an erasure of certain histories, and to sanitize Britishness under a veneer of tolerance. At the same time, multicultural tolerance necessitates the creation of intolerant culprits. Second, I uncover the formation of new economies of exclusion/inclusion and toleration through different acts of interpellating “others” to be seen to speak out as proud subjects...