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The aim of the present article is to offer a reasoned argument for putting the ‘national’ back into migration studies. Scholars engaging with ethno-cultural and religious diversity have often tended to move beyond the nation-state, often treated as a site of oppression and discrimination. Urban, transnational or cosmopolitan registers have instead been put forward, often celebrated for their more progressive attitudes towards diversity. In this article, we review these claims and we also attend to the rich scholarship which, from a political philosophical perspective, has instead argued for the continuing relevance of a national ‘we’ in civic, liberal and multicultural terms. We discuss the missing points in both these strands of literature, making the case for the study of the ‘national’ as both a spatial register and a discursive resource beyond a mono-culturally tinted and essentializing idea of nation. We then conclude with a research agenda which can illuminate the ways through which the ‘national’ remains central in the shaping of contemporary diverse societies.

This article examines the micro-politics of belonging in the post-socialist outskirts of Berlin, in Marzahn, one of many new urban immigrant settlement areas in Europe. More specifically, it focuses on what locals perceive as an acceptance-precluding conspicuous presence of nominally white immigrants of German ancestry from the former Soviet Union, the Aussiedler (resettlers). Long-term residents read and interpret these immigrants’ everyday embodiments by constructing what I call micro-economies of embodied difference in order to mark immigrants as non-belonging Eastern-European. In order to make sense of such practices and local antipathy towards the Aussiedler, I analyze the embeddedness of this suburban locality in the regional politics of belonging, showing how Marzahn and its long-time residents have themselves become post-wall Berlin's (and Germany's) internal Others, saturated with uncommodifiable traces of now-denigrated state-socialist Easternness. I suggest that in such a context these...

This paper examines how middle-aged and older post-Soviet immigrants in eastern Berlin navigate the neoliberalized landscape of work-based integration in face of their long-term unemployment. I first show how these immigrants’ own insistence on the centrality of paid work for their feeling integrated contributes to their experience of collective despondency and enrollment in exploitative quasi-markets, including workfare. Focusing on this insistence, I examine how it draws strength primarily from their continued subscription to the conceptions of self as deeply socially embedded, and of work as a practice of such an embedding, adopted through their Soviet-era socialization into the culture of dispersed personhood and obligation to work, rather than from their adoption of neoliberal concepts of citizenship in Germany. Contributing to geographies of post-socialist experience of neoliberalized regimes of citizenship and immigrant integration this paper thus highlights how some of the aspects of post-socialist subjectivities dovetail unexpectedly with the neoliberal project.

Recent urban scholarship celebrates the increased cultural and ethnic diversity of contemporary cities as promoting conviviality and intercultural sensibilities. The contact hypothesis and immigrant integration policies drawing on it similarly stress the importance of increased face-to-face contact for reducing inter-group prejudice and conflict. Drawing on ethnographic research in eastern Berlin, this paper examines spaces of encounters between local residents and recent immigrants and their potential for decreasing negative stereotypes, prejudice, and conflict. We find that contact between Russian Aussiedler and local German residents in public and quasi-public spaces remains fleeting, often reinforcing pre-existing stereotypes. Local immigrant integration projects, despite their intentions of increasing contact between migrant and non-migrant residents, often fail to provide opportunities for deeper contact. On the other hand, sustained and close encounters are enabled in spaces of neighborhood communi...

It has become hard to avoid “diversity” today, especially in the global north. Organizations of all kinds feel compelled to have diversity plans and employ diversity practitioners. Increasing numbers of employees in many sectors are required to undergo diversity training. In public discourse, likewise, diversity is invoked regularly and in an increasing number of governmental arenas, from education through social work to the private sector (Puwar, 2004). In many countries, it has become, in fact, a “central policy injunction” (Swan & Fox, 2010, p. 570). In the EU, promotion of societal diversity and diversity mainstreaming are now among the key goals of the Union (Kraus & Sciortino, 2014; Vertovec, 2012). Academia has, in a similar fashion, become embroiled in this new “normative meta-narrative” (Isar, 2006, p. 1). In addition to the field of diversity management, which has existed within the orbit of workplace and management studies for quite some time, diversity studies has been emerging over the last decade as the interdisciplinary field covering much of what previously fell under migration and multiculturalism studies. An ever-increasing number of teaching and research positions, calls for papers and research institutes, prefixed with the very term “diversity”, attests to this transformation. Through all of this, diversity has assumed the status of a social good that no sensible person could disagree with.

In this brief chapter at the end of a collection of essays which have thoroughly investigated multifarious aspects of diversity in a variety of contexts and from a plurality of disciplinary perspectives, we wish to reflect on the place of the nation. Why so? Because it seems to us that one of the most enduring obstacles to thinking of diversity as a constituent component of today’s societies is the way nations remain conceptualized in the mainstream. Nations are often perceived as mono-cultural entities, singular in their cultural essence and often in the people who compose them. According to one of its most renowned analysts, Anthony D. Smith (1991, p. 14), the nation is “a named human population sharing an historic territory, common myths and historical memories, a mass, public culture, a common economy and common legal rights and duties for all members”. The point here is not so much to contest this substantialist understanding of nationhood, as aptly pointed out by Brubaker (1994). Rather, it is to suggest that if one holds such a mono-culturalist understanding of “nation”, it is not surprising that diversity becomes a clear threat. This is apparent when it comes to current public discourses. In fact, increasing efforts to treat diversity as a new governmental paradigm continue to coexist with a general public idea that diversity, particularly when associated with international migration, past or present, is problematic or undesirable (Citrin & Sides, 2008; Simon & Sikich, 2007).