ABSTRACT Questioning the depiction of pro-migrant solidarity as unequivocal and transformative, the article draws attention to two types of ambivalences evident in the solidarity activism in Mexico. The vacillation between two different goals, that is, protecting migrants’ rights to mobile citizenship (i.e. the right to safe and secure mobility through Mexico) and the right to stay and settle in Mexico, constitutes the first type of ambivalence. We call it the mobility-immobility ambivalence. The second type of ambivalence is between the seemingly transformative discourses and actions and the de facto affirmative outcomes. We call it the transformative-affirmative ambivalence. Both ambivalences are linked to the rapidly changing geopolitical climate that has created uncertainty among Mexican solidarity activists. Based on in-depth interviews conducted in 2019 in Mexico, the article contributes to an understanding of how migrants’ citizenship rights are negotiated and claimed by solidarity activists.

ABSTRACT The paper focuses on the ways in which both state sovereignty and governance in Greece have been challenged by solidarity initiatives in unprecedented intensity. Since the beginning of the ‘refugee crisis’, particularly since the spring of 2015, multiple new actors have been playing a substantial role throughout the country wherever emergency conditions occurred. The paper examines to what extent state sovereignty and civil society have been repositioned through the involvement of these actors in the management of the ‘refugee crisis’. In other words: To what extent has solidarity towards refugees shifted both the scope of state sovereignty and the limits of citizenship? The analysis is based on empirical material gathered from semi-structured interviews with volunteers and activists who have been working with refugees in different settings in Lesbos and in Athens, as well as with representatives of relevant authorities.

ABSTRACT In urban spaces, racial profiling is a widespread police practice that dramatically reveals who is not considered a citizen of the nation. As the so-called majority society tends to see racial profiling as an indispensable police measure to maintain ‘order’ and ‘security’, initiatives of solidarity with people experiencing this form of institutional racism are rare. Nevertheless, a movement against racial profiling has emerged in Switzerland since 2016, protecting People of Color against local border policing and challenging the racialized boundaries of national citizenship. To analyze the convergence of differing solidarity practices, I propose the concept of ‘infrastructure of solidarity’. As I show in the empirical analysis, this ‘infrastructure of solidarity’ contesting racial profiling consists of a diverse set of actors deploying various forms of (counter-)knowledge and different political, social and spatial registers: from being involved in direct actions within urban citizenship struggles to artistic interventions and activist research to highly professional strategic litigation; and from solidarity as intimate, friendship-based care relationships to more strategic political relationships.

ABSTRACT Moving past the literature on states granting migrant voting rights, in this article I focus on individuals exercising rights in order to question the connections between (non)citizenship, political membership, and participation in contemporary societies. With over 120 countries worldwide having enfranchised migrants in some form, the binary of ‘here’ and ‘there’ is insufficient to categorize and study migrant political engagement. This article contains a new typology to classify the four options of migrant voting: immigrant (only in the destination country), emigrant (only in the origin country), dual transnational (in both), and abstention (in neither). While emigrant voting requires citizenship, immigrant noncitizen voting does not, so active noncitizen voting weakens the defining dimensions of citizenship as a concept. As a first application, I analyze differences between individuals pertaining to each of the four types, based on a 2017 survey of 680 migrants in Chile since this country grants extensive migrant suffrage rights.

ABSTRACT In 2018, the state of Israeli citizenship completed a long-anticipated transformation. The passage of the Nation-State Law represented a formal and substantial reordering of the Israeli political sphere and the long-held contention that it prioritized democratic citizenship. Redefining the Israeli state in exclusively ethnic terms, the new law places its Palestinian citizenry in a precarious position, neither fully stateless, nor fully citizen, and in a state which dangerously approaches ‘inhuman.’ Drawing on the works of Jewish humanist philosopher, Hannah Arendt, we further develop the conceptual category to which she alludes in The Human Condition and Origins of Totalitarianism – ‘half-statelessness.’ Applying Arendt’s arguments to the Palestinian case, we deepen previous analyses of the new Basic Law and citizenship studies more broadly, demonstrating how Israeli citizenship’s continuous evolution has reached its legislative apex and produced a phenomenon which transcends the typical prototypes of citizen and state and effectively de-humanizes its Palestinian citizens.

ABSTRACT The absence of an internationally-mandated peace process for Syria has allowed the Syrian regime to embark on a post-conflict reconstruction process unperturbed by international norms and actors. The emergent illiberal peace in Syria extends the conditions of war and violence into the post-conflict period through the creation of new citizenship regimes that bifurcate Syrian society into the reconciled and settled, on the one hand, and the unsettled and cast out, on the other. The post-conflict citizenship regimes in Syria are generated through a series of new laws around property ownership, military desertion, absenteeism, and political amnesty that are informed by a discourse of abandonment, betrayal, and desertion that casts some Syrians as loyal and worthy of citizenship, and others as disloyal and worthy of being cast out of citizenship. The bifurcation of Syrian society into the loyal and disloyal occurs through government-led processes of ‘reconciling’ with former rebel fighters and ‘settlement’ with civilians. In both cases, fighters and civilians have to prove their loyalty to the homeland in order to secure an albeit precarious return to citizenship and rights. Those denied settlement or reconciliation are simply denied citizenship rights and legal identity in Syria.

ABSTRACTThere is considerable variation in how countries deal with the presence of migrants lacking a legal right to stay. We present an analysis of the post-arrival migration enforcement regimes of European countries using a two-phased mixed-methods approach. The article (1) provides the currently best possible statistical overview of forced and assisted return in 12 European countries among rejected asylum seekers from six source countries, and (2) explores policy practices in six Western European and Scandinavian countries regarding deportability and effective non-deportability. While most rejected asylum seekers examined do not demonstrably return, we see highly divergent return patterns between host countries, and significant policy differences. The article thus shows the importance of better examining variation in post-arrival enforcement policies and their underlying interests and capacities. There is not one unified ‘deportation regime’; there are at least four ideal-typical ‘post-arrival enforcement regimes’: thin, thick, targeted, and hampered.

ABSTRACTThis study examines naturalization choices and processes among Filipina marriage migrants in South Korea. Drawing on interviews with 89 Filipina marriage migrants and nine of their spouses, we show how naturalization can become a site of bargaining where female marriage migrants strategize to maximize security and optimize their life options within a patriarchal host society. Citizenship is, for most marriage migrants, informally tied to their fulfillment of gendered expectations as wives, mothers and daughters-in-laws. As such, Filipina marriage migrants’ political incorporation cannot be separated from their gendered performance in the family. We also examine how personal resources such as education and employment prospects influence migrants’ bargaining potential. By focusing on the different social positions of and resources available to female marriage migrants, we show the complex ways in which both gender and human capital influences marriage migrants’ legal and substantive citizenship.

ABSTRACTOn the margins of Zimbabwe’s expanding capital Harare, the ruling ZANU–PF party promotes a view of access to urban land, housing and security as ‘gift’, conditional on demonstrations of party loyalty. This article discusses contestation over this form of partisan citizenship, making the following broader arguments. First, it argues that the notion of partisan citizenship draws attention to the role of party political affiliation as a source of differential entitlements in illiberal democracies, countering a tendency to emphasise ethno-regional, racialized or religious communal identities as the primary sources of graduated citizenship in Africa. Second, it casts clientelist subjection as a contextual and contentious domain of ideas and action, rather than presenting it as cultural persistence or reducing it solely to material bargaining. Third, the article uses the Zimbabwean case to caution against a tendency within debates over southern urbanism to celebrate land occupations and informal construction as political resistance and route to full citizenship. In these ways, the article offers partisan citizenship as a means of taking forward debates over re-configurations of citizenship in Africa’s illiberal democracies and the politics of precarious peripheries in the urbanising global South more broadly.

ABSTRACTThis paper critically interrogates the notion of ‘citizenship’ from the politically-charged perspective of Russian speakers in Estonia. Drawing on a broad range of critical citizenship literatures, and ethnographic examples from the borderland city of Narva, we propose re- and de-centring citizenship away from universalising conceptions, towards a historically and culturally grounded horizontal perspective on citizenship. While cognisant of dominant, state-centric approaches in Estonia, we present citizenship as a process unfolding through individual, everyday practices of belonging. We demonstrate how Russian speakers, excluded from membership in the Estonian community, can still become members in many less-formal ways, through vibrant interaction with local space.