Citizenship Regimes Research Articles

Crisis reflexivity: the fragile regime of citizenship in Greece’s compounded crises

The paper explores how the crisis imaginary shapes citizen identity in relation to the migrant noncitizen as well as the media’s role in enhancing or containing the crisis. The communicative process of crisis reflexivity offers a conceptual tool to understand the consequences of limited or absent encounters with noncitizen Others for the citizens’ construction of identity. Within the spatio-temporality of compounded crises in an Athenian neighbourhood, the study’s multi-method approach combines 30 in-depth interviews with Greek citizens with offline and online participant observation. The empirical findings reveal that embodied encounters shape the perception of citizens as victims in light of structural inequalities and the existential uncertainty tied to media disinformation and fear. However, for those with progressive views, predominantly mediated encounters can open up an avenue for a politics of justice and generate feelings of cosmopolitanism towards citizens-in-the-making.

Borders, Citizenship, and Global Inequality: What Barriers, Pushbacks, and Passport Controls Reveal About Our Understanding of the Equality of Humankind

Abstract Borders are ubiquitous. As invisible lines, they contribute to a functioning world order and guarantee security for the people. In the form of walls and fences, they divide society and establish strongholds of prosperity that are not accessible to everyone. A similar effect can be observed in connection with the concept of citizenship, which binds people fatefully to a particular territory and thus significantly determines an individual’s life chances. This article shows how borders and their protection as well as the concept of citizenship challenge fundamental ideas of justice and traces discourses that seek to evolve the current border and citizenship regimes into a more universal and just form of human coexistence.

Disaggregating citizenship: Tibetan refugees navigating identity, belonging, and exclusionary state policies in India

AbstractThis essay explores the struggles of second‐generation Tibetan refugees under an exclusionary Indian citizenship regime. Confronted with a national orthodoxy that entwines legal status, entitlements, and national identity, Tibetans respond by “disaggregating” citizenship. First, stateless Tibetans, born in India to refugee parents, won legal appeals by demonstrating that Tibetan nationality was no bar to Indian citizenship. In response, Indian authorities demanded that Tibetans give up refugee entitlements and remove themselves from their national space and political community in exile as the price of Indian citizenship. This article explores the diverse responses of Tibetans to the citizenship‐on‐offer: some aspiring for it, some accepting it, and others actively rejecting it. These responses illustrate strategies refugees employ to navigate citizenship regimes that often render them liminal. Refugees act both to mitigate the precarity of statelessness and to preserve their identity, community, and political aspirations against erasure. In doing so, they not only disrupt the national orthodoxy of states that negates refugee experiences but also reveal the incompleteness and contradictions of citizenship regimes.

Evolution of Kenyan Citizenship Regime: Pre- and Post-2010 Eras

Abstract Debates on citizenship are never conclusive as this is an evolving idea and practice. Formal citizenship in Kenya has its genesis prior to independence when the country was drafting its 1963 Independence Constitution. Before then, most Kenyans were considered subjects by the colonial administration, governed by a racialised hierarchical colonial order. This phenomenon changed in postcolonial Kenya as the nation’s primary focus was on eliminating these racial hierarchies to include those previously excluded as citizens. However, some of the statutory provisions on citizenship were contentious as they promoted discrimination and inequalities. The endorsement of Kenya’s new constitution in 2010 is termed transformative as it addresses the controversial provisions on citizenship. Through secondary source research, this paper aims to trace the development of formal citizenship in Kenya from colonial times to date and maps out the milestones made over time and space in citizenship on its acquisition, duality and statelessness.

Sojourners, Not Settlers: Temporary Labor Migration Since the Nineteenth Century

Systems of labor mobility across borders in which states assign a fixed duration to workers’ sojourn—temporary labor migration schemes (TLMSs)—have enabled employers to recruit workers while claiming to avoid the presumed negative consequences of settlement and integration. While existing explanations of TLMSs focus primarily on structural determinants, this article introduces a cumulative contextual model. It begins with a political-economic analysis of labor migration and addresses its gaps by adding an analysis of the ideological legitimations of TLMSs, as well as a consideration of the complex of rules and organizations that implement and regulate state-managed temporary migration. Building on this approach, I propose a typology of TLMSs according to dominant actors, rules that govern the labor relationship, and the gap between discourse about the goals of TLMSs and outcomes. The analysis has implications for immigration and citizenship regimes, for their assumptions of permanence, and for the nature of work.

(Un)Credible citizen: citizenship dispossession, documents and the politics of the rule of law

ABSTRACT This article explores how states mobilise ideologies of the rule of law to legitimise, facilitate and obscure human rights violations, especially in the context of citizenship and migration. There is a global pattern of states using ostensibly legal means to undermine citizenship status of vulnerable minorities. In several national contexts, the invocation of the rule of law and the use of legal identity documents are interlocked. States have relied on the regimes of documentary citizenship as the legal face of citizenship deprivation. This article studies India's north-eastern state of Assam – one of the most striking instances of this pattern – where bureaucratic practices of citizenship adjudication have threatened the citizenship status of more than 3 million people. It shows that despite being centred around them, the administrators of documentary citizenship routinely disregard identity documents in their everyday functioning. It argues that India's ethnicised politics towards immigration constitutes contradictory attitudes towards identity documents. Officials imagine legal identity documents as legitimate and viable, and simultaneously compromised due to administrative corruption and complicity. This documentary doublethink engenders grave instability of citizenship status. The article illuminates how the rule of law – like the documentary regimes it sustains – is Janus-faced by producing and obscuring precarious citizenship.

National Register of Citizens (NRC) in Assam: within, without and beyond the law

ABSTRACT This paper analyses the historical antecedents, character and implications of Assam’s National Register of Citizens as a socio-legal instrument. It seeks to understand how dominant nationalisms and the state produce volatile paper citizenship regimes, and use law – as a reified transcendental performance of social will – to construct the ‘minority citizen’ through categories of ‘belonging’ and ‘citizenship’. The paper does this by analysing three typologies of the law-society interaction. First, it examines what/who is a citizen from within law. Second, it critiques the mythology of law by giving an account of belonging and suffering of minority citizens without law. Third, it foregrounds peripheral subjectivities by offering an account of minority citizenship beyond law.

“We are the Revolution, Abroad”: Diaspora Protests, Identity Construction, and the Remaking of Citizenship in the 2019 Lebanese Thawra

Abstract Diasporas are often viewed as mirrors for their homeland’s politics. The Lebanese diaspora’s involvement in the 2019 Thawra, however, established the diaspora as a locus for autonomous and disruptive political action. Through an analysis of the spatialities of protest, this paper analyses the diaspora’s involvement in the Thawra, its implications for the protest movement, and for the diaspora itself. It argues that diaspora protests gave rise to new tactics and protest repertoires. These mirrored protest activity on the ground, supported protestors in Lebanon, and constituted the diaspora as a locus for contestation and claims-making. Moreover, the diaspora’s mobilization in the Thawra contributed to the consolidation of diasporic identity and the construction of alternative societal imaginaries and conceptions of citizenship that challenge Lebanon’s state-centric and sectarian citizenship regime. This paper thus makes the case for reassessing the autonomous political role of diasporas to gain a fuller understanding of transnational protest dynamics, solidarities, and citizenship beyond the boundaries of the nation-state.

Entangled contestations: transnational dynamics of contesting liberal citizenship in South Asia

ABSTRACT This paper investigates contemporary transformations of citizenship in India, Sri Lanka, and Myanmar in their historical trajectories. More specifically, we focus on the contestation of liberal aspects of the respective citizenship regimes, in particular principles of non-discrimination on the basis of caste, race, gender, religion, or ethnic belonging as well as a high degree of legal certainty about one’s citizenship status. We advance two central arguments. Firstly, we argue that while often studied in isolation, the processes by which liberal citizenship is contested across the three countries bear remarkable similarities. We therefore develop a transnational comparative perspective to highlight the legal mechanisms and social logics by which citizenship regimes across the region are being transformed. Secondly, we argue that to capture these transformations, we need to complement the analyses of legislative changes with an investigation of socio-legal practices. This dual focus reveals how the interplay between seemingly innocent legislative changes and particular bureaucratic practices across all three countries produces zones of liminality, in which entire population groups experience increasingly precarious citizenship status. We theorise this production of liminal citizenship by focusing on the social lives of official documents and the proliferation of rules and regulations governing the respective citizenship regimes.

Playing dirty: the shady governance and reproduction of migrant illegality

ABSTRACT State authorities in Europe invest immense resources in what the EU insists on calling the ‘fight against illegal migration’. Based on ethnographic research in two German cities, this paper shows that a tough approach towards illegalised migration can only be implemented through state practices that operate at the margins of, or even cross, the boundaries of what is legally permissible. This argument is developed through an analysis of informal practices that frontline staff in registry offices and migration administrations deploy to prevent, or at least disturb, illegalised migrants’ attempts to regularise their status by becoming the parent of child that is entitled to German citizenship. Drawing on the autonomy of migration approach, I use migrants’ struggles within and against Germany’s migration and citizenship regime as an epistemic device to expose three kinds of informally institutionalised counter-tactics of street-level bureaucrats that qualify as unlawfare. The analysis shows that officials, in their attempts to forestall migrants’ practices of self-legalisation, frequently resort to practices that are legally questionable or outright unlawful themselves. Ultimately, not only a tough stance on illegalised migration, but the very production of migrant illegality emerges as contagious as it implicates an illegalisation of state practices.

The Specter of Potential Foreigners: Revisiting the Postcolonial Citizenship Regimes of Myanmar and India

ABSTRACT Revisiting the citizenship regimes of Myanmar and India through a comparative lens, this article argues that a specter of the “potential foreigner” is decisive in the adjudication of citizenship in both countries. Citizenship is conceptualized not only on the basis of who is a citizen, but a perennial suspicion towards those who may not be. We frame this argument in the context of increasingly restrictive atmospheres in both countries, epitomized by violence towards the Rohingya in Myanmar and the Citizenship Amendment Act in India. This paper employs an historical perspective, tracing the evolution of citizenship since the partitions of Burma and Pakistan from India. It interrogates the very notion of foreignness that is embedded in these discourses, through a detailed description of the religious, ethnic, racial, and administrative "other" etched in the legislative and socio-political fabric of both countries. In order to develop the idea of potential foreigner as a key element of national identity and citizenship policy, the paper examines crucial legislation over the last three-quarters of a century, and the consequences of linking narrowing definitions of ethno-national belonging to citizenship status.

‘Paused citizens’: waiting and negotiating liminality in Assam, India

ABSTRACT In Assam, India, the National Register of Citizens (NRC) population enumeration process excluded about two million people from the final list. The NRC dropouts referred to in this study as ‘paused citizens’ are locked in a condition that is legally and socially ambiguous, hovering between citizens and stateless. This essay seeks to highlight the experiences of ‘paused citizens’ who have been thrown into this opaque and paralysing situation as they attempt to manage their precarious status, illustrate the tangled web of citizenship regimes, and the binary distinctions between inclusion and exclusion that are mediated by documents. A closer examination also reveals how the systems of power and control operate and how people trapped in time alternate between feelings of purposeful waiting and senseless stasis.

Gender, State and Religion: Palestinian Feminist Politics

Religion-based personal status laws and religious courts are an intrinsic component of the Jewish character of the State of Israel. The association between one’s religious affiliation and the law governing one’s personal status issues is longstanding. However, the significance and dynamics of this association cannot be analyzed in isolation from the context of the identity of the state, or the identity of the local subjects in terms of their nationality, religious affiliation, and gender. In the case of Palestinian citizens of Israel, the personal state laws that govern them bear the imprint of the state’s hierarchical and discriminatory citizenship regime. This article examines the struggles of Palestinian feminist activists, citizens of Israel, in their attempts to improve their personal status issues, which began in the 1990s and were led by secular as well as religious Palestinian feminists. In doing so, it reveals the complexity of feminist politics at the juncture of religion, gender and colonialism. It identifies similarities and differences in feminist discourses and activities, while delineating the boundaries of these politics. It argues that, in many instances, activists had to choose between ‘collaboration’ with a colonial regime and ‘complicity’ with a patriarchal establishment. The paper is based on a variety of sources, including media articles, archival documents, protocols of parliamentary committees, and personal interviews conducted with leading feminist activists.

Protesting power-sharing: citizenship acts and eventful protest in divided societies

ABSTRACT This article examines waves of citizen protest against the ethnic citizenship regime of consociational power-sharing. It seeks to contribute to research on power-sharing by bringing together the literature on “acts of citizenship” and “eventful protest” to show how protest waves in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Iraq and Lebanon seek to contest, destabilize, reimagine, and enact new forms of inclusive citizenship in ethnically divided societies. While research suggests that popular mobilization has destabilizing effects on power-sharing, this paper indicates that protest forms offer important forms of democratic participation and renewal for consociational systems. Towards this, the article illuminates four interweaving citizenship frames developed in protests: Citizens (Demos) versus Elites (Ethnos); Trans-sectarian; Inclusionary; and Inclusionary. The article draws on interviews, media and policy data to explore the voice of protestors.

We returned home empty-handed: COVID-19, care, and contested citizenship of Naga migrant workers in northeast India.

COVID-19 highlighted interconnections between matters of identity and citizenship, vulnerability, and inclusion in/exclusion from systems of care in times of crisis. Migrant workers from Nagaland state, northeast India, were disproportionately impacted by the pandemic's socioeconomic consequences. The public health emergency brought into question who is 'Indian' and the citizenship rights attached to that identity, heightening migrants' exclusion from central structures. Communitarian responses in Nagaland enhanced resilience in the face of often inadequate government responses; however, COVID-19 also exposed structural inequalities within and between Naga communities. This study shows that identity-based citizenship regimes and multi-nation federalism interact to increase minorities' exclusion during crises, and that crises can strengthen both divisions and solidarity at the local level in multi-nation federal systems. Inclusion in and exclusion from systems of care are shaped by and can reshape notions of identity and citizenship, underlining the need for inclusive sociopolitical systems to mitigate crises in multi-nation federal states.

The Divorce Mill: Mercenary Citizenship in the Twilight of the Habsburg Empire

This article analyses how wealthy men and women manipulated citizenship regimes during and after the Habsburg Empire to access the family laws most convenient for their private lives. To do this, I compare migratory divorce practices in pre-1918 Habsburg Hungary and the post-1918 Free State of Fiume. This article shows that while before 1918 it was mercenary actors who utilised legal loopholes between Austrian and Hungarian family laws and citizenship regulations to obtain divorces for the rich, after 1918 it was the impoverished, globally-isolated, mercenary postimperial state that procured the means for rich clients to buy their way out of their own state's family laws, raising questions about the relationship between the early twentieth-century postimperial world of globally dependent European successor states with today's postcolonial ‘golden passport’ system.

Citizenship regimes in Brazilian prisons: Hybrid, unjust and weak

For Brazilian inmates, prisons are mostly spaces of rights denial, above and beyond their formal condemnations. Most, nonetheless, still enjoy some rights. This paper examines the modalities of allocation and the range of those rights. It understands citizenship as a bundle of rights whose scope and quality are determined by the terms of the bargains through which those rights are allocated. These bundles, together with the governance arrangements that define and enforce them are in turn understood as citizenship regimes. The paper examines three regimes that are common in male Brazilian prisons: one regime that is fully controlled by the state, and two that are hybrid, involving both state authorities and, in one instance, criminal organizations (factions), and in the other, chosen inmates (keyholders or chaveiros) who are vested of governance authority by prison administrators. The overall system they conform is a composite of state and non-state rights enforcement arrangements. The allocation of rights it produces is deeply unequal. And the range and quality of the rights enjoyed by the vast majority of inmates is narrow and poor. 
 Resumen: Regímenes ciudadanos en las cárceles brasileñas: Híbridos, injustos y débiles
 Para los presos brasileños, las cárceles son sobre todo espacios de negación de derechos, más allá de sus condenas formales. No obstante, la mayoría sigue disfrutando de algunos derechos. Este trabajo examina las modalidades de asignación y alcance de esos derechos. Se entiende la ciudadanía como un conjunto de derechos cuyo alcance y calidad vienen determinados por los términos de los acuerdos a través de los cuales se asignan dichos derechos. Estos conjuntos, junto con los mecanismos de gobernanza que los definen y hacen cumplir, se entienden a su vez como regímenes de ciudadanía. El documento examina tres regímenes comunes en las prisiones brasileñas masculinas: un régimen totalmente controlado por el Estado y dos regímenes híbridos, en los que participan tanto las autoridades estatales como, en un caso, organizaciones delictivas (facciones) y, en el otro, reclusos elegidos (chaveiros) a los que los administradores de la prisión confieren autoridad para gobernar. El sistema global que conforman es una combinación de mecanismos estatales y no estatales de aplicación de los derechos. La asignación de derechos que produce es profundamente desigual mientras que la gama y calidad de los derechos de que disfruta la inmensa mayoría de los reclusos es limitada y deficiente.

‘THE TRANSIENT FOREIGNER’: RESTRICTIONS ON CITIZENSHIP ACQUISITION IN CHILE AND COLOMBIA FOR THOSE SAID TO BE ‘PASSING THROUGH’

AbstractThis article explores the constitutional regulation of birthright ius soli citizenship in two Latin American countries which restrict access to citizenship for the children of foreigners deemed to be passing through the countries. Access to citizenship is a significant marker of membership, setting the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion within and across States. Choosing the cases of Chile and Colombia, this article uses historical, institutional and comparative analysis in order to excavate the evolving conceptions of citizenship in those two countries, with particular reference to the concepts of the ‘transient foreigner’ and of ‘domicile’. The case studies provide an excellent laboratory within which to examine the evolution of constitutional ideas of citizenship and ‘the people’. In Colombia, the outcome of the investigation shows that there is unlikely to be significant long-term change in the citizenship regime towards a more generalised acceptance of unconditional ius soli, notwithstanding the substantial shorter-term measures taken to accommodate the children of undocumented migrants from Venezuela and to respond to international pressure. In Chile, combined with other ongoing constitutional work in the citizenship space as part of a wider reform process, there may be a slow journey towards a different constitutional future for so-called ‘transient foreigners’ and others excluded within the State, but this is currently stalled. Chile has, however, introduced legislation cementing a more limited concept of ‘transient foreigner’, linking this work on citizenship to the wider domain of migration governance.

The Citizenship Regime Change Behind Israel’s Rule-of-Law Crisis

This article delineates the relations between the judicial overhaul launched by Israel’s right-wing government in 2023 and the mechanisms of Israel’s control over Palestinians, demonstrating that they are two parts of a regime change. The essay traces a series of changes in Israel’s citizenship regime the past decade: the enactment of an anti-terrorism law and a nation-state law that defined the exclusive right of Jews to self-determination in Israel; the domestic application of surveillance and control practices developed in the occupied territories; and finally legislation allowing the revocation of Palestinians’ citizenship and the de facto annexation of the occupied territories.

Estonia's “Return to Europe”: The relationship between neoliberalism, statelessness, and Westward integration in post-independence Estonia

Following Estonia's declaration of independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, the country engaged in a fast-paced neoliberal transition to secure its alliance with the West. Simultaneously, the newly independent state decided to exclude the 500,000 Soviet migrants living in Estonia from its citizenry, thereby making a third of its population stateless. The aim of this article is to explore how the three political projects of independent Estonia – that is, creating and maintaining the ethnonationalist citizenship regime, the country's neoliberal transition and Estonia's Westward integration through a “Return to Europe” – have converged, mutually reinforced each other, and become irrevocably intertwined. To this end, the article traces the historical, material and discursive production of statelessness in Estonia. The initial exclusion of Soviet migrants from citizenship was justified on the basis of “restoring” Estonia to its pre-USSR demographic composition. While many left, those who stayed have been treated as a disposable population and face a disproportionally high incarceration rate. This article contributes to the literature on the intersections between ethnonationalism and neoliberalism by demonstrating how the continued mistreatment of the stateless in Estonia has been justified through neoliberal rationality, which casts the domain of the political into an economic register through the valorisation of individual responsibility. We further show how the emergence of neoliberalism has been linked with Orientalist narratives that simultaneously framed the country's economic reforms and ethnonationalist citizenship regime. As such, the Estonian post-independence experience demonstrates how neoliberalism is inherently compatible with ethnonationalist policies, especially when mediated through Orientalist logics.