Call for papers: “Rethinking migration pathways to Europe through ancestral citizenship acquisition” (IMISCOE 2025)

The 22nd IMISCOE Annual Conference “Decentering migration studies” will be held in Paris–Aubervilliers and online, on July 1st–4th 2025.  IMISCOE (International Migration Research Network) is the largest interdisciplinary network of scholars in the field of migration. This year’s conference is organized with the French Collaborative Institute on Migration (Institut Convergences Migrations, IC Migrations).

Melissa Blanchard (Centre Norbert Elias, CNRS, Marseille), Zeynep Yanaşmayan (DeZim Institut, Berlin) and Zeynep Kaşlı (Institute for Social Sciences, Erasmus University, Rotterdam) call for papers for the panel proposal  “Rethinking migration pathways to Europe through ancestral citizenship acquisition“.  Deadline : October 1st.

This panel explores the nexus between contemporary migrations to Europe and ancestral citizenship acquisitions as a pathway to European citizenship. By this, we refer to the acquisition of the citizenship of a European country on the basis of co-ethnicity and descent by people who were born outside the EU. We aim to stimulate a decentering of the historical and territorial dimensions of the concept of citizenship, revealing intersections (and tensions) between citizenship and migration policies by looking at a legal migration route to Europe that often goes unnoticed.
We propose to approach the topic at different scales, including but not limited to individual and familial motivations for acquiring ancestral citizenship, focus on various mobility patterns after acquiring European citizenship, and the broader implications of this process on imaginaries of citizenship and understandings of mobility justice. We wish to explore ancestral citizenship acquisition practices from an intergenerational perspective, revealing how different generations mobilize ancestral citizenship for various purposes, including transgenerational “return” migration and circulation within Europe. Through a multidisciplinary perspective, the objective of this space is to understand how extraterritorial access to ancestral citizenship influences overlooked migration patterns to the EU and to analyze from a neglected angle the intertwining of migration, diversity, and belonging in Europe.

This panel welcomes contributions based on empirical research that address one or several of the following issues, without being limited to them:

• What aspirations drive individuals to acquire ancestral citizenship and migrate to the EU?
• What are the stages of the process of acquisition, who are the intermediaries of this process, and how is it shaped by intergenerational relations?
• How does this phenomenon reflect the (un)availability of different citizenship and mobility pathways to Europe?
• What is the impact of these so-called return migrations on the European societies that these new migrants/European citizens settle in?

Please send a brief abstract of 250 words together with a very short bio to [email protected] by October 1st 2025.