4 P. ZISS broadly, naturalisation and its expected benefits (or lack thereof) are embedded in the relationship between different states and their relative position in the global world order (Constable 2021). Assumptions that migrants are usually better off after naturalization into higher-tier citizenship thus reproduce notions of a mutually exclusive binary between migrants and citizens that does not hold in reality (Gonzales and Sigona 2018) and creates a linear hierarchical relationship whereby ‘having citizenship is better than not having citi­ zenship’ (Macklin 2015, 229). Both obscure how nation-state citizenship is at its core an institution of social and mobility control, not only of imagined outsiders but also of citi­ zens, not least through the imposition of documentation or passports (Hindess 2000; Sharma 2020). Migrant naturalization thereby is also part of bordering practices that regulate the spatial and social mobility of migrants and citizens alike (De Genova 2018). Citizenship, in this view, is one technology of ‘identifying, fixing and immobilizing individuals and populations’ (de Noronha 2022, 433) in a broader discursive field of ‘ter­ ritorialization’: the assumption that a person automatically belongs to a nation associated with a certain territory and can only access rights as an presumably immobile citizen (Malkki 1992; Sharma 2020). This paper seeks to understand how current and former migrants negotiate this terrain of citizenship rights, bordering and territorialization. I view citizenship as a rela­ tional and ambivalent practice that may be simultaneously beneficial and costly, even in circumstances of highly unequal "passport value". Moreover, experiences of naturaliz­ ation may be shaped not only by local inequalities based on class, racialization and gender, as highlighted by critical citizenship literature, but also by the broader availability and accessibility of resources, including those accessed through other legal statuses. While often citizenship provides greater security, rights and mobility, in some cases of highly unequal and stratified citizenship rights, precarious statuses may may come with alternative and flexible opportunities. By appreciating the nuanced experiences, strategies and often difficult choices of people with ‘weaker passports’, I argue for a more nuanced view of citizenship and naturalization as a simultaneously mobilising and territorialising institution that complicates the binary association of citizenship with rights and territorial security, and migrancy with exclusion and involuntary mobi­ lity. Before presenting my empirical material to illustrate this argument, I outline the pro­ cesses and possibilities of migrant naturalization in Turkey, highlighting the special case of Syrians. Citizenship and naturalization of Syrian refugees in Turkey In Turkey, legal understandings of citizenship broadly reflect contestations of Turkish nationhood over the relative importance of republicanism and religious ethnonational­ ism (Yilmaz 2021). After the foundation of the Turkish Republic in 1924, citizenship was part of the state-building project under Mustafa Kemal Atatürk to promote a Turkish republican and national identity based on obligations towards the state and cul­ tural dimensions such as militarism and masculinity (Keyman and Icduygu 2005). The constitution implies that anyone with a relation to Turkish territory could be considered a ‘Turk’ (Içduygu, Çolak, and Soyarik 1999); these republican understandings of citizen­ ship ambiguously overlap with exclusionary and racialised nationalist imaginations of