The Israeli Citizenship law of 1952 states that Palestinians in East Jerusalem are able to apply for Israeli citizenship in accordance with a number of conditions. Inter alia, these conditions pertain to the length of time they have been resident in East Jerusalem prior to the application; having acquired a level of Hebrew language; and require the applicant to swear an allegiance to the State of Israel. Historically, Palestinians in East Jerusalem have chosen not to apply, on the grounds that it serves as a way of legitimising the settler colonial acquisition of Palestinian land by the Israeli state, and because this could ultimately reduce the likelihood of a future Palestinian state coming to fruition. Yet Permanent Residency is a precarious status in East Jerusalem, and one that can easily be revoked. This paper is based on an ethnography conducted over 20-months between 2016-2018 in a refugee camp in East Jerusalem. It examines the reasoning by which Palestinian refugees, who are Permanent Residents in East Jerusalem are engaging in new ways with the Israeli state, culminating in citizenship applications. Although the number of Palestinians who eventually receive Israeli citizenship are low, I argue that the reasons and processes behind this shift pose challenging questions to the purposes of citizenship acquisition. Scholarship within the anthropology of citizenship tends to focus on reading citizenship applications as an aspiration to be included in a political community. While this literature highlights some of the subversive or insurgent ways that people in different contexts under different kinds of state manage to do so, the Palestinian context tells a different story. Through an analysis of ‘claims’ that Palestinians in East Jerusalem make on the Israeli state through access to healthcare and social welfare, I argue that there is little intention among these East Jerusalemites to participate in Israeli political communities. Rather, a combination of pragmatism and tactical engagement with the state are driving the emerging kinds of social change taking place among refugees in East Jerusalem.
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Investor citizenship programmes have sparked much controversy over the last decade, not the least due to corruption and scandals that surrounded the sale of passports around the world, but also because they challenge our understanding of who is and should be recognised as a citizen. Reflecting a combination of different disciplinary approaches and policy insights, this webinar gathers six scholars in roundtable discussions on the opportunities and challenges of investor citizenship in a globalising world. The webinar is divided into two parts: it first addresses investor citizenship in the context of the much-debated notion of ‘genuine link’ and then explores the benefits and drawbacks of the sale of passports for different stakeholders, and from different perspectives.
To receive the ZOOM link to attend the webinar please REGISTER ONLINE by 25 January.
Organiser: Jelena Dzankic (EUI – Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies)
Globally, though to different extents, naturalisation remains of significant relevance to immigrants as this allows them to access rights restricted to nationals. However, not every state adopts the same rules to condition naturalisation and states with similar eligibility conditions sometimes have very different implementation practices. Focusing on residence-based naturalisation, this presentation takes policy differentiation seriously and aims to build up a systematic, comparative explanation for policy-variation in a global perspective. To assess the extent to which naturalisation policies vary an index is developed that allows determining how inclusive or exclusive individual countries are. This index looks both at the legal dimensions of naturalisation (eligibility requirements, procedural guarantees for applicants, protections against denaturalisation, etc.) and at its implementation dimensions (documentation to provide, use of discretion, levels of bureaucracy involved, etc.). The policy index should serve as an empirical starting point to test different theories explaining policy-variation in naturalisation in a more comprehensive manner than was the case in previous investigations, including theories that claim the existence of a ‘political regime effect’ in naturalisation policies or an impact of colonial legacies on the degree of inclusion of these policies.
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