Workshop “Ancestral Citizenship in Motion: Migration and the Politics of Extraterritorial Belonging”
In an era marked by shifting migration policies, contested identities, and global reckonings with historical injustice, this workshop interrogates the growing significance of ancestral citizenship as a pathway to mobility, restitution, and belonging.
We invite scholars, practitioners, and civil society actors to explore how extraterritorial acquisition of ancestral citizenship are reshaping migration trajectories and challenging conventional notions of nationhood within and beyond Europe. By ancestral citizenship, we refer to the (re)acquisition of citizenship based on descent, co-ethnicity, and historical restitution or compensation, often by individuals and families born outside the territory of the granting state.
Part of the research project Unmaking the Past, Making the Future: An Intergenerational Analysis of Ancestral Citizenship and Visions of Europe, this two-day hybrid workshop seeks to bridge academic and policy debates while fostering cross-regional and interdisciplinary dialogue. While much attention has been paid to territorial and birthright forms of citizenship, this event seeks to illuminate how ancestral ties—whether real, imagined, or bureaucratically constructed—open up extraterritorial routes to citizenship across diverse contexts and shapes migrations pathways, mobility strategies and experiences of belonging. Moreover, this workshop aims to investigate this often-overlooked legal and safe migratory route and interrogate its intersections—and tensions—with migration and citizenship policies.
The workshop invites contributions that decenter dominant, territorially bounded notions of citizenship, migration, and belonging and focus on legal and social infrastructures and (affective) sites of navigation related to acquiring ancestral citizenship. We would like to bring together researchers inquiring how ancestral citizenship acquisition operate across different world regions, and how they intersect with broader patterns of migration governance, mobility justice, and racialized, gendered, and intergenerational experiences of migration. We are also interested in how ancestral citizenship claims interact and intersect with legal and political debates around dual citizenship since states vary widely in their acceptance or restriction of multiple citizenships.
Key Themes
We welcome empirically grounded and theoretically informed contributions that examine ancestral citizenship at multiple scales—from individual motivations and family strategies to broader migration infrastructures and national and international policies. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
1. Legal Architectures and Policy Paradoxes
- What are the broader social and political implications of ancestral citizenship claims for concepts of nationhood, diaspora, restitution, and return? How are these processes racialized, gendered, and negotiated across generations?
- How does ancestral citizenship relate to other, less accessible or more precarious pathways of migration and mobility? In what ways does it produce or contest inequalities of access and belonging?
2. Intergenerational Relationships and the Role of Intermediaries
- How do national stances/restrictions on dual citizenship shape the motivations, strategies, and experiences of those seeking ancestral ties as a pathway to mobility or restitution? What do these negotiations reveal about the meanings attached to ancestry, identity, belonging and historical justice in different national contexts?
- How do individuals and families mobilize ancestral citizenship claims to access opportunities for migration, settlement, and mobility? How can we think of aspirations differently from personal, familial, intergenerational points of view?
- What actors, institutions, and infrastructures facilitate ancestral citizenship acquisition, and how are these shaped by intergenerational relationships? How do their roles vary across different geographic, legal, on-site/online and social contexts?
3. Imaginaries of Restitution and Return
- How do ancestral citizenship provisions engage with legacies of colonialism, genocide, or forced displacement?
- How does the use of ancestral citizenship reshape migration imaginaries and contest traditional narratives of citizenship, borders, and nation-states historical responsibilities?
