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P. ZISS
stuckedness by limiting alternative mobility strategies that Syrians accessed as refugees
such as resettlement and applying for asylum elsewhere.
The case of Syrians with citizenship of Turkey shows that legal citizenship did not
necessarily translate into rights in practice. Instead, rights were qualified and conditional
on class and being read as Turkish in a context of high levels of racist discrimination.
While some research on Syrians in Turkey has argued that higher-class Syrians are
largely protected from racist discrimination (Şimşek 2021), my study argues that legal
status overlaps with inequalities based on race and class in ambivalent and complex
ways (see also Gonzales and Sigona 2018; Nimer and Rottman 2021).
More broadly, I contribute to the critical literature on citizenship as a global regime of
population and mobility control (Hindess 2000; Sharma 2020). I argue that the case of
Syrians with citizenship of Turkey questions narratives of a clear and linear hierarchy
between citizenship and other forms of status. Although citizenship in Turkey provided
access to some equal economic and social rights in theory, the high degree of racist dis
crimination as Syrians means that it was simultaneously experienced as a loss of economic
and social opportunities associated with the otherwise highly precarious temporary protec
tion status, including free healthcare and avoiding tax payments. Greater mobility across
and within the borders of Turkey coincided with the closing down of irregular and huma
nitarian mobility strategies in a context where Syrians felt that they could not stay in
Turkey. This ambivalent effect on mobility was not only shaped by the relative value of
Syrian and Turkish citizenship. It was also influenced by their respective position in the
global citizenship regime: the Turkish passport provided relatively greater mobility
rights but was not at the very top of the global citizenship hierarchy. As a result, Syrians
experienced the rights and status associated with Turkish citizenship as simultaneously
mobilizing and immobilizing in spatial, social and economic terms.
Instead of assuming a clear and linear hierarchy between citizenship and other statuses, I
argue to pay closer attention to the complex and nuanced decisions that migrants make
when naturalizing, including difficult choices between deportability, on the one hand,
and ambivalent restrictions of mobility and opportunities, on the other. Citizenship, in
Turkey and elsewhere, should be seen as an ambivalent institution of both status and
rights and of social and mobility control, or in the words of one interlocutor, a ‘knife
with two sides’ that cuts both ways. In this context, I argue to conceive of naturalization
as a technology of territorialization, understood as state practices that perform territorial
sovereignty and reinforce the idea that persons should only have rights as citizens of
nation-states (Malkki 1992; Sharma 2020; de Noronha 2022). Conceiving naturalization
as territorialization, simultaneously mobilizing and immobilizing, can help contributing
to a more nuanced understanding of the hierarchical relationship between different citizen
ships, migrancy and irregularity. While Syrians and other migrants have little choice to nat
uralize to escape the precarity of temporary status and avoid the violence of deportation,
they also invite deeper questions as to whether the status of legal citizenship is the only
means to achieving rights on equal terms.
Note
1. Pragmatic and strategic considerations of citizenship and naturalisation are affectively and
emotionally embedded, as migrants develop a sense of identity with and expectation of