Women, Citizenship and Migration

How women’s access to citizenship is construed depends on how it is embedded in social policies that are intended to ensure equal citizenship for all. Political and civil rights are viewed as a necessary but not sufficient condition for citizenship. They need to be backed up by social rights that allow people to act as citizens, in a dialectic relationship between social structures and social relations. Global trends in migration have shown that many people are excluded from citizenship in host countries and cannot access civil, political or social rights. Activism around issues of citizenship have become more common. Engin Isen’s concept of “acts of citizenship” allows us to better understand exclusion from citizenship and activism for inclusion, such as grief activism, for example. Papers dealing with migration, activism around issues of citizenship and demands for the inclusion into citizenship are welcome.