Migrations through Law, Bureaucracy and Kin: Navigating Citizenship in Relations

Abstract

This Special Issue analyses how forced migrants’ and non-citizens’ kinning and de-kinning practices and their struggles of ‘doing family’ constitute navigations of citizenship. Forced migrants and non-citizens need to manoeuvre an intersecting net of different bureaucratic, political and legal, but also kin-related social and cultural regimes. In their encounters with state authorities, bureaucrats, and humanitarian workers, and through the material cultures these engender, forced migrants and non-citizens are marked and categorised–often with wide-ranging consequences for themselves and their significant others. This Special Issue traces how legal and bureaucratic inscriptions derive from, but also shape forced migrants’ and non-citizens’ familial status and intimate ties to fictive, legal or consanguineal kin. Centring on migration and displacement to and in Europe and the Middle East, we combine analytical debates from anthropology, gender, migration and citizenship studies. Collectively, this Special Issue suggests that the nation-state and its migration regime are experienced in relational ways, and impact on migrants’ ability to care for and be in relation with significant others.