Claiming Citizenship

Introduction When and how does citizenship matter? How are citizenship and its attendant rights reflected, refracted, and challenged when citizens migrate or cross the borders of their country of citizenship? Current conceptions of citizenship focus mostly on membership and rights contestation within the political community, but citizens in a globalized world are often reminded of their nationality or citizenship most acutely when they are outside or at the border of their country of citizenship. Korea, with its globally dispersed diasporic population, is no exception to this insight. This chapter probes what border-crossing tells us about the linkage between citizenship and rights claiming by examining the experiences of North Koreans who seek to resettle in South Korea (the Republic of Korea, ROK).2 The chapter focuses on these individuals because scholars and journalists often describe them as being granted “automatic citizenship” in the South, with the implication that their struggles for recognition and the rights attendant on citizen status are minimal, particularly in comparison to other groups, such as the Korean-Chinese or non-Koreans examined