The CITREST project will significantly advance existing empirical knowledge about, and theoretical understanding of, a very timely issue of high social and political relevance: The use that more and more EU member states are recently making of citizenship as a form of restitution. For millions of people around the world this means privileged access to (dual) citizenship and a European passport, as redress for past injustice, but also insurance in the face of present uncertainty, and opportunity for future migration.

This project will investigate this apparent trend from an interdisciplinary perspective, and by focusing on the cases of Austria and Spain – two countries with otherwise very restrictive citizenship regimes. Since September 2020, a new Austrian law entitles all descendants of victims of National Socialism in Austria to acquire citizenship without having to comply with the otherwise very restrictive requirements for citizenship acquisition. A very similar step has been taken by the Spanish government in 2022 through the new ‘democratic memory law’, which offers privileged citizenship access to the offspring of Spaniards exiled during the Franco regime and makes around 700,000 people eligible for Spanish citizenship. It thus significantly extends similar legislation passed in 2007 and will affect many more people than a 2015 law facilitating the naturalisation of Sephardic Jews whose ancestors fled the Iberian Peninsula more than five centuries ago. In both cases, the recent reform not only represents a landmark in terms of how the countries deal with their uncomfortable past, but also provoke many people in different parts of the world to engage with their own family histories that are intimately entangled with this past. From a state perspective, such heritage-based citizenship policy can also serve as a tool for managing the future composition of a country’s population and can function as a complement or even substitute for immigration policy.