SFM - Schweizerisches Forum für Migrations- und Bevölkerungsstudien

Puzzle

In The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), Hannah Arendt, a German-born former refugee and naturalised American, famously defined citizenship as ‘the right to have rights’. Because they no longer belonged to ‘any community whatsoever’, she argued, refugees were reduced to the ‘abstract nakedness of being human’. Her diagnosis of the tension between the universal rights of humans and the particular rights of citizens still resonates. To be sure, refugee law has changed dramatically since 1951, the year the Convention relating to the Status of Refugees was adopted in Geneva, and the consolidation of a global forced migration regime has transformed international and domestic legal practices over the past seven decades. Yet today, as in the past, the refugee condition results from the rupture of the political bond between a person and her state of citizenship. Countries of asylum may acknowledge her claim and offer protection, but they neither replace nor repair that bond, at least not upon recognition. Hence, in most areas of the world, forcibly displaced persons remain durably deprived of the political power of citizenship in both home and host countries. The depth of this deprivation, however, varies substantially across geographical, political and historical contexts: whereas some refugees have been durably treated as humans confined to ‘bare life’, others were gradually turned into citizens entitled to participate in political life.

Approach

Rooted in comparative political science and drawing on the two interdisciplinary sub-fields of forced migration and citizenship studies, our project aims to uncover how and why forced migrants are alternately included in or excluded from their political community of origin and/or of asylum. Conceptually, it approaches refugees as ‘transnational denizens’: individuals who, having been forced out of their country of origin and having sought asylum in another, hold an a priori valid claim to membership and participation in at least two states that is only partially recognised. Neither full members nor complete strangers, they see their legal status and political rights decisively shaped by the actions of, and interactions between, the multiple actors involved in what Peter Gatrell has called ‘refugeedom’: states of origin, states of asylum, international organisations and refugees themselves.

Research streams

Our project distinguishes between two conceptually distinct yet empirically related paths to citizenship, which we explore in two research streams.

The first research stream, “replacing the bond”, examines the creation of a new political bond with the country of asylum. One sub-project traces the rise and fall of preferential naturalisation policies for refugees in 13 European countries. Two comparative studies investigate contrasting patterns of political inclusion and exclusion in postcolonial contexts: the treatment of Harkis (1962-1964) and Indochinese refugees (1975-1989) in France, and that of Tamils (1985-1989) and Hongkongers (2019-present) in the United Kingdom. Finally, a comparison of Germany and Switzerland explores how both countries have navigated, over four decades, the tension between granting asylum seekers access to employment or to social assistance, what we conceptualise as the ‘workfare-welfare dilemma’.

The second research stream, “restoring the bond”, examines the restoration of the past political bond with the country of origin, particularly in contexts of regime change and political transition. One sub-project traces the trajectory of the principle of refugee out-of-country voting (OCV), examines the role of UNHCR and the International Organization for Migration (IOM) in its diffusion and explains its weak institutionalisation. Another approaches the ‘boundary problem’ of democratic theory through the practical problem of electoral law in wartime Ukraine, where part of the territory is occupied or annexed and a large share of the citizenry is displaced, within the country or abroad. A study of the Venezuelan diaspora in the United States explores a recurring paradox of exile politics: diasporic groups often mobilise in support of a powerful host-state government to achieve a radical political aim, only to be sidelined once that aim is reached. Finally, we examine how newly established governing elites in Iraq and Syria have redefined nationality, the franchise and political representation in the wake of political refoundation.

Core team

Jean-Thomas Arrighi – Principal investigator

Jean-Thomas Arrighi is Titular Professor at the Faculty of Social and Human Sciences of the University of Neuchâtel, affiliated with the History Department, the Political Science programme and the Swiss Forum for Migration and Population Studies (SFM). He co-coordinates the IMISCOE Standing Committee on Migration, Citizenship and Political Participation. His research has moved from comparative citizenship studies to nationalism and, more recently, to forced migration studies.

Sara de Athouguia Filipe – Postdoctoral researcher

Sara de Athouguia Filipe is a postdoctoral researcher at the SFM and a lecturer in the History Department of the University of Neuchâtel. She holds a PhD in History and Civilisation from the European University Institute (2022). Her research examines citizenship and refugee politics from a historical and comparative perspective, focusing on how displacement reshapes political membership through selective protection, external voting and struggles over self-determination.

Robin Stünzi – Senior researcher

Robin Stünzi is a human geographer and senior researcher at the SFM, University of Neuchâtel. He completed a doctoral thesis examining the securitisation of Swiss asylum policy from a historical perspective. Since then, his research has expanded to comparative analyses of the politics and governance of forced migration, as well as the political incorporation and experiences of discrimination among immigrants and their children.

Research assistant

Iryna Sava – Master’s student in Inclusive Education Sciences and an Erasmus Mundus scholarship holder

Her interdisciplinary background combines education sciences, international relations and linguistics, and her interests include migration, inclusion, social integration and European public policy. She joined the HUMANCIT team to collect and analyse data on the debate over the organisation of elections in Ukraine while the war is ongoing.

International collaborators

Debasreeta Deb – PhD candidate at the Centre for Regional Studies, University of Hyderabad, India

Her research examines the afterlives of the citizenship crisis in Assam and, more broadly, migration, citizenship, identity and belonging, drawing on ethnographic and archival methods to show how citizenship is experienced and contested in everyday life.

Shamna Thacham Poyil – PhD in Political Science, University of Delhi, India

With a dissertation entitled ‘Abandonment and Techno-Politics of Exclusion: Statelessness and Digitised Belonging of Rohingyas’, her research examines statelessness, techno-political governance, digital citizenship and the gendered dimensions of displacement, based on more than two years of hybrid multi-sited ethnography with Rohingya refugee communities in India, Bangladesh and Malaysia.

Debasreeta and Shamna joined HUMANCIT in 2026 to extend its comparative scope to the Indian subcontinent. They took part in the Tangier workshop (June 2026) and are contributing to the resulting special issue on ‚Citizenship in Exile‘ (in preparation); they are co-authoring, with Jean-Thomas Arrighi, an article comparing the ‚migranticisation‘ of Indigenous minorities in contemporary India and Myanmar; and they are co-organising the 2027 annual workshop of the IMISCOE Standing Committee on Migration, Citizenship and Political Participation.

Elisa Floristán Millán – Lecturer in Anthropology, University of Alicante

Her research focuses on youth, migration and borders. She joined HUMANCIT in 2025 as an nccr – on the move International Research Fellow, spending three months in Neuchâtel to study the citizenship struggles of young Moroccans who migrated irregularly to Europe (harraga). A first article, ‚The Social Skin of Mistrust‘, appeared in Mobilities in 2026; a second, in progress, addresses their growing political agency and capacity for collective mobilisation in Spain.

Eréndira León-Salvador – Postdoctoral Research Fellow, University College Dublin

Her research lies at the intersection of comparative politics, migration, and refugee studies. Combining qualitative fieldwork and causal inference methods, she examines how laws and institutions shape access to protection, citizenship and political participation. For HUMANCIT, she has developed a comparative study of refugee-led organisations in Germany and the United Kingdom, examining how institutional environments shape their recognition, access to resources and opportunities for political participation.

Workshops

Citizenship in Displacement: Policies, Practices, and Lived Experiences. Tangier, 25-26 June 2026. Co-organised with nccr – on the move and the IMISCOE Standing Committee on Migration, Citizenship and Political Participation. Call for papers

Public lectures

Co-organised with nccr – on the move

Reforming the British Empire: Space, Place and Mobilities of People, Capital and Ideas in the Global Restructuring of the British Empire. Alan Lester (University of Sussex), 16 October 2025. Programme · Video

L’exil comme objet du droit au XVIIe siècle. Naïma Ghermani (Université Grenoble Alpes, LUHCIE, ICM), 18 December 2024. Programme

Coercion and Displacement in the Refugee System. David Scott FitzGerald (University of California San Diego), 12 November 2024. Programme · Video

Appointment in Geneva: Refugees‘ Encounters with UNHCR. Peter Gatrell (University of Manchester), 2 March 2023. Programme · Video

Swiss National Science Foundation: Grant Number 219766

Approved amount: CHF 666,832

Date: 01.03.2024 – 29.02.2028