{"title":"Caring (for) relations: Syrian refugees between gendered kin-contract and citizenship in Germany and Turkey","authors":"Hilâl Alkan","doi":"10.1080/13621025.2022.2103969","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13621025.2022.2103969","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT 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.","PeriodicalId":47860,"journal":{"name":"Citizenship Studies","volume":"26 1","pages":"746 - 762"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2022-07-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44959575","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Categorical boundaries: the political production of kinship and citizenship","authors":"Suad Joseph","doi":"10.1080/13621025.2022.2103966","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13621025.2022.2103966","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The article explores the multiple ways/layers in which “boundaries” shape contemporary life. To be a state is to have territory controlled by the state. A state that does not have formally recognized boundaries that are acknowledged by other states is a state in constant jeopardy. Modern states are committed to consolidating boundaries –even as boundaries are often fluid, dynamic, and changeable. Boundaries are foundational to categorical thinking. Categorical thinking is the assembling of items, events, situations, people, things into groups which are presumed to shave common characteristics in opposition to other groups. Categories are socially/culturally constructed. Their ascendency/institutionalization at particular points in time often leads to their naturalization over time, as if they are given in nature or have a seamless, continuous history. Modern states try to fix, stabilize, naturalize themselves as categories through boundaries. Citizenship is a form of categorical thinking, a form of boundary created, necessitated, by modern states. Citizenship determines who and how one gets to belong to a state; who the state claims; and who is entitled to claims on the state. Refugees are refugees because they lost the ability to live within the boundaries constructed by their state. Whether as a result of violence, forced migration, political persecution, or other means, they can no longer live within the territorial boundaries of the state of which they had been citizens or residents.","PeriodicalId":47860,"journal":{"name":"Citizenship Studies","volume":"26 1","pages":"885 - 892"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2022-07-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46769324","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Refugees enacting (digital) citizenship through placemaking and care practices near and far","authors":"Monika Palmberger","doi":"10.1080/13621025.2022.2103971","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13621025.2022.2103971","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article explores how refugees enact (digital) citizenship through placemaking and care practices, when geographically close or at a distance. It is based on ethnographic research in Vienna, and it uses participant observation, narrative interviews, and digital diaries as key research methods. In this article, I argue that digital infrastructure is crucial for refugees’ care and placemaking practices that in turn shape political subjectivities and hold the creative potential to enact citizenship from below. Through these transnational care and placemaking practices, which are closely connected to new information and communication technologies, refugees navigate care and border regimes and build belonging and citizenry, ultimately enacting citizenship from below. This article thereby brings together discussions from the field of care and migration studies, and in particular from digital migration studies, generating a dialogue around citizenship across these fields.","PeriodicalId":47860,"journal":{"name":"Citizenship Studies","volume":"26 1","pages":"781 - 798"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2022-07-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49316362","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Self-Il/legalisation and political subjecthood: Syrian migrant women in the EU","authors":"Sophie Richter-Devroe","doi":"10.1080/13621025.2022.2103970","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13621025.2022.2103970","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT 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.","PeriodicalId":47860,"journal":{"name":"Citizenship Studies","volume":"26 1","pages":"763 - 780"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2022-07-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43790638","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Congolese mothers, affective circuits and ‘acts of citizenship’ in Russia","authors":"A. Bloch","doi":"10.1080/13621025.2022.2103975","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13621025.2022.2103975","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT With the intensified flow of refugees seeking asylum across Europe in recent years, scholars have increasingly turned their attention to the encounter between non-citizens and citizens. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Russia (2015–2019) among non-citizens, including Congolese asylum-seekers, this article examines how Congolese women foster affective ties as a means of creating a sense of belonging in a largely unwelcoming place. In considering how asylum-seeking, Congolese women in Moscow invest in ‘affective circuits’ forged through their children as they move through the city, navigating NGOs, citizen-activists, and forms of state power, the article argues that these are political acts. These acts are shaped by racialized citizenship practices, as well as distinctive politics of reproduction in Russia.","PeriodicalId":47860,"journal":{"name":"Citizenship Studies","volume":"26 1","pages":"852 - 867"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2022-07-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48036318","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"‘What about it is unclear? I mean I was born here:’ Ungeklärte Staatsangehörigkeit and the (re-)production of de facto statelessness in Germany","authors":"M. Farinha","doi":"10.1080/13621025.2022.2103972","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13621025.2022.2103972","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT 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.","PeriodicalId":47860,"journal":{"name":"Citizenship Studies","volume":"26 1","pages":"799 - 815"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2022-07-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"59810346","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Navigating citizenship and motherhood in and beyond Berlin","authors":"Magdalena Suerbaum","doi":"10.1080/13621025.2022.2103974","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13621025.2022.2103974","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article centres on the predicaments of an East African migrant woman who resided in an Eastern EU country and is the mother of a child holding citizenship in the same EU country. Seeking asylum in Germany after having fled an abusive marriage, she found out that her residency in an EU country would most likely invalidate her asylum claim. Being classified as an EU migrant and withdrawing her asylum application, however, complicated her and her daughter’s access to welfare provision. Tracing this woman’s struggles in Germany and her onward migration trajectory to a country in the Arab world, offers a perspective on the consequences of legal complexity, challenging bureaucratic encounters, and missing support structures for a mother’s relationship with her daughter. Her negotiations of dominant parenting ideologies, attempts to create belonging, and striving to cope with racialization in the process of migration to and attempting to settle in Germany can be read as navigations of citizenship.","PeriodicalId":47860,"journal":{"name":"Citizenship Studies","volume":"26 1","pages":"834 - 851"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2022-07-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48853998","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"National citizenship and postcolonial racism","authors":"Nandita Sharma","doi":"10.1080/13621025.2022.2091248","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13621025.2022.2091248","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In the decisive shift from imperial-states to nation-states after World War Two, two related processes took place. There was a wide scale effort to delegitimize racist ideologies. At the same time, state sovereignty across the world was being nationalized. Nationalist ideologies were rendered not only legitimate but practically mandatory in politics. This talk charts this history in order to understand how racism is organized, practiced, and resisted in an era of postcolonialism (i.e. an era when national sovereignty is the hegemonic state form and when the social and juridical distinction between 'national' and 'migrant' are widely accepted). I examine the growing autochthonization of politics and how nationalisms the world over are increasingly reconfiguring the 'national' as an autochthon, i.e. a 'native' of the national 'soil'. Through a discussion of various autochthonous movements I analyze the double move wherein historic colonizers are re-presented as 'migrants’ and today's 'migrants' are made into 'colonizers'. Such a move, I argue, is made possible by postcolonial racisms: the historic articulation between ideas of 'race' and 'nation' wherein ideas of national soil are racialized and racist ideas of blood are territorialized.","PeriodicalId":47860,"journal":{"name":"Citizenship Studies","volume":"26 1","pages":"638 - 649"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2022-07-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46716893","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"What makes democratic citizenship democratic?","authors":"J. Holston","doi":"10.1080/13621025.2022.2091231","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13621025.2022.2091231","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT I contend that parliamentary representative democracy betrays what must be democratic about democratic citizenship – its directness. I examine this betrayal to consider what makes democratic citizenship democratic, what is direct about direct democracy, and how it may provide a means to (re)democratize democracy. To do so, I engage the conundrums about citizenship Aristotle posed in the Politics. For millennia, theorists have used Aristotle’s dislike of democracy and related misrepresentations to dismiss direct democracy as impossible for large states. Moreover, the problems he raised have roiled political theory ever since because they established two issues that indicate how profoundly democracy troubles citizenship. The first concerns what it means for “the people” to remain sovereign even when most delegate the political powers of their citizenship to others. The second concerns the historical capacity of democracy to transform the political by disrupting entrenched power and legalized inequality. If so, democracy must somehow institutionalize disruption as a resource to keep it vigorous. I examine how the provocations of sovereignty, equality, and disruption democratize citizenship. These problems are unresolvable in a democracy. Their tensions are necessary to mobilize democratization, as Athenian democracy shows. Attempts to resolve them – such as republican representative democracy – destroy its energies.","PeriodicalId":47860,"journal":{"name":"Citizenship Studies","volume":"26 1","pages":"491 - 504"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2022-07-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"59810777","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Citizenship among the historians","authors":"M. Prak","doi":"10.1080/13621025.2022.2091245","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13621025.2022.2091245","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Around the time of the establishment of Citizenship Studies, historians had a straightforward picture of what it was, and how it developed. Citizenship had been invented in Ancient Greece, where philosophers like Aristotle had outlined its main features, which remained basically unchanged until the twentieth century. Citizenship was a male prerogative, closely related to political participation and for a long time only available to Europeans. Only in post-colonial regimes could the rest of the world develop its own forms of citizenship. This picture is hard to square with the contents of Citizenship Studies, and historians have indeed moved on, as the discussion of three major books demonstrates. Such changes have, however, not come about as a result of the impact of the journal among historians, because that has been very limited so far. The paper speculates about other explanations of this parallel development.","PeriodicalId":47860,"journal":{"name":"Citizenship Studies","volume":"26 1","pages":"608 - 614"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2022-07-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45942372","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}