Workshop “Ancestral Citizenship in Motion: Migration and the Politics of Extraterritorial Belonging”

“The Bureaucracy of Belonging: Spain’s Sephardic Law of Return and the Contradictions of Ancestral Citizenship” – Maria D. Bermudez

Spain’s 2015 Law of Return for Sephardic Jews presents a paradigmatic case of how states deploy ancestral citizenship as symbolic restitution while simultaneously undermining its practical implementation through bureaucratic gatekeeping. Enacted to “correct a historical error” stemming from the 1492 expulsion, this legislation promised Spanish nationality to up to 3.5 million descendants of expelled Sephardic Jews. Yet by its 2019 deadline, fewer than 10,000 individuals had successfully obtained Spanish citizenship—a success rate of less than 0.3%.

This paper examines how Spain’s law transformed historical reparation into a performance of tolerance that privileged symbolic gestures over substantive justice. The legislation’s labyrinthine requirements—including mandatory Spanish language and cultural examinations for speakers of centuries-old Judeo-Spanish dialects, compulsory travel to Spain for notarial verification, and associated costs ranging from €4,000-6,000- created new forms of exclusion that contradicted the law’s stated purpose. How does a state bureaucratically authenticate five centuries of diaspora? What constitutes “sufficient connection” to an ancestral homeland? How is the concept of nationality affected by the impossible negotiation between politics and bureaucracy? The Spanish case reveals how contemporary citizenship regimes struggle to translate complex historical relationships into administrative categories. Applicants faced the absurd requirement of proving their “special connection” to Spain through modern documentation while simultaneously demonstrating ancestry through genealogical evidence that the Spanish state itself had systematically destroyed during the Inquisition.

The law’s genealogy exposes how genocide becomes constitutive of both exclusion and identity formation within nationalist projects. The 1492 expulsion represented more than displacement: it was cultural genocide that forged Sephardic identity through traumatic severance from homeland. Yet Spain’s law treats this genocide-born identity as a bureaucratic category to be authenticated rather than acknowledging how genocidal violence created new forms of belonging that transcend territorial citizenship. By demanding that applicants prove their “connection” to Spain through state-approved cultural markers, the law attempts to domesticate genocide-forged identity, transforming survivors of state violence into supplicants who must demonstrate their worthiness to the very state that created their diaspora. This reveals how ancestral citizenship provisions can weaponize the aftermath of genocide, forcing descendants to perform the cultural authenticity that their ancestors’ expulsion was designed to destroy. The law also fundamentally reshapes migration imaginaries by positioning diaspora as a resource rather than a problem. It contests traditional narratives of Spanish national identity by acknowledging that “authentic Spanishness” exists outside territorial boundaries, carried for centuries in languages, customs, and collective memory. However, by demanding linguistic assimilation from Ladino speakers, whose preservation of medieval Spanish represents extraordinary cultural continuity, the law ironically erases the very diaspora culture it claims to honor. The law’s failure illuminates broader tensions within ancestral citizenship policies: between recognition and restriction, historical justice and administrative control, symbolic inclusion and practical exclusion. While Portugal, which naturalized more than 56,000 Sephardic jews by 2022, offered a parallel program with minimal requirements that attracted thousands of Spanish law applicants, Spain’s approach suggests that bureaucratic complexity served as a deliberate filter, ensuring that only those with significant economic and cultural capital could successfully navigate the process. This article contributes to understanding how states weaponize administrative procedures to manage the “problem” of large-scale ancestral citizenship claims while maintaining the political benefits of appearing historically conscious. The Spanish case demonstrates that in the bureaucracy of belonging, the process often becomes the punishment, transforming reparative justice into its opposite through the very mechanisms designed to implement it.

“Ancestral Citizenship and Mobility: The Case of Hungary” – Szabolcs Pogonyi

This paper analyzes the implications of Hungary’s non-resident citizenship policy, introduced in 2010, on migration and mobility patterns. Using demographic datasets, the paper will show that ancestral compensatory citizenship has important implications for immigration: it facilitates the maintenance of the myth of an ethnically homogeneous nation in the age of migration and globalization.

Instituted by Viktor Orbán’s right-wing government following a landslide electoral victory, ancestral citizenship was framed as both historical restitution and a transsovereign nation-building project. Through fast-track naturalization, ethnic Hungarian descendants of former citizens—regardless of residence—were granted Hungarian citizenship to symbolically reunite the Hungarian nation across borders.

While the government claimed that this policy would strengthen national identity without encouraging outmigration among Hungarian minorities in neighboring countries, the reality has diverged from this expectation. Since 2010, over 1.1 million individuals with Hungarian ancestry born abroad have acquired Hungarian citizenship via preferential naturalization. Drawing on Hungarian and EU demographic data, this paper argues that contrary to government intentions, ancestral citizenship has increased the volume of migration among ethnic Hungarians living abroad. Particularly in less developed neighboring countries, such as Ukraine and Serbia, individuals have leveraged Hungarian citizenship to access better job markets within Hungary and other EU member states. Thus, a policy designed to foster national cohesion has inadvertently facilitated the further dispersion of ethnic Hungarians.

The second section of the paper focuses on Hungary’s internal political landscape, examining the Orbán government's anti-immigration rhetoric and policies since 2015. It shows how the government has employed ethno-nationalist, nativist, anti-multiculturalist, anti-Muslim, civilizationist, and overtly racist narratives in its discourse. This section also discusses the implementation of stringent anti-immigration measures, including the construction of a razor-wire fence along the southern border and the introduction of a zero-immigration policy, which has made it nearly impossible for refugees to apply for asylum in Hungary.

The final section connects ancestral citizenship and immigration by exploring the broader implications of ancestral citizenship in the context of Hungary’s immigration trends. By analyzing longitudinal demographic and migration data, the paper demonstrates that the combination of restrictive immigration policies and the preferential naturalization of ethnic Hungarians abroad has resulted in an increasingly ethnically homogeneous immigration pattern. While the number of ethnic Hungarians immigrating to Hungary has surged, the inflow of non-Hungarians has been deliberately limited—supporting the Orbán government's vision of an ethnically homogeneous nation.

“Navigating the Colour Bar: Ancestral Nationality and the Legal Sorting of Citizenship in Portugal” – MC Loureiro

This paper examines how Portugal’s nationality regime produces racially stratified access to ancestral citizenship. It focuses on three groups linked to Portugal through descent or historical connection: descendants of expelled Sephardic Jews; individuals from former African and Asian colonies; and people from Europe and the Americas with at least one Portuguese grandparent. By juxtaposing these pathways, the paper argues that Portugal’s contemporary regime of ancestral citizenship reproduces colonial patterns of racialised belonging under the guise of neutral legal recognition. Recent legal provisions facilitating the acquisition of Portuguese nationality by descendants of expelled Sephardic Jews have been celebrated as acts of historical justice. Yet these provisions stand in stark contrast to the continued exclusion or bureaucratic obstruction faced by those linked to Portugal through the imperial past. While the former benefit from a streamlined process that affirms their place within a European legal imaginary, the latter are often routed through naturalisation rather than attribution, subject to opaque evidentiary burdens, or altogether denied access on the basis of past indigeneity.

Drawing on original legal analysis of nationality legislation and administrative practices, as well as archival material concerning colonial subjecthood, this paper demonstrates how Portugal's nationality regime operates not through formalised racial criteria but through inherited hierarchies of legal personhood. These hierarchies, established under the colonial indigeneity regime and reactivated through postcolonial nationality law, continue to structure who is presumed to belong, and who must prove it. The paper connects this analysis to a broader taxonomy of stratified citizenship, distinguishing between forms of formal status and material access. It argues that while ancestral citizenship is often framed as a reparative gesture, it frequently functions as a selective filter that legitimates descent-based inclusion for some while foreclosing it for others. Legal ancestry thus becomes a site of racial sorting, where bureaucratic eligibility maps onto deeper histories of civilisation, exclusion, and imperial governance.

By foregrounding these internal asymmetries within the Portuguese system, the paper invites a rethinking of ancestral citizenship not as a singular or progressive legal category, but as a fragmented and contested terrain where the colonial past continues to shape the distribution of rights. It contributes to ongoing debates about restitution, migration governance, and the boundaries of European belonging by showing how access to nationality is not only legally stratified, but also historically burdened.

When Ancestry Fails: Statelessness and the Politics of Negated Descent among Post-Cessation Liberians in Nigeria-Tosin Durodola

This paper examines how post-cessation Liberians in Nigeria confront the structural inaccessibility of reclaiming ancestral citizenship following the withdrawal of international protection. Drawing on  (Tel Aethnographic fieldwork in the defunct Oru Refugee Camp, once a major settlement for those displaced by Liberia’s civil wars (1989–2003), it explores how individuals legally eligible for citizenship by descent are unable to activate these rights due to institutional disengagement, legal ambiguity, and the absence of implementing infrastructure. In 2012, the UNHCR invoked the Cessation Clause, declaring that conditions in Liberia had improved sufficiently to end refugee status. Yet for thousands who remained in Nigeria, cessation marked not the end of displacement, but the removal of all formal protection pathways.

Liberia’s 1973 Aliens and Nationality Law confers citizenship by descent to children of Liberian fathers, while children of Liberian mothers and foreign fathers were historically excluded from this provision unless naturalised. A 2022 amendment removed this gender-based restriction and permitted dual citizenship for the first time in statutory law. However, Liberia’s 1986 Constitution still requires children born abroad to renounce other citizenships upon reaching adulthood in order to retain Liberian nationality. This constitutional constraint, combined with the persistence of bureaucratic barriers, continues to limit the practical realisation of descent-based claims abroad. For displaced Liberians in Nigeria, particularly second-generation youth born in exile, these provisions remain effectively out of reach. Most lack documentation such as birth certificates or national identity cards, and have no contact with Liberian state institutions. Bureaucratic bottlenecks in Liberia’s limited consular representation, combined with the absence of intermediaries or legal support, mean that even informal efforts to secure recognition through diaspora networks often collapse under documentation requirements and administrative silence.

I introduce the concept of negated descent to describe how legally valid ancestral ties remain dormant due to the erosion of state capacity, the weakening of transnational legal infrastructures, and the absence of procedural access. Unlike ancestral citizenship regimes in Europe or Latin America, often tied to projects of restitution, post-conflict redress, or diaspora inclusion, the Liberian case reveals how descent can be legally acknowledged yet practically void. The promise of ancestral belonging, rooted in jus sanguinis and discourses of postwar reintegration, is rendered inaccessible not through explicit denial but through structural non-engagement.

This study contributes to global debates on extraterritorial citizenship by foregrounding a case where descent produces neither mobility nor protection, but prolonged legal and emotional uncertainty. Among second-generation Liberians in Nigeria, ancestral citizenship is experienced as both bureaucratically inaccessible and symbolically disaffiliating. Rather than a bridge to belonging, ancestry becomes a deferred promise; a reminder of political abandonment and procedural exclusion. This paper argues for a rethinking of descent not as an automatic conduit of belonging but as a contingent and uneven process shaped by legal design, political will, and the viability of state infrastructures in the aftermath of displacement. The Liberian case invites broader reflection on how post-conflict states operationalise, or neglect, the legal entitlements of extraterritorial citizens in the aftermath of international withdrawal.

 “Ideological Citizenship and Ancestral Belonging: The Case of the Hungarian State Repatriating Venezuelans of Hungarian Descent” – Judit Molnar

My doctoral research at the University of Oxford has examined the role of home-state ideologies in shaping diaspora subjectivity through an ethnographic study of Hungarian and Venezuelan migrants in London. I was interested in why and how migrants remain emotionally, politically, economically, and socially invested in their countries of origin, as well as the extent to which home state outreach, or the lack thereof, conditions such processes. By juxtaposing two autocratic and populist regimes – Hungary’s far-right nationalism and Venezuela’s far-left socialism – I have explored how the two countries’ diaspora policies structured transnational ties and positioned migrants as potential agents of change.

Over the past two decades, both Hungary and Venezuela have witnessed massive-scale outmigration from their territories, yet their responses have differed significantly. Hungary, in line with other nationalist regimes, has treated its emigrants as integral to the nation and since Viktor Orbán’s ascent to power in 2010, the Hungarian government has institutionalised one of the most comprehensive diaspora engagement strategies in Europe. State-appointed facilitators are dispatched to over 140 locations worldwide to organise Hungarian communities abroad and boost their investedness in Hungary’s future. Through these networks, more than one million passports have been distributed to individuals who demonstrated – or often merely suspected – Hungarian ancestry.

In stark contrast, the Venezuelan state, reflecting the historical stance of socialist regimes, frames emigration, particularly to Western countries, as an act of betrayal and systematically hinders migrants’ political and humanitarian engagement with Venezuela. Yet migrants are not passive recipients of state narratives. They actively negotiate, contest, and selectively engage with these rhetorics, informed by kinship obligations, moral imaginaries of diasporic responsibility, and historically embedded conceptions of citizenship and belonging. Among Venezuelans, the ongoing crisis has also triggered a notable turn towards countries of ancestral origin. Prospective migrants have sought to acquire citizenship through ancestral ties, thereby asserting claims on their symbolic homelands.

This paper focuses on a singular episode emerging from the encounter of Hungarian and Venezuelan migration regimes: a clandestine operation by the Hungarian state to repatriate Venezuelans of Hungarian descent. Although publicly framed as an act of diasporic solidarity, rooted in a decade of Fidesz’s anti-migrant rhetoric, local Hungarians failed to recognise the newcomers as compatriots and treated them with suspicion and hostility, in some cases reporting them to authorities as illegal border-crossers. Disillusioned and alienated, many repatriated Venezuelans leveraged their newly acquired EU citizenship to relocate to Spain, highlighting the limits to the sentimental power grounded in ancestral belonging.

In my contribution, I draw on this episode to introduce my analytical concept of ideological citizenship, which underscores how recognition as a citizen by the two states is predicated less on legal status than on conformity with the state’s political ethos. I then juxtapose this with ancestral belonging as a sentimental and practical orientation amongst migrants, demonstrating how it frequently becomes instrumentalised within struggles over identity, political legitimacy, and contested claims to membership.

“Claiming Germany from Abroad: Ancestral Citizenship and Postwar Naturalization Politics among ‘Old’ Alsatians, 1918-1920” – Devlin Scofield

An array of voluntary and forced migrations followed the First World War in Europe. In the Franco-German borderland of Alsace, newly empowered Republican officials undertook a campaign to categorize the province’s population as either “nationally-loyal” or “nationallysuspect” to ease the reassertion of French sovereignty. Most of the 110,000 people who were subsequently expelled or voluntarily left Alsace were German immigrants or their descendants who had migrated to the province after 1871. Under German law, these individuals resumed their former state citizenship (Staatsangehörigkeit) and simultaneously received national citizenship (Reichsangehörigkeit). Borderland residents whose ancestors lived in Alsace prior to 1871 occupied a more ambiguous national category. Republican authorities, committed to the nationalist image of a patiently abiding Francophile Alsace, automatically bestowed French citizenship on these “old” Alsatians. This applied to Alsatians wherever they resided. Unlike the Treaty of Frankfurt’s nationality options in 1871, the Treaty of Versailles contained no provision for a French-defined Alsatian to decline their reintegration. Not all Alsatians willingly consented to their imminent return to France. This was particularly the case for Alsatian veterans of the Imperial Army or the widows of men who died in its service, living abroad in places such as Switzerland and Austria. However, maintaining their German citizenship proved problematic: lacking previous residency ties with a German state, they faced the prospect of statelessness—a status made even more devastating by the accompanying ineligibility for official aid. This paper examines the efforts of these individuals to (re)claim German citizenship and the responses of Weimar authorities, arguing that their interactions reveal the contested nature and boundaries of postwar German citizenship. An ethno-cultural connection to Germany was only one of several factors considered by Weimar authorities, who did not feel obligated to approve every naturalization petition simply because the applicant had once been a German citizen. In fact, the applications became a forum for symbolically resisting resented postwar French policies and provided the means to exclude certain Alsatian petitioners deemed undesirable. For their part, Alsatians’ petitions demonstrate a strategic interaction with German authorities and naturalization motives that combined elements of genuine national sentiment with an appreciation of the tangible benefits that accompanied maintaining their German nationality. In the end, the study of expatriate old Alsatian communities demonstrates the connection between military service and national inclusion, reveals the limits of German citizenship in the postwar period, and reminds us that national belonging involves more than just blood or residence location—citizenship was also a contested status shaped by geopolitical context, bureaucratic discretion, and personal strategy

(Spät)Aussiedler citizenship: a (non-)contentious matter? A mixed-methods analysis of parliamentary debates in Germany – Zeynep Yanaşmayan, Jonna Rock, Jannes Jacobsen, Simona Maue, Long Nguyen

Grounded in the 1949 German Constitution–article 116(1)–German (late) resettlers from Central Asia, Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe have the right to “return” and claim citizenship in Germany. This “return” migration, which gained particular momentum after the collapse of the Soviet Union, later decreased due to the restrictions imposed, yet remains a sustained legal pathway for an increasingly diverse group. 

This mixed method and multilevel paper unravels shifting political and individual discourses of citizenship, (re)settlement and return since the 1990s. On the one hand, we reveal complex motivations for obtaining German citizenship and, on the other, the justifications put forward by the politicians during the parliamentary debates to grant and/or restrict access to ancestral citizenship.  

For individual – and familial – discourses on ancestral citizenship, we draw on semi-structured interviews with twenty interlocutors originating from present-day Kazakhstan, Romania, Russia and Ukraine and who migrated to Germany in different time periods, analysing their journeys as well as changing perspectives across generations. To explore the discursive changes at the political level, we use topic modelling and sentiment analysis linking the emotional tones in speeches to the biographies of MPs. 

Analysing perspectives on (Spät)aussiedler citizenship through a mixed method approach, advances knowledge about historical reparation and (re)settlement, as well as the relationship between citizenship and migration, potentially pointing at misalignments between individual and political discourses. 

“Ancestral Citizenship as Restitution, Or Selective Immigration Policy?” – Reinhard Schweitzer

Like several other EU Member States, Austria and Spain have recently opened privileged pathways to external citizenship for descendants of the many people who had fled persecution under previous authoritarian regimes. Ancestral citizenship not only offers mobility and other key rights and opportunities for individual beneficiaries (as well as their children) but also fulfils a range of purposes for the nation-state that grants it, including intergenerational continuity and territorial or at least symbolic inclusion of people with familial ties to that state. In some cases, this is part of the necessarily complex and longterm process through which modern nation-states (and their populations) are trying to come to terms with an uncomfortable past. But it can nonetheless also be seen as a tool for managing the future composition of a country’s population and – more or less effectively – function as an ethnically selective complement or even substitute for immigration policy. Since September 2020, an Austrian law entitles all descendants of victims of National Socialism in Austria to acquire citizenship without having to comply with the otherwise very restrictive naturalisation requirements. The overall number of people acquiring Austrian citizenship every year has since then almost doubled, with the new law being the basis for around 40 per cent of these acquisitions. More than half a million people worldwide have been estimated to potentially benefit from this reform, which has already led to a significant growth of the number of Austrians living outside of Austria. An at least on paper very similar step has been taken by the Spanish government in 2022 through the so-called ‘Democratic Memory Law’, which also offers very privileged – although in this case time-limited – citizenship access to the offspring of Spaniards exiled during the Spanish civil war and subsequent dictatorship under General Franco. This provision significantly exceeds a similar law that had been passed in 2007 and – by the end of February 2025 – had already attracted close to 700,000 applications, primarily by people living in Latin America (especially Argentina, Cuba, Mexico, and Brazil). Based on a comparative analysis of legal documents, media coverage, and political debates around these two reforms and their ongoing implementation, this paper first highlights the similarities and key differences between the Austrian and Spanish cases. Secondly, and based on existing literature on these and other cases of citizenship restitution as well as preliminary insights from ongoing fieldwork in Vienna and Madrid, it questions some of the underlying interests, intentions, and official justifications, and thereby helps to explain how and why these reforms have come about. This analysis constitutes the first step of a multi-annual research project funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science that aims to contribute to a better understanding of, and more informed public and political debates about, the role of ancestral citizenship in and for contemporary Europe.

Roundtable: Practitioners’ Insights: Return Migration in Action

Başak Yavcan – Head of Research, Migration Policy Group (Belgium)

Giovanni Maria De Vita – Head of Italea Project – Roots Tourism

Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation (Italy)

Nikita Heidt – Managing Director, Riwwel gUG (Germany)

Katherina Andreeva – Co-founder of ZaVrushtane v Bulgaria (Bulgaria)

“Finding Home in Manitoba: Onward migration of post-Soviet Germans from Germany to Canada”? – Anna Kozlova

Between 1998 and 2012, 12,964 Germans migrated to Manitoba. However, the vast majority of the nearly 13,000 migrants were not born in Germany but in the former Soviet Union (FSU) or its successor states. The Canadian government has attributed this recent surge in German migration to the Manitoba Provincial Nominee Program (MPNP) – a provincial-level migration scheme that seeks to recruit migrants to come and settle in Manitoba as a way to address the province’s slow population growth and labour shortages in various fields. However, the MPNP is only one of the reasons for the migration; historical ties have been an important factor in informing these migrants’ decisions to come and settle in the province. German-speaking Mennonites from Ukraine were the first settlers to migrate to Manitoba in 1873 when the Government of Canada signed a ‘Privilegium,’ providing them with “free land” that they would cultivate. Official languages (English and French) notwithstanding, German is the second most widely spoken language in Manitoba, with 22 percent of the population of the province claiming German ancestry. The recent migrants coming to Manitoba from Germany were born in the former Soviet Union but migrated to Germany using the Federal Expellee Law of 1953, the initial aim of which was to integrate German expellees who were German citizens or ethnic Germans who had lost their home as a result of the consequences of the expulsions that took place during the Second World War. Ethnic Germans believed they were “returning home” when moving to Germany, but upon arrival, they discovered that even though they were considered German by the government, the society did not see them as such. This disconnect left many grappling with a lack of belonging in their adopted homeland, something that they also struggled with in the Soviet Union. Drawing on oral history interviews I conducted, my research examines the multifaceted experiences of ethnic Germans born in the former Soviet Union who migrated to Germany using the Federal Expellee Law and who later re-migrated to Canada, where a number have found a sense of home and belonging for the first time in their lives. My project explores the tension between the state-defined concept of what it means to be German and societal views, shedding light on how ethnic Germans navigated their national identity and belonging amidst multiple migrations. This work asks critical questions about identity, belonging, and the meaning of home.

“‘Europeanness’ as a colonial privilege in migration? Perspectives of Chileans of European descent in Switzerland” – Céline Heini

Drawing on critical whiteness and post/decolonial perspectives, especially on the theoretical discussions on the articulation between whiteness, Europeanness and coloniality, this paper analyses how (white) ‘Europeanness’, as a colonial privilege, can be constructed in one context and sometimes contested in another, in particular through migranticisation processes, often synonymous for racialisation.

These perspectives show that whiteness and coloniality are intrinsically linked and (re)produce processes of racialisation. Migration studies drawing on these perspectives show how the articulation of whiteness and coloniality produces hierarchical categories of migrants, as in the case of immigration policies differentiating according to people’s ‘origin’ and these categories are often used in place of racialized categories. Switzerland is no exception.

Therefore, I propose to put into perspective two national contexts for the construction of whiteness, Chile and Switzerland, based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted with Chileans of European descent who have a migration experience to Switzerland, (1) to examine several spaces in which this whiteness-Europeanness-coloniality nexus operates as a power relation; (2) in doing so, how participants navigate race boundaries across these spaces.

In Chile, participants benefit from the social and economic privileges associated with white Europeanness. In the migration paradigm, they also benefit from the possibility of ‘regaining’ European citizenship (ancestral citizenship) as part of their ‘colonial privilege’ and therefore from a significant advantage in terms of the right to move and the ‘choice’ to remain on Swiss territory.

Participants’ life trajectories highlight the colonial construction of whiteness in Chile and the privileges it confers on people marked as European/white in this context. On the other hand, in the Swiss context, the hierarchical and often racialised categorisations of migration are affecting them at the institutional level and beyond, in their everyday lives, questioning the continuity and the extent of their European citizenship privilege.

“Sacred Returns: Religious Imaginaries, Ancestral Citizenship, and the Politics of Restitution in the Middle East” – Stavroula Koskina

This paper examines how ancestral citizenship in the Middle East is entangled with religious imaginaries of return, exile, and restitution, producing complex tensions between legal belonging, historical trauma, and spiritual redemption. Focusing on Israel and Lebanon, the paper interrogates how claims to ancestral citizenship or recognition are infused with religious narratives of homecoming that often clash with modern state logics of sovereignty, exclusion, and demography. In Israel, the Law of Return grants Jews worldwide a pathway to citizenship, grounded in biblical and Zionist imaginaries of return to the Promised Land. At the same time, Palestinian refugees’ right of return -arguably the most profound case of ancestral citizenship denial- is framed through both secular nationalist and Islamic narratives of dispossession and sacred land. The paper explores how these competing claims mobilize religious affect (martyrdom, chosenness, exile) and shape transgenerational imaginaries of restitution. While in Lebanon, the descendants of Lebanese Christians abroad often pursue ancestral citizenship grounded in Maronite communal memory and narratives of Ottoman persecution or Islamic encroachment. Meanwhile, Palestinian refugees born in Lebanon remain stateless, excluded from citizenship frameworks due to sectarian anxieties, highlighting how religious identity operates as a gatekeeper of ancestral belonging. Through these case studies, the paper argues that ancestral citizenship in the Middle East is not merely a legal process but a religio-political battleground, where notions of sacred history, collective trauma, and divine promise shape access to rights and national membership Methodologically, the paper employs affective narrative analysis to explore how individuals and communities make sense of ancestral return not only as a legal claim, but as a deeply emotional and spiritual experience. Drawing on testimonies, oral histories, and cultural narratives, it concludes by reflecting on how sacralized narratives of return produce hierarchies of suffering and justice, illuminating broader dynamics of mobility, exclusion, and contested memory in the region.

“Imagining Circassianness and Caucasia”– Cemre Erciyes and Didem Baş

This paper aims to look at how the memory of exile and genocide; the idea of belonging to an ancestral “imagined” homeland and diasporic experiences as citizens of multiple states as well as ancestral citizenship regimes shape the identity of the people generally known as “Circassians”. Circassian (or Tcherkess, Cercetes, Ziques, Circasci as used in other western languages; Cherkess, Çerkes or Çerkez in Turkish; Jarkas or Sharkas in Arabic, Charkas in Persian) is a name given to the people’s of the Caucasus. Exactly who it refers to depends on the context as earlier use of the term in the diaspora literature complicates the terminology which is shaped by different political imaginations of the Circassian identity by both insiders and outsiders in different periods. In the narrowest sense it refers to the Adyge (Adyg); though some studies use the term to refer to Adyge and their ethnic kin, the linguistically extinct Ubykh and the Abkhaz-Abaza, and in the widest sense it refers to all North-Caucasian diasporas including the East Caucasian Language speakers Chechens, Ossetians, or even Turkic languages speaker Karachai, etc (Erciyes 2014). Hence the Circassian (or as occasionally used in the diaspora North Caucasian) unity depends on the understanding of belonging to a homeland Caucasus (or Circassia) on the Black Sea Coast, stretching along the North of the Caucasus Mountains. The Circassians, who have been exiled from the Caucasian homeland in the second half of the 19th Century, have developed relations with their ancestral homeland in the last few decades. The political changes in the Caucasus, development of communication technologies and cheaper transportation opportunities increased connection of ancestral descendants to their homeland. Hence various wars and further displacements – such as the Syrian Circassians moving to Turkey, Lebanon, Europe and the Caucasus (Baş Bilge 2019)- forced them to establish new connections with their long lost homeland and develop new diasporic experiences as they had to navigate ancestral citizenship regimes. The political unrests (for example of Syrian Circassians from the Golan Heights who have watched their diasporic homes becoming part of Israel in two different periods or Syrian Circassians settling in the partly recognised state of Abkhazia or in Turkey as they were not allowed to settle in the Russian Caucasus due to strict ancestral citizenship regimes) are creating new imaginations of Circassianness and belonging to the Caucasus. Their citizenships and unrecognised belonging to multiple places where they have been displaced, with the legal frameworks constantly changing, is creating new dimensions of imaginations for their ancestral roots. In this regard, this paper aims to look at how Circassians in the diaspora navigate ancestral citizenship regimes, geopolitical constraints and multiple identities of belonging including religious, citizenship and regional. Drawing primarily on the cases of Syrian Circassians, Turkish Circassians and Caucasian Circassians resettling outside of the Caucasus, we will analyse how legal recognition of ancestry intersects with unresolved historical injustices, dual citizenship restrictions, and intergenerational strategies of belonging.

“Genealogical Judaism: Sephardic Citizenship and the Quest for Jewish Ancestry in Mexico” – Yossi Harpaz

This project examines Spain’s 2015 Sephardic citizenship law from an overlooked angle: engagement with the law by Catholic Mexicans who claim descent from Jewish converts. Although the Spanish law was ostensibly designed to offer restitution to descendants of Jews expelled from Spain in 1492, its framing and implementation rely on an imagination of Sephardic Jews as having maintained linguistic and cultural ties to Spain over five centuries. Thus, the law conditions citizenship on passing tests in Spanish language and civic knowledge. These requirements kept away many Jewish-Sephardic applicants from Israel and elsewhere, leading many of them to apply instead for Sephardic citizenship from Portugal, which has no such requirements. On the other hand, Spain’s Sephardic citizenship law has created an opening for an unexpected population: Latin American Catholic descendants of conversos, i.e. Jews who were forced to convert to Catholicism several centuries ago. Indeed, the three leading nationalities of Spanish-Sephardic citizenship recipients were Mexico, Colombia and Venezuela. This legal ambiguity offers a unique case for analyzing the shifting criteria of belonging, descent, and restitution in contemporary citizenship regimes.

I focus on applicants in northern Mexico, particularly Nuevo León – a region with long-established traditions of crypto-Jewish ancestry. It is one of several regions around Latin America that had a documented presence of conversos and crypto-Jews in the 16^th and 17^th ago and now see a surge in applications for Sephardic citizenship. The study draws on over 60 interviews with applicants and genealogists from Mexico. Professional genealogists play a key role in applications for ancestral Sephardic citizenship, as they establish genealogies tracing lineages to individuals who were tried by the Inquisition in the 15th or 16th centuries. Genealogies must be approved by Spanish authorities and the Federation of Jewish Communities of Spain to establish eligibility for citizenship. The project documents how genealogists produce new knowledge by drawing on genealogical information from religious and secular sources. The study focuses on a sociological analysis of the perspective of citizenship applicants: how they make sense of their discovered Jewish ancestry and how it reshapes their identity and their relation to the history of their family and their region, as well as the way they reformulate their relation to Catholicism, Judaism, Mexico and Spain.

This study contributes to three core workshop themes. First, it sheds light on the unintended consequences of ancestral citizenship policy, exposing the policy paradox at the heart of Spain’s Sephardic law and the tension between the assumption of ethnonational affinity to Spain and actual Sephardic-Jewish identity. Second, it contributes to the rich literature on migration and citizenship industries by highlighting an overlooked type of intermediary, namely genealogists. Third, it theorizes a distinct imaginary of a Jewish identity – one that is not religious, ethnic or religious, but rather relies on certified descent and bureaucratic recognition from a victimizing country. In doing so, the paper offers a new framework for understanding how ancestral citizenship regimes generate forms of extraterritorial belonging that are at once strategic, affective, and historically constructed.

“Ancestral Citizenship and the Politics of Belonging: Reflections from the Immigration Museum of São Paulo (Brazil)” – Henrique Trindade

In Brazil, the acquisition of ancestral citizenship, understood as the extraterritorial (re)acquisition of nationality based on descent or historical ties with European states, has become an increasingly significant strategy for individuals seeking mobility, security, and recognition. The Immigration Museum of São Paulo, located in the historic building of the former Hospedaria de Imigrantes do Brás, plays a unique and understudied role in this process. Between 1887 and 1978, the site received over 3.5 million immigrants of more than 70 nationalities. Today, it functions not only as a site of memory but as a dynamic institutional space for researching and substantiating citizenship claims through the Center for Preservation, Research, and Reference (CPPR), established in 2016.

Over 80% of the CPPR’s users consult the museum’s archives primarily to obtain documents that enable applications for European citizenship, mainly Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, German, and Polish. This phenomenon is not merely bureaucratic; it reveals affective and intergenerational imaginaries of restitution, identity, and belonging. These searches are often entangled with romanticized narratives of European ancestry, which ignore or obscure the racialized and selective immigration policies that shaped Brazil’s history.

This paper argues that museums in the Global South, particularly those involved in preserving immigration memory, are increasingly becoming intermediaries between personal genealogical pursuits and transnational legal infrastructures. The Immigration Museum’s role extends beyond the archival: it actively shapes visitors’ understandings of their own family histories, of Europe, and of Brazil. Through courses, public events, and direct contact with researchers, the museum fosters critical reflections on historical injustice, the racialized logics of citizenship regimes, and the persistent inequalities in global mobility.

We explore how the museum, as a space of both knowledge and affect, contributes to the symbolic and material construction of ancestral citizenship as a legal and moral claim. While often perceived as a privilege accessible only to the few, ancestral citizenship also reflects broader aspirations for stability, recognition, and historical redress. At the same time, visitors are frequently confronted with unexpected obstacles, bureaucratic delays, documentation gaps, and experiences of xenophobia or racism abroad, that challenge idealized notions of return and belonging.

By analyzing the Brazilian case through the lens of the Immigration Museum, we propose a shift in the way ancestral citizenship is studied: from a legal or policy-centric approach to one that incorporates institutional mediation, affective narratives, and historical consciousness. Museums, in this context, are not neutral repositories of the past, but active agents in shaping how the past is mobilized to imagine new futures.

This contribution thus seeks to expand the understanding of ancestral citizenship acquisition by foregrounding the role of cultural institutions in negotiating identity, belonging, and justice, particularly in postcolonial and “post-migration” societies. It invites a broader interdisciplinary dialogue on how heritage spaces navigate and influence contemporary struggles over who has the right to move, to belong, and to remember.

“Online Promoters: Sharing/Selling/Advocating for Ancestral Citizenship in Italy and Bulgaria” – Zeynep Kaşlı, Marhabo Saparova, Melissa Blanchard, Thales Speroni

This paper examines the role of digital intermediaries in mobilizing emotions to promote, sell, and advocate for ancestral citizenship acquisitions in Italy and Bulgaria. Over the past three decades, the growing popularity of this legal pathway has been accompanied by increasing complexification and bureaucratization, which has led to its widespread commodification. Lengthy procedures, fragmented administrative systems, and juridical hurdles have created fertile ground for a flourishing industry of brokers—including lawyers, consultants, interpreters, genealogists, and, crucially, social media influencers—who facilitate applicants’ navigation of ancestral citizenship processes.

Our analysis builds on the literature on intermediaries and brokers in migration and citizenship regimes. Research has shown how intermediaries act as meso-actors, shaping both state practices and migrant strategies (Deniz & Çetinkaya 2024, 2025), and how transnational firms in the investment migration industry exercise considerable power in global governance (Kalm 2023). More recently, the concept of migration influencers has expanded this lens by examining how digital actors on platforms like YouTube or Instagram guide, inform, and emotionally prime aspiring migrants before they move to the desired destination (Hwang 2025). We situate our analysis within this emerging literature, focusing on how influencers not only provide practical advice but also shape imaginaries and aspirations through affective registers.

Empirically, we examine 20 Instagram profiles (10 per case) that market commercial services related to Italian and Bulgarian ancestral citizenship. The services range from basic document retrieval from civil or religious archives to “all-inclusive” packages that promise seamless bureaucratic navigation. Through a combined textual and visual analysis of their posts, stories, and reels, we investigate how these influencers mobilize emotions to attract and reassure clients. Our preliminary findings suggest that emotions such as hope, desire, pride, apprehension, and even urgency are central to their strategies. These affective appeals transform citizenship from being merely a legal status into a dream to be pursued, a right to be claimed, and a heritage to be honored.

By foregrounding the affective and digital dimensions of brokerage, this paper contributes to broader debates on the commercialization of citizenship, the digitization of migration and citizenship infrastructures, and the emotional economies of mobility. It shows how ancestral citizenship is increasingly mediated and sold through the curated emotional worlds in social media platforms.