Migration and Citizenship Debates in the Middle East and North Africa

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

Despite its centrality in terms of global migration stock and flows, the Middle East and North Africa has only recently begun receiving the attention of political scientists working on migration and citizenship. This panel seeks to interrogate how the Middle East has featured in interdisciplinary debates on mobility via fresh analyses of local empirics as well as intra-regional connections. It seeks to benefit from the complexity and variations of movements across the Middle East in order to identify, and develop, locally-centred frameworks that could enrich broader issues on migration and citizenship. The panel’s papers sit at the forefront of contemporary debates on this topic, aiming to provide a glimpse into migrant and refugee politics in North Africa, the Levant, as well as the Gulf. Its contributions are based on rich, empirically-driven research that seeks to push our understandings of the non-regulation of migration, the political importance of emigrants, refugees, and immigrants, as well as diverse interpretations of legal systems in both formal and informal contexts. Overall, the panel affirms the region’s importance and its capacity for offering timely research with the capacity of advancing scholarship on migration and citizenship across the Global South and beyond.

Sub Unit

• Division 52: Migration & Citizenship

Cosponsor

• Division 57: Middle East and North African Politics

Individual Presentations

• Strategic Non-regulation as Migration Governance - Katharina Natter, University of Amsterdam; Kelsey P. Norman, Rice University

• Middle Powers and Soft-Power Rivalry: Egyptian-Israeli Competition in Africa - Asaf Siniver, University of Birmingham; Gerasimos Tsourapas, University of Glasgow

• Exit Controls in the Arab Gulf under the Kafala and Male Guardianship Systems - Noora Anwar Lori, Boston University

• Labor Market Threat Perceptions from Migration: Evidence from Morocco - Matt J. Buehler, University of Tennessee; Kristin E. Fabbe, European University Institute

• Intentional Ambiguity: Citizenship Policies in Law vs. Implementation in Jordan - Lillian Frost, Virginia Tech

Chair

• James F. Hollifield Southern Methodist University

Discussant

• Kamal Sadiq University of California, Irvine