The Citizenship - Migration Nexus: Citizens, Migrants, Humans?

This Section aims to explore the citizenship-migration nexus and its transformative effects on identity, rights, belonging and community by reflecting on how individuals claim, experience and mobilise around citizenship related issues. Citizenship is usually defined as a legal status, political practice and membership in a political community. If we take citizenship to be the fundamental political and legal expression of membership in a community, as well as the way through which ties of solidarity are built among individual members, then migration can be perceived as one of the most important, if not the most important challenge facing citizenship today. This issue has been at the forefront of recent political and legal debates in Europe (and elsewhere) in the wake of the migration and refugee crises. Even if no solution has been identified, one thing is certain: debates about the citizenship-migration nexus are here to stay. By focusing on this nexus, the Section articulates the need for scholars, policy and lawmakers to rethink if and to what extent citizenship can operate as an inclusionary space; whether the language of (citizenship) rights can capture the variety of relations that exist between individuals and states; how practices of belonging inform our understanding of what citizenship stands for; and whether it is possible to design alternative or complementary ways of cooperation between individuals, whose original background transcend the boundaries of national citizenship. Despite previous attempts to develop other forms of membership – through the lenses of transnational or postnational belonging – claiming membership through national citizenship and using nation-state focused language continues to shape our understanding and practice. The European Union is a good example here of a supranational membership that designed the rights of the people within its jurisdiction in the language of citizenship that transcends the boundaries of national citizenship, even if important questions remain about the extent to which EU citizenship indeed amounts to citizenship at all. At the same time, human rights and migrant rights discourses open up new possibilities of framing citizenship that transcend national boundaries and draw attention to novel ways in which individuals can articulate their claims of belonging, identity or equality. The exploration and advocacy of new ways of belonging beyond the state has been accompanied by accounts (Soysal and Cohen) that describe citizenship as becoming flexible in some circumstances, and weaker in other others (Turner). While transformation is evident in such processes, their causes and interlinking are complex and in need of further interrogation. In order to address the complexities related to the citizenship-migration nexus that is ever so prevalent today, this Section invites theoretical and empirical approaches along the following lines. Panel ideas - Citizenship in Europe: post-national, post-political, not quite supranational: What next? (Chair: Karen Heard-Laureote, University of Portsmouth) The Panel calls for contributions addressing the changes (or indeed lack of changes) in collective activism among citizens and migrants through social movements and civil society organisations, and the role of non/state actors in shaping policy-developments. - Supranational citizenship in regional integration organizations: the interplay between rights, belonging and regional identity (chairs: Carlos Closa, Spanish National Research Council, CSIC & Daniela Vintila, University of Leicester) Drawing on functionalist and diffusionist approaches to institutional design, the Panel welcomes Papers focusing on supranational forms at the aggregate level (i.e. conceptions of supranational citizenship in regional organizations), disaggregate level (i.e. configurations of specific sets of supranational rights) or the national level (i.e. national implementation of specific rights). - EU citizenship and expulsion: is EU citizenship really citizenship? (chair: Elspeth Guild, Queen Mary & Radboud University) The Panel calls for Papers exploring national practices of expulsion of EU citizens, their link with international human rights standards of protection and EU standards designed to safeguard the exceptionality of EU citizenship. - Transnational migrants and access to social rights. (chair Anita Böcker, Radboud University) Relying on Sadiq’s (2008) notion of ‘blurred membership’ to understand the ambiguity of certain migrants' legal statuses in Europe, the Panel calls for Papers addressing blurred spaces of belonging and strategies used by migrants and bureaucrats to deal (cope) with them. - Redrawing political boundaries: What lets us count as equal? (chair: Patricia Mindus, Uppsala University) The Panel rebuts clear cut distinctions between citizens and aliens by focusing on a series of situations in which newcomers are entitled to enjoy or claim bundles of rights within host communities to an extent where it is no longer possible to distinguish clearly between different groups. - Special requirements for special categories - Trends towards particularism in European citizenship policies (chairs: Jeremias Stadlmair, Univ of Vienna and Djordje Sredanovic, ULB) This Panel critically examines the claim that citizenship policies are converging by focusing on understudied citizenship provisions that highlight problematic aspects of the citizenship-migration nexus. - Practicing citizenship in Europe: citizens v migrants (Chair/discussant: Aleksandra Sojka (Harvard University) and Nora Siklodi) The Panel calls for empirical and theoretical contributions addressing recent developments and changes in migrants and citizens’ identity, claims for rights and forms of political participation in a crisis-stirickenEurope. Biographies: Sandra Mantu (PhD 2014) is Researcher at the Centre for Migration Law of the Radboud University Nijmegen. Her research focuses nationality law, EU citizenship and free movement of persons in the EU. Together with Elspeth Guild she has co-edited a volume on labour migration (Constructing and Imagining Labour Migration, 2011, Ashgate). Her PhD examined state practices of citizenship deprivation at the national, regional and international levels combining nationality law and citizenship studies perspectives (Contingent citizenship, Brill, 2015). Nora Siklodi (PhD 2015) is Lecturer in Politics at the University of Portsmouth (UK). Her research interests and publications are in the fields of citizenship and migration studies, especially citizens’ attitudes towards and participation in national and European politics, and, more recently, the role of institutional and societal actors in defending citizenship rights at the national and European levels.