Call for written contributions and invitation to workshop in Cologne, Germany, June 2015

Naturalization policies and practices worldwide

International migrants need to naturalize in the country of reception if they want to become legally equal members and to have access to all citizenship rights, most notably to the right to vote. During the last decade, nationality policies in many countries (most visibly perhaps in Western Europe) attempted to make it more demanding to become a new citizen by imposing naturalization tests, and invented new rituals of citizenship ceremonies to attribute profound meaning to the act of becoming a citizen. In this process, national administrations seemed to be inspired by practices of other countries and even outright copy each other, to the extent that there is some convergence in the use of citizenship tests and ceremonies in the western world.
But what is happening in other regions of the globe? In Singapore, to name just one example of a country successfully attracting international migrants, the public policy of immigrant admission and naturalization tries to cautiously select the most capable and most suitable candidates by way of a naturalization procedure called “citizenship journey”. The Hungarian rules on nationality grant easier naturalization to co-ethnics, and other (not only Eastern) European states pursue a similar strategy. When the Venezuelan government has generously naturalized hundreds of thousands of undocumented Colombian refugees since 2004, it did so with the aim to guarantee equality of all citizens and access to fundamental rights –but the administration also applied a clause in the Venezuelan nationality law which contains ethnic preferences.

The research group Citizenship & Migration of the Global South Studies Center (University of Cologne, Germany) invites proposals for written papers on naturalization policies and practices worldwide to be published as a special issue of an international journal by 2016. With this Call for Contributions, we aim at the inclusion of research on regions hitherto less prominent in relation to this broad subject. Besides the USA, Canada, EU, and Australia, little has yet been published about naturalization policies and practices throughout the world. Therefore, we explicitly invite scholars working on Latin America, Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe to contribute with the findings of their investigations.

Possible topics that papers might address include
- the political rational behind access to or exclusion from nationality by naturalization;
- reasons for introducing language and/or country knowledge tests;
- public debates about naturalization or elements of the procedure;
- the conduction of test interviews;
- how certain groups are (de facto) privileged or discriminated against concerning their naturalization;
- immigrants’ decisions to naturalize;
- the various actors involved in the process of naturalization;
- naturalization ceremonies.

Contributors must be prepared to deliver a first draft of the proposed paper by end of May 2015; participate in a two day workshop in Cologne end of June 2015 to discuss all contributions; and prepare the final version of their paper (of max. 8000 words incl. notes and references, in English) by end of October 2015. The GSSC will cover travel to Cologne and lodging during the workshop.

The paper proposal is to be submitted by December 8, 2014, and should include the following information:
- name, affiliation, contact details, and short CV of the author
- title, abstract (of max. 250 words) and five keywords of the paper.

Please note that you must agree to publish in an international journal (e.g. Citizenship Studies) yet to be decided should your paper be selected and the proposals be accepted by the journal. Hence the proposed contribution must be unpublished work. Please don’t submit proposals for work already committed elsewhere. The workshop in Cologne is tentatively scheduled for June 25-26, 2015. Please indicate if your participation in the workshop depends on (or excludes) a specific date.

Proposals for contributions and participation in the workshop are to be submitted by December 8, 2014, to Tobias Schwarz, t.schwarz@uni-koeln.de. All applicants will be informed of the decision of acceptance or not by end of January 2015.