Citizenship as Legal Infrastructure

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Abstract

Whenever a person intends to cross a border, citizenship de facto determines—more than any other status—whether that person can enter the territory of another state. Yet, despite its ubiquity and centrality within global mobility infrastructures, the exact mechanisms through which citizenship shapes human movement on the planetary scale remain surprisingly ambiguous. This article examines the multifaceted ways in which citizenship operates as an organizing principle within the complex of rules and norms governing transnational human mobility, including how the increasing acceptance of dual nationality status and the emergence of citizenship-by-investment schemes reverberate throughout the legal infrastructure and create new pathways for elite mobility. Using citizenship as an exploratory lens, thearticletherebyseekstotheoreticallycomplementandnuanceexisting scholarship in migration and mobility studies, arguing that physical space remains the dominant structure for human mobility. As we show, legal infrastructures reconfigure access to human mobility in ways that simultaneously fragment and compress physical space as it pertains to transnational movement.
Original languageEnglish
JournalGerman Law Journal (GLJ)
Volume25
Issue number8
Number of pages27
ISSN2071-8322
Publication statusPublished - Dec 2024

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