Search

This article explores the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal (PPT) hearing, ‘The hostile environment on trial’, which took place in London in 2018. When calling a gathering a ‘people’s tribunal’, certain kinds of listening and attention become possible, which are shaped by specific histories and contexts. The author considers the kinds of listening that took place during the London PPT and what changed as a result. She argues that the legal framing that comes with calling a gathering a ‘tribunal’ both compels and excludes, and the politics of listening for migrant justice within such a space is laden with imperial pitfalls and power relations that must continuously be worked through. Instead of a legal remedy, what results is a social relation – an ‘Us’ created through the mutual effort of organising and participating in the tribunal that can open up different understandings of migrant justice and its connection to wider struggles.

Citizenship tests are arguably intended as moments of hailing, or interpellation, through which norms are internalized and citizen-subjects produced. We analyse the multiple political subjects revealed through migrants’ narratives of the citizenship test process, drawing on 158 interviews with migrants in Leicester and London who are at different stages in the UK citizenship test process. In dialogue with three counter-figures in the critical naturalization literature – the ‘neoliberal citizen’; the ‘anxious citizen’; and the ‘heroic citizen’ – we propose the figure of the ‘citizen-negotiator’, a socially situated actor who attempts to assert control over their life as they navigate the test process and state power. Through the focus on negotiation, we see migrants navigating a process of differentiation founded on pre-existing inequalities rather than a journey toward transformation.

This chapter focuses on citizenship policies in Europe that require migrants to prove that they ‘deserve’ citizenship, e.g. through naturalisation processes which require proof of ‘good character’ and language proficiency. In this chapter, drawing on work largely informed by intersectional scholarship—specifically Black feminist traditions—I consider what happens when the study of naturalisation in Europe is analysed at the intersection of gender, sexuality, race and class. Analysing naturalisation, and specifically deserving citizenship, at these intersections exposes the deeply entrenched colonial power relations underlying naturalisation processes and provides insights into what it would mean to fundamentally challenge ‘deservingness’ and citizenship.

Since the early 2000s several European countries have introduced language and citizenship tests as new requirements for access to long-term residence or naturalization. The content of citizenship tests has been often presented as exclusionary in nature, in particular as it is based on the idea that access to citizenship has to be 'deserved'. In this paper, we aim to explore the citizenship tests 'from below', through the focus on the experience of migrants who prepare and take the 'Life in the UK' test, and with particular reference to how they relate to the idea of 'deservingness'. Through a set of in-depth interviews with migrants in two different cities (Leicester and London), we show that many of them use narratives in which they distinguish between the 'deserving citizens' and the 'undeserving Others' when they reflect upon their experience of becoming citizens. In so doing, they negotiate new hierarchies of inclusion into and exclusion from citizenship, which reflect broader neo-liberal and ethos-based conceptions of citizenship.