POSTCOLCIT

Decolonisation set in train a massive migration of formerly colonised peoples towards former European metropoles. Studies on this phenomenon have pointed to the crucial role of citizenship redefinitions within former colonial powers as either enabling or hampering postcolonial migration. To date, the dominant view in existing scholarship is that such citizenship redefinitions form a closed chapter of (post)colonial history. POSTCOLCIT calls into question this dominant view by setting out to unpack the continuing impact of postcolonial citizenship redefinitions on the lives of formerly colonised subjects and descendants. It opens a ground-breaking line of enquiry on contemporary ‘acts of postcolonial citizenship’, i.e. practices of (re)affirmation of postcolonial citizenship rights within formerly colonial powers. These acts take multiple forms, from narratives of how individuals and families experience citizenship laws and policies to actual litigations and collective mobilisations against specific citizenship laws and policies. POSTCOLCIT articulates an ambitious comparative and longitudinal perspective on postcolonial claims to citizenship, starting from 1960 and the adoption of the United Nations Declaration on Decolonisation until today. The comparison will extend to four major former European colonial powers: Belgium, France, the Netherlands and the UK. Postcolonial claims to citizenship will be investigated through administrative archives, case law analysis and interviews with formerly colonised subjects and descendants, intermediaries (civil society organisations, lawyers) and public authorities implementing citizenship policies. Building on an interdisciplinary perspective at the crossroads between citizenship and migration studies and legal consciousness studies, POSTCOLCIT will pursue three main research and innovation objectives. (1) Whereas existing studies only provide unsystematic and descriptive evidence on postcolonial immigrants’ attitudes towards the citizenship of former colonial powers, POSTCOLCIT will compare and explain patterns of attitudes across groups of postcolonial immigrants within different domestic contexts. (2) It will interrogate the emergence of a new repertoire of claims to citizenship, i.e. reparative claims to postcolonial citizenship, based on the idea that citizenship should compensate for past injustices and exclusions linked to colonisation/decolonisation. (3) It will account for the responses of public authorities to practices of citizenship rights-claiming among postcolonial immigrants and descendants. Meeting these three objectives, POSTCOLCIT will have major impacts for academic research and society. It will substantially advance our understanding of ongoing mobilisations within European postcolonial polities on the perpetuation of colonial legacies. These mobilisations do not only deal with the continuing presence of the colonial past in the public space (e.g. museums, universities); they include the practices of citizenship rights-claiming that POSTCOLCIT will study and through which formerly colonised subjects and their descendants emerge as active negotiators of the colonial heritage of citizenship laws.