JOURNAL OF ETHNIC AND MIGRATION STUDIES https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2024.2405061 ‘A knife with two sides’: naturalization and the ambivalent value of citizenship for Syrians in Turkey Paladia Ziss * School of Social Policy, University of Birmingham, Ringgold Standard institution, Birmingham, UK ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY Different legal citizenships and passports are associated with different sets of status, rights and identities. Through naturalization into a higher-value citizenship, former migrants can improve economic opportunities, transnational mobility, and ease relationships. Building on growing research that questions the migrant-citizen binary, this paper asks how citizenship matters in practice through an exploration of naturalization amongst displaced Syrians in Turkey. Drawing on qualitative research with Syrians, some of whom held temporary protection status while others had naturalized, the paper argues that the rights and status associated with Turkish citizenship are ambivalent, simultaneously beneficial and costly. Naturalization provided some economic and social rights and spatial mobility compared to temporary protection status. But Turkish citizenship also reinforced classbased distinctions and racial discrimination, and shaped new forms of exclusion: Syrians forewent certain mobility and economic strategies that they accessed as refugees. The paper argues to conceive naturalization as a technology of territorialization that fixes people onto a certain territory and forces migrants to make difficult choices when negotiating state practices of bordering and mobility control. Paying attention to the simultaneously mobilizing and territorializing effects of naturalization helps to question linear assumptions of citizenship and status hierarchies. Received 11 January 2024 Accepted 11 September 2024 KEYWORDS Migrant naturalization; strategic citizenship; Turkey; Syrians; territorialization Introduction When migrants naturalize, they formally access a ‘combination of status, rights, and identity’ (Joppke 2007, 37) associated with legal citizenship in the contemporary system of nation-states. Growing research shows that both migrants and states use citizenship strategically (Harpaz and Mateos 2019; Joppke 2019). For example, states attract wealthy individuals through citizenship-by-investment schemes. Migrants use naturalization as one instrument to access material rights (Harpaz and CONTACT Paladia Ziss paladia.ziss@bristol.ac.uk @pyziss *Present address: School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK © 2024 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.