The construction of the citizenship of young refugees: a discourse analysis and ethnographic study in Belgium

Scholars agree that international migration challenges a national conception of citizenship and that tensions arising from the increasingly restrictive policies are transforming the concept of citizenship. However, there is little empirical research on this transformation and how this is experienced by migrants. As research shows that the way refugees and their citizenship are discursively constructed in policy plays an important role in the integration process of refugees, we want to investigate how the refugees’ citizenship practices interact with the policy discourses to construct their citizenship position. We conducted a discourse analysis of the migration policies in Belgium between 2011 and 2014 focusing on how the citizenship of refugees is framed and an ethnographic study focusing on the reactions of young refugees towards these discourses. Our analysis shows that refugees are denied agency as full citizens in the migration policies by categorizing migrants as profiteers and criminals or as victims. We provide insight in how young refugees create new subjectivities for themselves in light of these discourses through daily practices. In this paper we show that the policy discourses and the practices of refugees do not produce a dichotomy between citizens and non-citizens, but that a more complex gradation comes about