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INTEGRIM Third Annual Conference

3rd Annual Conference of INTEGRIM Network
CITIZENSHIP IN MOTION: RESPONSES TO INCREASING TRANSNATIONALITY
20 November 2015
Venue: Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations, Koç University
İstiklal Caddesi No:181, Beyoğlu, Istanbul

The world population is on the move. Along currently highly problematized asylum seeker and irregular migrant flows, a significant share of migrants are moving within confines of legal migration regulations for settlement, work, and education. Moreover, regular migration more often includes transnational activity, which challenges the current state-citizen relations as taking place in a strictly defined territorial space. Citizenship policy is becoming increasingly politicized. Changes in citizenship policy interact with state’s migration policy, internal policy and foreign policy, and introduce dilemmas when trying to accommodate interests in relations with, inter alia, diaspora, minority communities and their kin-states, and international organizations.
The aim of this conference is to address the nature of changes in perceptions and policies of citizenship, and on how these changes reflect on immigrant interaction. Issues as the centrality of the notion of nation in the understanding of citizenship, the expansion of citizenship rights across geographical space, as well as economic, cultural, and social dimensions of citizenship will be addressed at the conference to provide a comprehensive outlook on the challenges and opportunities for citizenship provided by increase in transnationality. Perceptions of citizenship must be discussed across various levels of analysis, from the individual to the society, the state, and the international community.
The conference expects presenters and participants from political science, sociology, anthropology, history, economics, law, human geography and others, encouraging interdisciplinary debates and exchange of ideas.

CONFERENCE PROGRAMME:

8:30 – 9:00 Registration
9:00 – 9:15 Introductory remarks: İlke Şanlıer Yüksel, Migration Research Center at Koç University, İstanbul
9:15 – 10:30 Keynote lecture by Engin Isin, The Open University
Conventional Approaches to Citizenship Studies and their Critics
Introduction and Facilitation: İlke Şanlıer Yüksel, Koç University
10:30 – 10:45 Break
10:45 – 13:00 Morning session:
Chair: Prem Kumar Rajaram, Central European University
Costica Dumbrava, Maastricht University
The Politics of Citizenship and Ethno-Demographic Survival Margit Fauser, Bielefeld University
Lifestyle Migration and Transnational Privilege: German Retirees on the Turkish Coast
Blanca Garcés-Mascareñas, Pompeu Fabra University
Deservingness Frames on Citizenship: Residence, Performance and Vulnerability
13:00 – 14:00 Lunch
14:00 – 15:15 Keynote lecture by Yasemin Soysal, University of Essex
Immigration, Citizenship, and Human Rights: What is New?
Introduction and Facilitation: Ahmet İçduygu, Koç University
15:15 – 15:30 Break
15:30 – 17:45 Afternoon session:
Chair: Ahmet İçduygu, Koç University Peo Hansen, Linköping University
EUropean Citizenship in Crisis Evren Balta, Yıldız Technical University and Ozlem Altan, Koç University
Transnational Values of Citizenship: The Case of the American Passport Marlou Schrover, Leiden University
Gender and Citizenship from a Historical Perspective

Abstracts in the Order of Talks
Engin Isin
Conventional Approaches to Citizenship Studies and their Critics
Between 1949 and 1989 T.H. Marshall’s interpretation of citizenship as a group of civil, political, and social rights more or less held sway in Euro-American social sciences. Since 1989 however critique of Marshall coincided with rapid transformations in not only Euro-American states but also in Africa, Asia, Latin and South America and the Middle East developed. It is very difficult to say whether this critique was witnessing or performing pivotal changes in how we understand citizenship. The critique overturned several of Marshall’s assumptions: that civil, political, and social rights developed in sequence, that the British experience was applicable to European and American let alone African, Asian, Middle Eastern experiences, that rights were only civil, political, and social, and that citizenship was essentially about amelioration of social class conflict. By overturning these conventional assumptions what is now considered as ‘critical citizenship studies’ began documenting that civil, political and social rights can be synchronous as well as asynchronous, dispersed as well as concentrated, and social and political struggles could involve new rights such as sexual rights, women’s rights, environmental rights, animal rights and digital rights. Moreover, critical citizenship studies documented the convergence between citizenship and human rights and how claiming rights could cross borders. Finally, critical citizenship studies also warned against taking the existing citizenship rights taken for granted as neoliberal regimes have variously eroded them. Now, after almost thirty years of this critique, we not only have a radically dynamic understanding of citizenship but also radically dynamic ways of studying it.
Panel 1
Costica Dumbrava
The politics of citizenship and ethno-demographic survival
Many countries in Europe grant preferential access to citizenship on ethno-cultural grounds. This trend overlaps with several demographic changes (low fertility rates and increased immigration/emigration) that pose serious challenges to the economic, social and cultural survival of nation states. This presentation explores the politics of ethnic citizenship in Europe through the lens of demographic changes. What is the real or expected demographic impact of preferential citizenship based on ethno-cultural grounds? To what extent have citizenship policies been used as tools for ethno-demographic survival?
Margit Fauser
Lifestyle Migration and Transnational Privilege: German Retirees on the Turkish Coast
While the classic version of modern citizenship refers to membership in a national political community and state most research on migrants’ citizenship concentrates on their situation as immigrants within their country of residence. In focus are access to formal legal citizenship as well as the social and political rights and other substantial aspects that exist for non-status citizens in many immigration countries. In this research the implications of migrants’transnational attachments and the various expressions of dual and transnational citizenship have also started to receive attention. However, when it comes to the external dimension of membership, or transnational citizenship, research is less abundant, and existing studies center around dual citizenship allowance on part of emigration states and cross-border voting rights from abroad. Other dimensions of emigrants’ transnational membership have hardly been considered.
In this contribution I propose the study of transnational membership of emigrants, considering both formal and substantial aspects. Furthermore, rather than engaging with the more marginalized groups, I consider a relatively privileged group, notably the lifestyle migrants, that constitute a crucial case to explore contemporary reconfigurations of membership in the age of global mobilities. This type of mobility constitutes part of ‘reverse migrations’, broadly speaking moving from richer to poorer countries. In empirical terms I use a case study on German senior citizen retirees who settle temporarily but also often permanently in the Turkish coastal town of Alanya. It is the aim here to explore their transnational membership that informs their privilege in cross-border as well as local perspective.
Blanca Garces Mascarenas
Deservingness frames on citizenship: residence, performance and vulnerability
In this presentation I will discuss how the boundary between citizens and non-citizens is constantly negotiated at the formal policy and discursive level. By analysing immigration and integration policies as well as current political debates on immigrants and refugees in Europe, I will consider what makes a foreigner a more or less deserving citizen. I will show how the chances to deserve depend on frames based on residence, performance and vulnerability and how these are used differently at different administrative levels and depending on different categories of immigrants.
Yasemin Soysal
Immigration, Citizenship, and Human Rights: What is New?
Panel 2
Peo Hansen
European Citizenship in Crisis
The debate over migration in the EU is no longer confined to the EU’s external asylum and migration policy. Rather—and certainly much propelled by the growing crisis-induced disparities between member states and the increasing anti-immigrant tendencies in the EU—the eroding commitment to migrants’ social incorporation can now also be seen to be catching up with the very institution of free movement in the EU itself. More and more, a formerly commended free movement of EU citizens is being recast as a detrimental immigration of “welfare tourists”. Accordingly, many EU members at the centre are now calling for restrictions on free movement from the peripheral members, requesting, above all, a curtailment of the social provisions that until now have formed an integral part of the EU’s citizenship and free movement regime. This could be seen as calling into question the whole edifice and hence the whole future of EU citizenship as we know it. As with the current refugee crisis, it could also be taken as a sign that many of the features of the EU’s external migration policy are about to be internalized—reflecting a larger core-periphery dynamic currently being internalized within the EU—with a socially embedded free movement increasingly metamorphosing into a no-frills circular migration.
Evren Balta and Ozlem Altan-Olcay
Transnational Values of Citizenship: The Case of the American Passport
Passport is the regulatory instrument of residence, travel, and belonging; thus it represents the contours of citizenship. This paper aims to explore transnational values of citizenship, by approaching the American passport as an idea and practice among its holders outside of the United States. The literature on citizenship has discussed how having political membership in well-off polities plays a crucial role in the distribution of basic social conditions and life opportunities on a global scale. It has also debated whether the value and meaning of national citizenship regimes are on the decline in an age of globalization. These findings lead to conclusions about place-specific nature of citizenship regimes, which play a fundamental role in life-chances of individuals. We move a step further and explore the meanings and values membership to well-off-polities has outside of the borders of that specific polity. The paper is based on interviews with three groups of people, all with permanent residence in Turkey, at the time of the interviews: US citizens born and raised in the US, Turkish citizens who have been naturalized also as US citizens and Turkish citizens who gave birth to their children in the US for purposes of acquiring US citizenship for them. Based on their experiences with and perceptions of US citizenship outside of the US, this paper aims to open up a new discussion of inequalities, emerging around the transnational values of citizenship. We suggest that citizenship can be experienced as a global resource, whose value outside the country of birth is determined at the intersection of geopolitical circumstances and histories of local classification struggles.
Marlou Schrover
Gender and Citizenship from a Historical Perspective
Citizenship is seen as a key element of integration. Citizenship regimes are indicative for the openness of societies to newcomers, and determine integration policies. In popular discourse, citizenship is presented as the crown on a successful integration trajectory. In current political and public discourse, citizenship is equated with integration, civil society and active societal participation. This conflation results from the definition of citizenship at two levels: the juridical and the discursive level (membership of the nation-state and membership of society). People with juridical citizenship can be denied discursive citizenship. At the juridical (or formal) level citizens have rights that non-citizens do not have (voting rights for instance). At the juridical level a sharp distinction is made between citizens and non-citizens. Discursive (or moral) citizenship relates to being (seen as) part of a community or society, and being a virtuous citizen. In recent decades, the sovereignty of nation states has eroded, because of globalisation and the creation of larger political units such as the EU. Yet, this has not decreased the discursive or moral importance attached to citizenship. Discursive citizenship is a vague and flexible notion.
Citizenship regimes are – or were in the past – not the same for men and women. Men could lose their juridical citizenship when they joined a foreign army, and thus morally betrayed the nation. It also meant they moved. Women could lose both discursive and juridical citizenship without ever moving. Between 1850 and 1950, citizenship laws in most countries distinguished between men and women: wives derived their citizenship from their husbands. Women who married foreign men lost their citizenship, acquired the nationality of their husbands, and became foreigners in their country of birth and abode. In several Western European countries women could reclaim their citizenship within one year after the end of their marriage (because of divorce or death of their husbands), but women were frequently not aware of this possibility. The widely used concept of derivative citizenship shows how ideas about juridical and discursive citizenship intertwine, and are gendered. Women are seen as the biological reproducers of ethnic collectivities, and the reproducers of the boundaries of national groups. Women are carriers of national identities. Men monopolize the political and military representation of the nation, while women ‘embody’ the nation as such. Precisely because they embody discursive citizenship, women who out-marry are deprived of juridical citizenship. Over a century, authorities have alienated part of its citizens not because they were foreigners, but because they married foreigners. The acts of women were framed in terms of betrayal, sleeping with the enemy and horizontal collaboration. Through the single act of marriage – with marriage being the choice rather than the loss of citizenship – women were alienated from a society they mostly continued to live in. Integration was a long and winding road, while dissimilation was a walk down the aisle. It seriously questions the idea that citizenship is the crown on the integration trajectory.
In my presentation I look when and why gendered ideas regarding citizenship changed.

INTEGRIM 3rd Annual Conference_Friday Program with bios and abstracts