‘A knife with two sides’: naturalization and the ambivalent value of citizenship for Syrians in Turkey

Different legal citizenships and passports are associated with different sets of status, rights and identities. Through naturalization into a higher-value citizenship, former migrants can improve economic opportunities, transnational mobility, and ease relationships. Building on growing research that questions the migrant-citizen binary, this paper asks how citizenship matters in practice through an exploration of naturalization amongst displaced Syrians in Turkey. Drawing on qualitative research with Syrians, some of whom held temporary protection status while others had naturalized, the paper argues that the rights and status associated with Turkish citizenship are ambivalent, simultaneously beneficial and costly. Naturalization provided some economic and social rights and spatial mobility compared to temporary protection status. But Turkish citizenship also reinforced class-based distinctions and racial discrimination, and shaped new forms of exclusion: Syrians forewent certain mobility and economic strategies that they accessed as refugees. The paper argues to conceive naturalization as a technology of territorialization that fixes people onto a certain territory and forces migrants to make difficult choices when negotiating state practices of bordering and mobility control. Paying attention to the simultaneously mobilizing and territorializing effects of naturalization helps to question linear assumptions of citizenship and status hierarchies.