This chapter begins by defining the main theoretical problem my book addresses and continues by situating it within existing scholarly literature. The conceptual framework needed to locate the main theoretical problem is developed by surveying and synthesizing works from political science, human geography, anthropology, sociology and political psychology. The interdisciplinary literature review provides meaning and substance to concepts relevant to my study; forms interlinking relationships between these concepts and identifies gaps where a theoretical contribution can be made. I begin by setting my study within the larger literature on return migration, by examining the definitions and types of return migration, followed by a brief overview of the main theoretical approaches. The decision to return is examined by looking at the complex set of reasons and re-evaluating the “voluntariness” of voluntary return. Specifics of post-conflict return are evaluated in the context of reintegration, reintegration strategies and the sustainability of return. The following section develops a substantive definition of the diaspora concept by examining its history; reviewing the defining criteria; and comparing and contrasting diaspora to the closely connected concept of transnationalism. Throughout this study, the returnees are referred to as diaspora members and transmigrants, as both terms fit their actual life experience. The third section of the chapter discusses how emotions have been neglected in the social sciences by a dominance of the rational-choice paradigm, by treating emotions as merely personal reactions and thus leaving them outside of the ‘political’ and by overemphasizing the methodological challenges involved in the study of emotions.

Scholarly literature on citizenship is presented in the fourth section of the chapter. Citizenship is discussed from the point of view of liberal theory, in constant relation to the nation-state, followed by a discussion on how citizenship enters the relationship between emigrants and the emigration state and concluded with an examination of the importance of studying how individual citizens conceptualize citizenship. Next, emotional/affective/intimate citizenship is discussed as the theoretical nexus between citizenship and emotions by looking at how scholars so far have established this connection, primarily through the concepts of home and belonging. An understanding of emotional/affective/intimate citizenship is further developed by contrasting it with flexible/pragmatic/instrumental citizenship; followed by a review of the scholarly literature which establishes links between citizenship and the distinct feelings of “patriotic love”, fear, security/safety and shame.

The concepts of home and belonging are elaborated in the next two sections of the chapter, as they also represent a ‘meeting point’ of the previously discussed theory areas. Scholarly literature points to the centrality of home and belonging in the theoretical connection between citizenship and emotions, while the two concepts also figure prominently in deepening our understanding of diaspora/transnationalism. Home is investigated as the physical home, a ‘sense of place’, as movement itself, a site of conflicting emotions, a set of social relations, links between the past, present and future, as well as the ‘cornerstone of national identity.’ Subsequently, theorizing belonging as place-belongingness and the politics of belonging is explored. Place-belongingness is further extended by examining its autobiographical, relational, cultural, economic, and legal aspects, while the politics of belonging connect directly to citizenship. The final section of the chapter concludes and identifies how resolving the central theoretical problem contributes to the existing literature(s).

2.1 Theoretical Problem

The theoretical problem this book addresses is the creation of a nexus between voluntary return migration, citizenship, home, belonging and a set of specific and distinct ‘political’ emotions. The case of diaspora members/transmigrants voluntarily returning to the home state presents a unique opportunity to study this problem, particularly when the returnees are dual citizens; they have a highly complex relationship to home and belonging due to experiencing violent displacement; and when the disparity between their host and home states is as large as it is with developed Western democracies and a state still recovering from the aftermath of war.

Their return is “decided” or “chosen” (Cassarino, 2008), since they have a viable alternative of remaining abroad, often provided by citizenship of the host state, financially afforded by established sources of income and livelihood, and socio-culturally offered by a knowledge of the host state language and overall high levels of integration. Put simply, if they wanted to, they could have stayed in the host state. Yet, they freely chose to go back. The motivation for this type of return is found to be primarily emotional, while the initial conceptual premise of the book is that emotions are neither placed in stark opposition to rationalityFootnote 1 nor are they considered as purely personal reactions.Footnote 2 Instead, emotions are given their rightful place in the analysis and are seen as significant forms of knowledge and appraising thought (Nussbaum, 2001; Solomon, 2003). Emotions are considered as crucial for a better understanding of social reality with full respect awarded to their diversity and distinctiveness. They play an important role in politics and society, particularly “in the process of constituting identity and community attachments” (Hutchison & Bleiker, 2007, pg. 63). What largely remains unexplored within the general social sciences, and political science specifically, is the role that emotions play in our conceptualization of political phenomena, namely citizenship.

The unifying conceptual framework of the study is citizenship, also seen as a “prism through which to address the political” (Nyers, 2007, p. 3), and more specifically its emotional dimension, which scholars have so far conceptualized through home and belonging. This perspective on citizenship builds on the foundations set by George Marcus, inspired by David Hume, who presents a treatise of the connection between citizenship and emotions, radically asserting that, contrary to the conventional view in political theory, emotions enable rationality and good citizenship, mainly because they foster democratic action. Previous researchers (for example: Marcus, 2002; Ho, 2009; and Jackson, 2016) have established that studying emotions is relevant to a better understanding of citizenship; theorized ‘emotional/affective/intimate’ primarily through the concepts of home and belonging and made connections between some emotions, such as ‘patriotic love’, fear, security/safety and shame, however, much work remains to be done on creating a deeper understanding of the theoretical problem. By focusing on individual citizens, in this case returning diaspora members, my book aims to create robust theoretical connections between voluntary return migration, a set of specific and distinct ‘political’ emotions, citizenship, home, and belonging.

2.2 Conceptualizing Voluntary Return Migration to a Post-Conflict Society

“Return migration is the great unwritten chapter in the history of migration” (p. 7) wrote Russell King in 2000. He continued to say that the knowledge scholars have produced thus far on return migration is often summarized in an occasional footnote regretfully stating that “little is known of those who have returned” (King, 2000, p.7). More recently, the situation seems to have changed substantially with scholarship on return migration flourishing in the interim (see Carling et al., 2011; King & Kuschminder, 2022). Initially, scholarly work on return migration has been challenged by attempts to directly apply theoretical approaches developed to explain original migration from the home to host state (Nadler et al., 2016), so the predominant early theorizing of return migratory movements revolved around Ravenstein’s Laws of Migration (1885, 1889), related explanatory generalizations (Bovenkerk, 1974) or push-pull explanations (Lee, 1966). It was in the mid-1970s that work on return migration gained momentum with studies conducted on “guest workers” (Gmelch, 1980; Cassarino, 2004; van Houte & Davids, 2008). Developed countries have started to pay more attention to patterns of return migration following the increases in asylum applications due to post-Cold war events (Kuschminder, 2017). Given the ongoing migration crisis, it could be expected that scholarly attention in this field is likely to continue growing. Although, as emphasized by King (2000), much work remains to be done in both theoretical and empirical studies designed to explain and understand the specific aspects of return migration, at least five distinct theoretical approaches can be identified.

Cassarino (2004) presents a systematic comparison of five theoretical approaches to the study of return migration: neoclassical economics, new economics of labor migration (NELM), structuralism, transnationalism and social network theory. Analogously to how neoclassical economics explains initial migration as caused by wage differentials between the home and host states, return is viewed as a miscalculation on behalf of the migrant. According to this perspective, the migrant returns to the home state, having failed to benefit from the higher earning potential abroad. In contrast, NELM moves the level of analysis from the individual migrant to the household and explains the decision to return as a “calculated strategy” (Cassarino, 2004, p. 255). According to NELM, return is the natural result of achieving one’s goals of higher earnings abroad, accumulated savings and attachment to the home state. Structuralism further moves the focus of analysis from the individual migrant and the household to wider social elements in the home state, the context and “reality” (Cassarino, 2004, p. 257) of return. The structural approach is most concerned with the impact returnees have on the home state, either along the lines of time or space. Implicitly, the structural framework assumes a strict separation between home and host societies, with very little informational transfer between the two. Transnationalism arises out of the need to better understand the growing social, economic and cultural connections between the sending and receiving societies. Seen from a transnational perspective, return migration is part of a dynamic exchange between the home and host states comprising back-and-forth movements, frequent return visits and remittances. Similarly, social network theory gives importance to the links between the sending and receiving countries, but it does not see these linkages as related to existing diasporas. Instead, these connections are viewed as resulting from the personal relations of the returnees and their previous migratory experiences.

Traditionally, return migration has been categorized as either forced or voluntary, however, different constraints (Carling et al., 2015; van Houte & Davids, 2014) and the often disputed element of “voluntariness” (Cassarino, 2008; Webber, 2011) have challenged scholars to find new classifications. Kuschminder (2017) makes the important point that the distinction between the forced and voluntary categories can be made along two different axes. The original migration differentiates between a refugee and a migrant, while the return involves a difference between a deportee and a returnee. King (1986) considers repatriation to be a type of forced return since migrants themselves do not initiate the return, but it is rather political, natural or personal disasters forcing them to return. Whether the UNHCR considers repatriation to be a form of forced return or not still leaves open, the question of how many other actual options are left to the refugees. Since repatriation often is their only alternative, it can be categorized as “compelled” return (Kuschminder, 2017, p. 8). Black et al. (2004) conclude that the agencies involved in refugee return do not have a common definition of voluntary refugee return and, instead identify gradations of “voluntariness,” while van Houte and Davids (2014) base their distinction on the legal status of the migrant in the host country. If the migrant has a legal alternative to stay in the host state and still returns, then this type of return can be classified as voluntary. Conversely, the return is defined as involuntary. In criticizing assisted voluntary return and reintegration programs, Cassarino (2008) calls for a new term: “decided or chosen return”. Decided or chosen return is “mainly based on the migrants’ own decision to return to their country of origin, on a temporary or permanent basis, without the assistance of a public body” (p. 12). Similarly, Webber (2011) questions the “voluntariness” of assisted voluntary return programs, which also seek for a more sophisticated understanding of the distinctions between forced and voluntary return migration. In case of truly voluntary return migration, the returnees’ decision-making process deserves particular scholarly attention.

To understand the return decision-making process, differing classifications of return motivations and reasons have emerged. Scholars as early as Bovenkerk (1974) have remarked on how little economic reasons impact return migration, simply because “economic betterment is the main cause of emigration in the first place” (Bovenkerk, 1974, p. 21) and a reversal of relative differences in economic development between sending and receiving countries is highly unlikely. King (2000) summarizes the reasons for return migration to comprise economic, social, family/life-cycle and political reasons, also proposing that non-economic reasons are more dominant than economic ones. With second-generation return, King et al. (2008) argue that return can be seen as a “personal project of relocation to the ancestral homeland strongly influenced by aspirations and emotions of belonging and identification” (p. 263). Kılınç and King (2017) look at “lifestyle migration” as another type of return migration, primarily motivated by non-economic reasons. Achenbach (2017) creates a classification of return motivations based on three areas of concern or “influential spheres”: career, family, and lifestyle, with each area further framed by the individual migrant’s goals and other influential factors. As was discussed previously, with full realization of the importance of economic reasons “whether from a neoclassical or Marxian perspective” (p. 242) Halfacree (2004) champions non-economic reasons as most appropriate in explaining return migration decisions.

The decision to return is highly complex, involving a combination of factors related to agency and structure. Halfacree (2004) cites Fielding’s writing on the relationship between migration and culture found in the first volume of Migration Processes and Patterns to illustrate the complexity of decision-making involved in return migration. Both Fielding (1992) and Halfacree (2004) primarily turn to culture as a complementary explanatory force to the dominant economic paradigm. When thoroughly reviewing the literature on migration decision-making Achenbach (2017) also criticizes the rational choice model and the “homo economicus” as an over-simplifying device in decision-making, as well as pointing to inadequate attention paid to the migrants’ own agency either at the individual or the household level. To better conceptualize the complexity of factors involved in the decision-making process, challenge the limits of rationality and incorporate both agency and structure, Black et al. (2004) build a model involving structural conditions in the home and host states, the particular migrant (individual or family) characteristics and possible public policy incentives to encourage return migration.

Within scholarship on return migration, the specific elements of post-war return have garnered a lively academic debate. What most scholars (Black & Koser, 1999; Pedersen, 2003; van Houte & Davids, 2014) agree upon is that return to a post-conflict society does not imply a restoration of order to the home state and a completion of the refugee cycle. Even where basic physical security is guaranteed, return might not be the most preferred step for the migrants as they have a lot to lose economically, socially, culturally, and emotionally by going back (Monsutti, 2008; Omata, 2013). Scholars do not view return to be a natural outcome and an end to the refugee cycle. Instead, if this type of return happens, it is seen as the start of an extensive process of re-integration (Pedersen, 2003) as both “home” and the refugees have changed substantially either with the conflict, the time spent abroad or most often both. Differently from the “restoration of order” (van Houte & Davids, 2014, p. 76), the strand of research discussing “return as change” (p. 76) argues for the returnees and the home society to benefit from these differences (King, 1978; Bakewell, 2008), with the returnees using their position of in-betweenness to promote change and development in the home state.

An alternative perspective on return to post-conflict societies uses the transnational in-betweenness of the returnees. Eastmond (2006) offers a look at return as an “open-ended process, one which often takes place over a longer period of time and may involve periods of dual residence and considerable movement back and forth” (p. 144). Transnational return thus presents new challenges to the understanding of “reintegration” or “home” with transnational lifestyles distributing different values of home to different places. Eastmond (2006) also identifies two different strategies of return: open-ended and seasonal returns. In the first case, the returnees become “transnationals at home” (p.147), seeking to establish a more permanent base in Bosnia and Herzegovina, while maintaining an active connection with the host country. With seasonal returns, the returnees come back to BiH temporarily, through vacations or longer visits, but keep their base in the country of asylum. In addition, the novelty of Eastmond (2006) compared to many other studies that examine macro-structural processes and policies to understand international return is that it offers a “transnationalism from below” (Smith & Guarnizo, 1998 as cited in Eastmond, 2006, p. 145). Eastmond (2006) examines the refugees’ own voices and viewpoints to gain a better understanding of the concepts used to set return policies from above. Scholarship on return migration to postwar settings gradually came to view return as both a “movement back” (van Houte & Davids, 2014, p. 71) where returnees restore some sense of social fabric that existed prior to the conflict, and a “movement forward” (p. 71) in which the return aids economic development and transition to peace (Black & Koser, 1999; Faist, 2008). Whether a “movement back” or a “movement forward” post-war return involves a lengthy process of re-integration.

The prolonged process of re-integration has a considerable impact on the returnees themselves and the home society, calling for re-integration strategies and ultimately affecting the sustainability of return. Various scholars (Olsson & King, 2008; Carling et al., 2015; Paasche, 2016) compare the challenges of re-integration to the original difficulties migrants and refugees faced when integrating in the host countries. While the returnees need to re-integrate across different social contexts, including the family, community, society and the state (Carling et al., 2015) or different spheres of life: social, cultural, economic and political (Cassarino, 2008) several different studies (Rogge, 1994; Black & Koser, 1999; Hammond, 1999) show that re-integration is not a simple process of people returning to a familiar society, culture, and home (Kuschminder, 2017). The temporal dimension cannot be underestimated (Pedersen, 2003; Carling et al., 2015), as both the returnees and the home society change in the interim. This is particularly pronounced with post-conflict return. Often, the population that stayed behind does not accept the returnees (Bovenkerk, 1974) or even shows direct mistrust, enmity and envy towards them (Black & Koser, 1999; Kibreab, 2002; and Stefansson, 2004). Although the comparison between strategies of integration and re-integration is not entirely smooth and there are many differences between the two processes, still there are important similarities. Given that the re-integration literature is not theoretically as developed, further theorizing of the adaptation refugees and migrants undergo upon return to their home states can benefit greatly from the more advanced integration theory (Kuschminder, 2017). In fact, for re-integration to be successful, strategies are needed on part of the returnees (Kuschminder, 2017) and focused public policy efforts (Arowolo, 2000) on part of the home state authorities. Ultimately, the success of returnees’ re-integration determines the sustainability of return. The simplest measure of whether return was successful is whether re-emigration follows (Bovenkerk, 1974) with scholars (Black et al., 2004) developing additional criteria for measuring the sustainability of return migration.

2.3 The Returnees: Diaspora Members and Transmigrants

Diaspora, as a concept discussed by scholars, has gone through several different transformations (Faist, 2010). These changes have left much ambiguity (Weinar, 2010) around the three original characteristics of a dispersed group sharing a common ethnic or national background, maintaining organized networks which connect various points of dispersion, emotionally identifying with the homeland and preserving symbolic or actual linkages with it (Sheffer, 1986). Other authors (Cohen, 1997; Sheffer, 2003) suggest other defining features of diaspora such as “dispersion under pressure, choice of destination, identity awareness, networked space, duration of transnational ties and relative autonomy from host and origin societies (Bruneau, 2010, p. 36-37). The ostensible vagueness of how diaspora has been defined within the scholarly literature has led Brubaker (2005) to refer to Sartori’s ‘concept stretching’, wherein a concept is so widely used that it loses its meaning. To clarify the definition of diaspora, Brubaker (2005) highlights its three key characteristics: dispersion, homeland orientation, and boundary-maintenance. “The term that once described Jewish and Armenian dispersion now share meanings with a larger semantic domain that includes words like immigrant, expatriate, refugee, guest-worker, exile community, ethnic community” (Tölölyan, 1991, p.4). Brah (1996) adds the highly relevant concepts of “home” and “belonging” (p.189) to defining the concept of diaspora. There is a “creative tension” (Brah, 1996, p. 189) between dispersion as one of the defining features of diaspora and “home.” This tension is expressed by nurturing a “homing desire” as “discourses of fixed origins” are criticized. Dispersal implies that “home” is desired concurrent to a rhetoric praising mobility.

Faist (2010) presents a succinct historical overview of how the concept of diaspora has evolved. Diaspora is rooted in a distant past, beginning with its application to the historic experience of specific peoples, originally the forced dispersal of the Jews. A more recent understanding of forced dispersal as a key characteristic of diaspora also includes the Palestinians; while most recently any type of dispersal, not necessarily forced, becomes a defining feature of diaspora, to include groups such as the Chinese, Turks or Mexicans. An older understanding of the “homeland orientation” characteristic of diaspora implied a “return to the (imagined) homeland” (Safran, 1991), while more recently, an emphasis on return is replaced by “dense and continuous linkages across borders” (Faist, 2010, p.12). Finally, in the more distant past the diasporic characteristic of sharing a common ethnic, religious, linguistic and/or cultural origin also implied that diaspora members were not integrating well into the host country. In more contemporary usage, this characteristic does not automatically imply problems with integration, but rather a “cultural distinctiveness of the diaspora vis-à-vis other groups” (Faist, 2010, p. 13). Thus, retaining some degree of “cultural distinctiveness” in the more modern understanding of diaspora does not necessarily imply poor integration in the host society.

Closely related to the concept of diaspora is transnationalism and the two overlap in certain points, while differing in others. Bauböck (2010) looks at how various classical definitions of diaspora equally apply to transnational groups and analyzes each one of the criteria used to define diaspora to see how it also applies to transnationalism. He concludes that the key difference between the two terms lies in their differing spheres of usage. “Diaspora is an evocative political term, whereas transnationalism is primarily an academic concept that refers to a set of empirical phenomena and a perspective that groups them together and suggests a framework for studying them” (Bauböck, 2010, p. 317). Faist (2010) also agrees with this distinction and adds that, while both diaspora and transnationalism refer to “cross-border processes” (p. 9) diaspora has been widely used in literary studies and history. In the language of social sciences, transnationalism is used more extensively to describe an abstract set of processes. Faist (2010) also proposes that, while diaspora refers to groups that share a common religious or national background living outside of an (imagined) homeland, transnationalism denotes “migrants’ durable ties across countries….and all sorts of social formations, such as transnationally active network groups and organizations” (p. 9). According to Faist (2010) whilst a member of diaspora is located outside the (imagined) homeland, the transmigrant is at times inside and at other times outside of it. Bruneau (2010) also shares the view that “this relationship to place and territories enables us to distinguish between diasporism and transnationalism” (p.49).

Transnationalism as a theoretical approach within migration studies, looks at the development of links between sending and receiving societies and the emergence of “transnational communities.” Migration is seen as a vehicle for the emergence of ‘deterritorialized nation-states.’ One of the first (Mazzucato, 2010) to theorize the concept of transnationalism were Glick-Schiller et al. (1995) by focusing on migration in a globalizing context and questioning the role of the nation-state. As Glick-Schiller et al. (1995) argue, immigrants of modern times cannot be depicted as “uprooted” in the same sense as the word was used to describe traditional immigrants. The difference between a “traditional immigrant” and a “transmigrant” is that, while the former leaves the outbound country to become fully integrated in the new country and is more or less forced to sever ties to the old country, the later becomes rooted in the new country, but maintains active political, economic, social, cultural and other links to the old country.

The transmigrant is able to influence and shape both the society of emigration and that of immigration. Portes et al. (1999) define transmigrants as people who “live dual lives: speak two languages, have homes in two countries, and make a living through continuous regular contact across national borders” (p. 217). Transmigrants could have a sense of belonging in two different societies; find their home in both of them and make this state of flux to be their primary identity, source of income and cultural reference point. Both Glick-Schiller et al. (1995) and Portes et al. (1999) point to the overwhelming importance of technology, particularly communications technology, that has made transnational activities more feasible and accessible on a much wider scale than ever before. Vertovec (1999) calls for a need to “reconstruct locality or ‘place’” (p. 455) and argues that communications technology coupled with higher social mobility contributes to “translocal understanding.” The main conflicting tendency is in the emergence of “translocalities” (Vertovec, 1999) and “deterritorialized nation-states” (Glick-Schiller et al., 1995), parallel to mainly capital-rich states enforcing more stringent controls on migration and tightening their borders together with globalizing forces accompanied by increasing nationalism (Glick-Schiller et al., 1995). Although these insightful observations were made towards the beginning of the twenty-first century, they ring even more true today, in its third decade.

2.4 Political Emotions: Moving Beyond the Reason/Emotion Dichotomy

Emotions play an important role in world politics, but, until recently have been understudied in the social sciences. Bleiker and Hutchison (2008), as well as several surveyed scholars (Mercer (1996), Mercer (2005), Crawford (2000), Balzacq & Jervis (2004), Lebow (2005), Hill (2003), Linklater (2004) as cited in Bleiker and Hutchison (2008)) point to the problematic lack of study of emotions and the effect that this deficit in research has had on the development of the social sciences. To explain the ‘strange absence’ of investigation into how emotions influence world politics, Bleiker and Hutchison (2008) firstly point to the dominance of the ‘rational-choice’ paradigm, which works within the emotions-reason dichotomy, champions cognition and treats emotion merely as a deviation from rationality. Second, Bleiker and Hutchison (2008) survey empirical studies to find that they do not address the historical evolution of feelings. Where feelings are included, investigation is conducted assuming that emotions are only personal reactions without considering wider societal dynamics. Third, to find possible explanations for a dearth of research in this area, Bleiker and Hutchison (2008) highlight the methodological challenges that arise when studying emotions in the social sciences.

The dichotomy which positions emotions in an opposing and adversarial relationship with rationality is the first and most systemic reason serious inquiry into emotions has been missing from the social sciences. Maiz (2011) surveys a large body of political theory to argue first that the reason/emotion dichotomy or dualism, resulting from a radical interpretation of the Enlightenment, is the foundation of other binary codes, which act as impediments to democratic and political development. Maiz (2011) also shows how the reason-emotion dichotomy has had a profound impact on the major paradigms of contemporary political theory: utilitarianism, Marxism, post-Kantian liberalism found in the work of John Rawls, as well as in Alasdair MacIntyre’s communitarianism. In contrast, Maiz (2011) also explores the new theoretical approaches in political philosophy, starting with Remo Bodei and Martha Nussbaum, who reject the old reason-emotion dichotomy and set the stage for a new, non-dichotomic paradigm, crucial for further growth in political theory. This review concludes:

  1. 1.

    There is a cognitive element in emotions.

  2. 2.

    Both emotions and reason find their origin to be in the body.

  3. 3.

    Regarding learning processes, reason depends on emotions.

  4. 4.

    Reason also depends on emotions to perform certain actions.

  5. 5.

    Reason depends on emotions to decide on the most important actions.

  6. 6.

    Emotions are affected by judgments–values and beliefs.

  7. 7.

    Emotions are in part constructed by “cultural and socio-structural factors” (p. 46)

Considering the more recent developments in various disciplines, leads the way for a scholarly investigation into the role emotions play in social and political phenomena and as Nussbaum (2013) concludes: although reason or ‘rationality’ has dominated the social sciences, emotions are gaining an increasingly important role.

Working within the reason-emotion dichotomy is the founding theory of emotions, independently formulated by James (1884) and Lange (1885). The James–Lange theory of emotions posits emotions are the consequence of bodily responses to outside stimuli. James (1884) argues that bodily changes follow the perception of an ‘exciting fact’ and our feeling of these bodily changes is the emotion. The physiological changes, e.g. constricting eyes and brows or throat clearing and coughing precede the associated emotions, e.g. worry and embarrassment. Cannon (1927) criticizes the James-Lange theory of emotions, by pointing out several apparent inconsistencies in the viscera (gut, internal body)—emotion connection. As an alternative, a theory of emotions based on thalamic processes is proposed. Dalgleish (2004) provides a historical overview of developments in affective neuroscience, starting with the work of William James and Charles Darwin, followed by a discussion of the work of Walter Cannon and Phillip Bard, James Papez and Paul MacLean, collectively referred to as early functional neuroanatomical models.

The dominant James-Lange theory of emotions or the “bodily/somatic approach” to emotions has been challenged by several scholars, proposing an alternative, “cognitive/appraisal approach” to emotions. Bleiker and Hutchison (2008) look at the growing literature that rejects the standard dichotomy between emotions and reason and dismisses categorizing emotions as purely irrational. The two most prominent scholars representing the cognitive approach to emotions, Robert Solomon and Martha Nussbaum, do not subscribe to the James-Lange theory of emotions as bodily reactions, but consider emotions to have an appraisal quality and to be “important forms of knowledge and evaluative thought.” Bleiker and Hutchison (2008) identify a number of scholars who have successfully summarized the debate between the cognitive/appraisal vs. the bodily/somatic basis for emotions: Crawford (2000)), Marcus (2000), Mercer (2005), Ross (2006) and Connolly (2002). When contrasting emotions to rational self-interest, Elster (1998) presents, but also criticizes the standard tools of economic theory, namely cost-benefit calculations, encapsulated in a utility function and preference curves. Within the economic theory paradigm, emotions would enter the utility function with either a negative or a positive sign, just as any material reward. Drawing on findings of Damasio (1994), Elster (1998) argues that emotions can help us decide and, in some cases, help us make the best decisions. Prinz (2004) argues that the James-Lange theory of emotions needs to be amended with ‘embodied appraisal theory,’ treating emotions as perceptions of changes in our somatic condition and appraisals. Mercer (2010) uses the appraisal/cognitive approach to emotions, which presupposes that beliefs precede emotions and that rational decision-making depends on emotions.

Emotions have been marginalized from the social sciences not only because of the reason-emotions dichotomy but also because they used to be considered as purely personal and thus not worthy of political analysis. Perhaps the feminist battle cry of the “personal is political” can be credited for moving emotions closer to the center stage of political theorizing. Emotions are not just personal reactions, instead, they have broader social and political significance. Hutchison and Bleiker (2007) survey the literature (Nussbaum (2001), Shilling (1997), Marcus (2000), Ahmed (2004) and Scheff (1994)) on emotions and security/terrorism to show how emotions are not only personal reactions and how they in fact have an important place in politics and society, particularly “in the process of constituting identity and community attachments” (p. 63).

Finally, studying emotions in the social sciences has been sidelined because it is confronted with certain specific methodological challenges. Bleiker and Hutchison (2008) find that international relations scholarship, including constructivist approaches, relies on social science methods, which, even in their qualitative form are not entirely appropriate for the study of emotions. Acknowledging important feminist contributions to the study of emotions, the authors suggest three points of change in ‘intellectual attitude’ that may solve the problem of the identified gap and include the study of emotions in the social sciences: (1) accepting ambivalence in the study of emotions and politics, (2) looking at emotions through representations (pictures) and communication and (3) expanding the intellectual toolset for the study of emotions and politics by borrowing from the humanities. According to Neuman et al. (2007), emotions are studied using a wide spectrum of methodologies, ranging from aggregate studies, survey sampling studies, content analysis, as well as experiments. However, regardless of which methodology is used, some of the major challenges in studying emotions are: establishing reliability and validity with measurement; relying on the subjects’ introspective abilities to properly identify their emotions and accurately describe their emotional responses to various stimuli presented by the researcher; developing theoretical concepts that connect concepts of thinking, feeling and acting at the individual and aggregate levels (Neuman et al., 2007).

2.5 Citizenship as Membership Status of a Community or a State?

The classical liberal theory of citizenship can be grasped in the work of T.H. Marshall (1950), who proposes that citizenship is based on civil, political and social rights and focuses on how these rights have developed in Britain. “Citizenship is a status bestowed on those who are full members of a community” (Marshall, 1950, p. 28). Citing Stuart Hall and David Held, Yuval-Davis (2006) underlines that Marshall’s definition of citizenship makes no mention of the state, thus implicitly assuming complete overlap between the ‘community’ and the ‘state.’ However, as Guzina (2007) argues the assumed ‘community’ and ‘state’ overlap is primarily a result of historical circumstances and not inherent. Ingrained within this conceptualization of citizenship is the liberal ‘neutrality of the state,’ which states that cultural or any other particularities do not need to be considered because they can be satisfied by a ‘neutral state’ as they translate directly into a language of civil, social, or political rights (Guzina, 2007). This assumption is more easily implemented in culturally and nationally homogenous societies (Guzina, 2007). However, Yuval-Davis (2006) further questions the supposed universalistic character of liberal citizenship as it has also proven to be exclusionary and representing “hegemonic, majoritarian and ‘westocentric’ positions” (p. 207) as in fact, a complete overlap between national community and a state is illusory.

Further theorizing of citizenship as rights can be found in the work of other prominent citizenship scholars with differing views on the proper role ascribed to the nation-state. Soysal (1994) refers to her model of citizenship as “postnational” since its first basis is found in the personhood of each individual bestowed upon with “entitlements” (p. 3), which were previously associated with “national rights.” According to Soysal (1994), transnationalism and human rights structures give a normative framework for “postnational citizenship,” which grants rights to any individual to participate and be a member of any political community regardless of whether she or he has any cultural or historical bonds to this community. Joppke (1999) views citizenship through the lens of rights as well, but emphasizes that the nation-state is still relevant for international human rights and norms. In the author’s own words, his book “sets a counterpoint to current diagnoses of nation-states diminished by the external forces of globalization and international human regimes and discourses” (p.vii). For Joppke (1999), the nation-state remains highly relevant for our understanding of citizenship as rights and national citizenship continues to be the main conduit for immigrant integration, albeit with some nationally specific patterns of multiculturalism. The multiculturalist theory of citizenship (Kymlicka, 1995) also includes rights as a dimension. However, the focus within multiculturalism is on the group and not on the universal rights seen in previous theories. The three types of group rights in Kymlicka’s thought are: self-government, polyethnic and special-representation rights.

Various scholars examine the different dimensions of citizenship. Bloemraad (2000) views citizenship as a relationship between the individual and a socio-political community with at least four dimensions: legal status, rights, identity and participation. At the center of the debate presented by Bloemraad (2000) lies the naturalization of immigrants which questions the degree to which rights need to be attributed to personhood rather than membership in a nation-state and challenges a state’s identity and cohesion by producing multiculturalist outcomes. Bauböck (1999) defines citizenship as “a status of equal and full membership in a polity” (p. 5); distinguishes between thin and thick conceptions of citizenship and proposes the three main dimensions of citizenship to be: rights, membership and practices. Offering an alternative typology of the literature on citizenship, Kymlicka and Norman (1994) suggest legal, identity and civic virtue to be the three main dimensions of citizenship at the individual level. For Brubaker (1992), the key aspect of citizenship is membership and closely connected to membership is territoriality, as membership in a defined territory of a nation-state. In further inquiry into the connections between citizenship and the nation-state, Bosniak (2000) identifies the four dimensions of citizenship to be: legal status, rights, political activity and “a form of collective identity and sentiment” (p. 455).

Closely related to the concept of citizenship are the concepts of emigrant and emigration state. Various scholars (Collyer, 2013; Gamlen, 2008; Barry, 2006; Bauböck, 2009) address the issue that citizenship and migration literature has much more to say about immigrants and immigration than it does about emigrants and emigration. However, as was first stressed by Abdelmalek Sayad (1977), every immigrant is also an emigrant. “Emigrant citizens are legal nationals and citizens of emigration states who voluntarily live physically outside those states. The term does not include refugees or asylum-seekers” (Barry, 2006, p. 13). An “emigration state” is one where the number of people leaving the country in search of better opportunities abroad is greater than the number of people arriving. Within the well-developed scholarly literature on citizenship and immigration, the immigrant’s pre-existing citizenship, citizenship of the emigration state, is significantly undertheorized and instead mainly used as a marker of the immigrant’s “otherness” (Barry, 2006). However, emigration brings a particular perspective on citizenship and thus deserves specific attention. To clarify this discussion, it is useful to think of citizenship as either a legal status or as membership of a community (Gamlen, 2008). Citizenship, when assumed to be “membership of a community in which one lives one’s life” (Held, 1991, p. 20) implies a certain level of cohesion between citizens, yet this cohesion is significantly damaged in the case of emigration states. Emigration by itself can become an integral part of the citizenship experience (Barry, 2006).

The relationship between emigration states and emigrants can be complicated and in some cases conflicting (Barry, 2006). Given the economic reality of emigrants primarily originating from the global South and migrating to the global North, the emigration state’s main perspective on its emigrants is one of economic interest. Emigrants are a stable source of remittances and capital inflows for the emigration state (Barry, 2006). Collyer (2013) recognizes the importance of the economic dimension in the state-emigrants relationship and illustrates it by the state’s efforts to “mobilize” (p. 5) its emigrants. In addition, Collyer (2013) goes beyond the economic rationale when surveying the transnationalism literature to show how the state becomes a “transnational actor just like any other” (p. 6) in interaction with its diaspora/transnational migrants. Emigration also transforms the “territorial understanding of state sovereignty” (Collyer, 2013, p. 11) by challenging the inside-out dichotomy in international relations theory. In the language of transnationalism, the state becomes “de-territorialized” (Glick-Schiller et al., 1995). Gamlen (2008) builds an analytical framework to explore the emigration state–diaspora relationship and delineate “diaspora integration mechanisms,” which focus on extending rights and extracting obligations and “diaspora building mechanisms” that center on cultivating existing diaspora communities and creating new ones.

Very few citizenship studies focus on individual citizens (Aker, 2014) and there is an “overemphasis on structures” (Kymlicka & Norman, 1994, p. 353). The importance of individual citizens to the understanding of citizenship is underestimated (İçduygu, 2005). Aker (2014) surveys some notable exceptions to this overall assessment: Miller-Idriss (2006), Caymaz (2008), İçduygu (2005) and Balta and Olcay (2014). Miller-Idriss (2006) shows that citizenship in the German case is constituted by territoriality, legal status and identity, an interpretation which moves away from the traditional “ius sanguinis” understanding of German citizenship towards “ius soli,” membership, and cultural requirements. “Citizenship is not a static or uniform concept, but rather imagined and re-imagined by ordinary citizens in a variety of ways” (Miller-Idriss, 2006, p. 541). Generalized, structure-driven understandings of citizenship are not sufficient as they quickly become “static and uniform.” Instead, conceptualizations of citizenship need to be produced by individual citizens. For example, Caymaz (2008) fınds that individual Turkish citizens in Turkey conceptualize citizenship primarily as duties. İçduygu (2005) emphasizes the relevance of attachment as a dimension of citizenship observed in Turkish and international migrants, with attachment to a particular state offering citizens “a world of predictable relationships” (İçduygu, 2005, p. 202). Balta and Olcay (2014) argue that transnational citizenship is commodified and illustrate this phenomenon by Turkish elites acquiring U.S. citizenship.

2.6 Emotional/Affective/Intimate Citizenship: Perceiving Citizenship as Feeling

“The solution to good citizenship is located in our capacity to feel,” (p.8) boldly contended George Marcus in his seminal The Sentimental Citizen: Emotion in Democratic Politics, a work with a “radical assertion” (p.7) that emotion makes rationality possible. Without emotions, argues Marcus, people are not capable of rationality and this relationship holds nowhere more strongly than with citizenship practices. The radical nature of this assertion stands in stark contrast to the conventional view of the previously discussed antagonism between rationality and emotion, reason and passion, as well as the ensuing forced choice between one or the other. If we choose reason, so the conventional understanding goes, a world of “freedom, justice, and rights equitably secured for one and all” (Marcus, 2002, p. 47) will follow, while choosing emotion will lead to creating often unreasonable connections with people. The radical nature of Marcus’s argument places emotion and reason in a cooperative, non-competing, mutually enabling relationship, with a key reliance on Hume’s insight (Hume, 1984) that emotions create action. For democratic citizenship to function, reasonable deliberation, made possible by emotional engagement, needs to result in action, again stimulated by emotion. In Marcus’s view, citizens are capable of being “good” because they can feel.

Marcus’s argument is radical, not only because it offers a change of perception in the relationship between rationality and emotions, but also because, unlike received knowledge, it pays serious attention to how emotions impact citizenship. Brown (2014) explains the relative lack of inquiry into the role emotions play in citizenship scholarship, by the presence of some uniform and relatively universal emotions such as “patriotic love” (p. 427). Patriotic love, similarly to hatred projected at national enemies, seems to be present in almost all national contexts, and thus not particularly interesting for scholarly investigation. As a notable exception, Johnson (2010) looks at how citizens are encouraged to feel in order to conceptualize a “good” (p. 500) citizen. Wood (2013) recognizes citizenship participation to be “thoroughly social and relational and inseparable from emotions that arise and flow between people” (p. 52). These individual emotions have a social character and form the basis of the “cohesion agenda” (Fortier, 2010, p. 22), which recognizes that individuals’ feelings are produced by social interaction and the impact of a “community” (p.22). Marcus presented a novel mode of conceptualizing the interplay between emotions and citizenship, which was soon followed by innovative developments in emotional, affective and intimate citizenship.

The concept of emotional citizenship refers to how individuals perceive citizenship as feeling, rather than as citizenship presented by the state and politically received by the citizen. Emotional citizenship relies heavily on citizenship as practice (Wood, 2013), that is on the daily experience of citizenship (Nyers, 2007). The complexity of citizenship is most pronounced within everyday life, where it is experienced as feeling and not necessarily politically structured (De Graeve, 2010). To provide analytical rigor to the concept of emotional citizenship, Ho (2009) differentiates between emotional representations and emotional subjectivities. Emotional representations are defined as the “lexicon and metaphors that individuals use to give meaning to citizenship, such as “home” and “belonging” (Ho, 2009, p. 789), while emotional subjectivities “emphasize the way individuals experience the social world, especially the manner in which they emotionally negotiate the power relations of citizenship governance” (Ho, 2009, p. 789). These two categories are not mutually exclusive; they rather constitute each other. Similarly, Jackson (2016) finds that the four main elements of emotional citizenship are: belonging, home, safety and roots, with home being “intrinsic to emotional citizenship” (Jackson, 2016, p. 824). Other authors (Magat, 1999; Wood, 2013; Howes & Hammett, 2016; Ahmed, 2016) place the focus of emotional citizenship on belonging, or a feeling of belonging.

Similarly to emotional citizenship, affective citizenship recognizes citizens’ feelings as instrumental to how citizenship is constructed. The term is used by Jones (2005) to describe the “affection and loyalty” (p. 145 as cited in Johnson, 2010, p. 496) which “citizens are encouraged to feel about their nation” (Johnson, 2010, p. 496). Mookherjee (2005) uses the term affective citizenship as an “alternative approach to recognition” (p. 36), which, contrary to the abstract notions of unitary citizenship, recognizes how emotional relations act to form identities. According to Mookherjee (2005), those identities are strengthened by shared experiences of social disadvantage, marked by “direct or remembered pain, loss, humiliation or even the psychological disorientation which postcolonial writers associate with the effects of colonial domination” (Fanon, 1967, p. 78). Presented as a response to the postcolonial and feminist criticism of liberal universalism, affective citizenship aims to provide recognition to minority values (Mookherjee, 2005). In a similar manner, Fortier (2010) defines the “affective citizen” to be a member of a community, where membership relies on personal feelings, which go beyond the “private” realm of family and kin and are instead projected towards the larger community.

Intimate citizenship, as defined by the sociologist Ken Plummer, stands apart from the previously described notions of emotional/affective citizenship and refers to the connection between human intimacy and citizenship rights. In Ken Plummer’s definition, intimate citizenship is concerned with “rights, obligations, recognitions and respect around those most intimate spheres of life–who to live with, how to raise children, how to handle one’s body, how to relate as a gendered being, how to be an erotic person” (Plummer, 2001, p. 238). Intimate citizenship is seen as a “sensitizing concept” (Plummer, 2001, p. 238), primarily interested in rights, as they pertain to a particular area of life—the intimate sphere of each individual. Muchoki (2015) emphasizes the “bridge” (p. 61) characteristic of Plummer’s intimate citizenship, since this concept creates a connection between the public and private arenas. De Graeve (2010) indicates that studies in intimate citizenship (as defined by Ken Plummer) concentrate on how “alternative spheres of life” (p. 365) are often discriminated against and excluded when differences between them and general society are negotiated. Another way of understanding the “alternative spheres of life” would be to consider them as people who have different ways of interpreting intimacy, compared to society at large. It is therefore important to underline the key difference between emotional/affective/intimate citizenship in authors such as Ho (2009), Jackson (2016), Magat (1999), Wood (2013), Howes and Hammett (2016), Ahmed (2016), Mookherjee (2005), Fortier (2010), or Johnson (2010) and intimate citizenship in Plummer (2001). The former considers emotions as instrumental for construction of citizenship, while the latter focuses on citizenship rights, as they pertain to a particular sphere of life–human intimacy.

A useful contrasting concept to help define emotional/affective/intimate citizenship is the notion of pragmatic/flexible/practical/instrumental citizenship, also closely related to dual citizenship. Mavroudi (2008) introduces ‘pragmatic citizenship’ to describe a situation in which a passport is strategically acquired for economic, social or security reasons without a strong emotional dimension expressed towards the citizenship of the host state. The result could be belonging that is exclusively reserved for the original state, but it could also produce dual or multiple belonging with de/re-territorialized attachment. Mavroudi (2008) explains how the concept was previously termed by Ong (1999) as ‘flexible citizenship’ to signify the acquirement of multiple passports for security purposes and how it was also used by Waters (2003) to discuss Chinese migrants obtaining Canadian citizenship and their strategic “spreading out” (Waters, 2003 as cited in Mavroudi, 2008, p. 310) of families. Magat (1999) refers to the same concept as “passport identity” (p. 137), or the “formal membership that enables one to benefit from certain privileges bestowed by the state alone.” The formal membership is only a matter of practical convenience with no effect on identity. Mavroudi (2008) also cites Aguilar (1999) as using the concept of ‘instrumental citizenship’ where home states accept that their citizens also have formal citizenship of another host state, but recognize that their primary emotional attachment is directed towards the home state. Thus, these emigrés are also considered being part of the nation by the home state, where the nation is “spread out and de-territorialized” (Mavroudi, 310). Closely related is the concept of dual citizenship, where the home-state citizenship is kept for reasons of identity, belonging and emotional attachment, while the second one is obtained for purposes of security (Skulte-Ouaiss, 2013). The result could be ‘hyphenated identities’ (Mavroudi, 2008)–assuming multiple or dual attachments; ‘cosmopolitan indifference’—a lack of attachment to any nation and the perception of citizenship as devoid of meaning (Lam & Yeoh, 2004); or perhaps a source of ‘democratic influence’ (Kastoryano, 2000)—with the potential for dual citizens to apply values of Western democracy in the home state. In either respect, it is safe to conclude that, as emphasized by Lam and Yeoh (2004), one of the defining features of transnationals is their ambivalence in allegiances and commitments. Thus, while a strict binary between emotional/affective/intimate citizenship vs. pragmatic/flexible/practical/instrumental citizenship might not be possible, the juxtaposition is still beneficial to understand both.

So far, the discussion on the conceptualization of emotional/affective/intimate citizenship has mainly hovered around notions of emotional representations, such as belonging and home, and emotional subjectivities such as the emotional experience of power relations between the citizens and the state. However, as is pointed out by other scholars, such as Mas Giralt (2015), a sorely missing element is an exploration of the distinct emotions which make up the emotional dimension of citizenship. Once a theoretical connection between emotions and citizenship is established, the question to be answered becomes: which particular, specific and distinct emotions constitute citizenship? Within an overall scarcity of research into this subject, some theoretical connections between specific emotions and citizenship have already been recognized within the literature. As was previously discussed, the most common emotion connected to citizenship is one of “patriotic love” and its opposite- hatred towards the enemy of the country, nation or the state. Besides “patriotic love,” scholars have also examined the nexus between the feelings of fear, security/safety and shame.

According to Brown (2014), “patriotic love” (p. 427) is so similar across different national contexts that this universality explains why there has been relatively little attention paid to individual emotions within citizenship studies. Universally, citizens are encouraged to love the nation, so that this “national love” creates a “collective affective alignment towards the nation as an object of love” (Ahmed, 2004, p. 129). Ahmed sees national love to consist both of identification and idealization, where the subject/citizen longs to be more similar to the object of love/nation; as well as where the citizen sees his or her idealized form in the nation (Franz, 2015). Citizens are encouraged to ‘love their country’ with daily reminders as part of citizenship practice (Pantti & van Zoonen, 2006). The “fantasy of romantic love between citizen and nation-state” (Franz, 2015, p. 188) functions to create national cohesion, where the national body is held together by the love of its citizens. National love also serves to draw boundaries between ‘real’ and ‘alien’ citizens, such that the former engages in selfless love towards the nation and the latter is incapable of loving and thus only able to produce national pain (Franz, 2015). The ‘real’ citizen loves the nation and is loved by the nation, while simultaneously fearing the Other/‘alien’.

Delimiting the ‘real’ citizen from the ‘alien’ is one of various uses of fear in constructing citizenship. Within this specific form of “governing through affect, which places the affective subjective at its center”, (Fortier, 2010), the alien Other is perceived as a threat to the national body and fear is used to protect and to defend it from outsiders. Not surprisingly, the described dynamic forms the foundation of anti-immigration rhetoric (Franz, 2015). Ho (2009) finds fear and aversion to be fundamental to the “maintaining and challenging” (p. 792) of the social contract and the basis of the nation-state. In a similar vein, Isin (2004) explores how a nation-state’s border intact involves a process referred to as the ‘neuroticization of the border’ (Isin, 2004, p. 231) whereby citizens are encouraged to have fears and anxieties about the Other, most commonly the migrant. Although, mobilizing affect for governance has a history going back to Aristotle (Charteris-Black, 2005; Johnson, 2010), fear has had a long history of being used for these purposes (Robin, 2004; Bourke, 2005; Johnson, 2010). As fear of the migrant ‘other’ is the most widely spread (Johnson, 2010), it is not surprising that fear as a mobilizing device has gained importance with a worldwide increase in the terrorism threat and a general rise in violence.

Feeling safe and secure is one of the main components of “citizenship as feeling” (Jackson, 2016, p. 826). Connecting citizenship to home, belonging and rootedness, participants in the Jackson (2016) study consistently reiterated the importance of feeling safe in order to maintain the emotional attachment to place. In an analysis of dual citizenship, Skulte-Ouaiss (2013) concludes that the main reason participants in her study pursued a second passport is security. The desire for security is multi-dimensional–“physical, economic, religious, social and, above all, practical (Skulte-Ouaiss, 2013, p. 137). Interestingly, Yuval-Davis (2006) points out that the emotional constituents of people’ identities become more important proportional to how threatened and insecure they feel. An increase in the level of insecurity and threat will bring more attention to emotional attachments.

Besides patriotic love, fear and safety/security, shame is a potent emotion in constituting citizenship. Two studies with very different contexts theorize how shame takes part in the emotional dimension of citizenship. Brown (2014) examines how the German national feeling is “broken,” with shame dominating the civic emotional landscape as a legacy of the Holocaust and the Nazi-era. Practices of citizenship in modern Germany include an active rejection of patriotism (Fulbrook, 1999; Jarausch, 2006; Brown, 2014) with even low-key expressions of national pride and national symbols considered to be inappropriate and taboo. Instead, public displays of civic emotion in modern Germany regularly contain elements of “ritual shame” (Fulbrook, 1999; Brown, 2014) and “ritualized regret” (Olick, 2007; Brown, 2014). Aguilar (1996) looks at transnational shame felt by Filipino professionals working in Singapore because of the deeply ingrained ‘Filipino as maid’ image. Since acquiring Singaporean citizenship is surrounded by legal obstacles, Filipino professionals combat the mainstream stereotypes by establishing between themselves and the maids, accentuating higher socioeconomic status and professional skills. An additional source of shame in this context is exaggerated attention that the mainstream society pays to the “potential inferiority of co-nationals, on the ‘weaknesses’ of the ‘race’ that, by implication, one carries ‘in the blood’” (Aguilar, 1996, p. 123). As a result, Filipino professionals continue to distance themselves not only from the domestic workers but also from their own citizenship, which is perceived as a source of shame. The two very different cultural and historical contexts both show how the emotion of shame acts to constitute citizenship in substantial ways.

2.7 Home: Place, Time, and a Set of Social Relations

Understanding the concept of home involves a series of interlinking connections with the concepts of belonging and emotional citizenship, both in relation to the host country and the country of emigration (Howes & Hammett, 2016). According to Magat (1999), there is the “Little Home”, a place for daily activities, and the “Big Home- where one belongs, the place of ultimate return” (p. 120). Home, in that sense is not just one place, but perhaps many different places that encompass different elements of home: a house, a sense of place, familiar people and bonds of kinship, rootedness, connections between the past, present, and a projected future, nostalgic yearning for the innocence of childhood, homeland, “an affective core” (Rapoport, 1995) or “a mythic place of desire in the diasporic imagination” (Brah, 1996). Home is a complex concept, which, according to Boccagni (2017), is defined by the key attributes of security, familiarity, and control.

The brick and mortar of the house, the geographical landscape, the smells, and senses of the air and water all form part of the physical or the “material home” (Taylor, 2009). While some researchers (Lam & Yeoh, 2004), find that only a small minority of study participants consider economic concerns of homeownership to be important to their understanding of home, others (Taylor, 2009) consider the “material home” to be of fundamental importance. In the study of Cypriot refugees in London, Taylor (2009) finds that the material home “is not just seen as the house, but also the fields, orchards, farmland and cemetery where ancestors are buried” (p. 16). Particularly for people from rural areas, the value of the physical land goes beyond its economic worth. The land provides sustenance, meaning, and a place of labor. According to Taylor (2009), other elements of the natural environment such as plants, animals, trees, crops and flowers figure prominently into the “material home”, as well as the tastes and smells of the local cuisine.

Home can also be seen as a ‘sense of place.’ Geographers have long established the difference between space and place, as basic concepts. According to Tuan (2001), an abstract space becomes a place, as it gains “definition and meaning” (p. 136). A space gains meaning through “daily practices, burial rites, festivals and religious and political discourses’ (Taylor, 2009, p.12). As space is transformed into place, it gains meaning and definition and represents security, while space remains a bastion of freedom. Humans are attached to place and security, as they yearn for space and freedom (Tuan, 2001). Home, in Tuan’s view is “an intimate place” (p. 144). Blunt and Dowling (2006) show home to be a place, but also an “imaginary that is imbued with feelings.” (p. 2) These feelings can range from belonging, desire and intimacy to fear, violence, and alienation (Blunt & Dowling, 2006). The emotional substance created by lived experience forms individual and collective memories; ties a community of people to a physical location–a space, and thus creates home as a ‘sense of place.’

In contrast to the understanding of home as a specific place is the notion that home can be found in multiple locations, as well as in movement itself. In a study of transnational professionals, Erkmen (2015) concludes that home, for these individuals, is two-fold: an emotional anchor to their homeland, as well as the “key element of cosmopolitan identity construction” (p. 38), the belief that home can be found anywhere, including mobility itself. Similarly, Rapport (1997) views movement to be crucial to our understanding of home. “In place of the conventional conception of home as the stable physical centre of the universe—a safe place to leave and return to—a far more mobile notion comes to be used: a home which can be taken along whenever one decamps.” (Rapport, 1997, p. 73) This perspective of home underplays the importance of fixity and connection to a physical place. In this respect, Lam and Yeoh (2004) compare home to the ‘body’, where both “function as portable repositories for desires, anxieties and personal memory attached to the self“(p. 143). These authors extend the home-body analogy to a gendered perspective, where the mobile home is more akin to male endeavors, while female ones are more suited for a fixed understanding of home. Viewing home as essentially gendered sheds light on the possibility for home to be a site of multiple different emotions, both positive and negative. Blunt and Dowling (2006) assert that home is a gendered concept and point to feminist scholars who view home to be a site of oppression and violence against women. Henderson (2011) further analyzes home as a gendered concept without it including direct violence and overt oppression, by exploring Simone de Beauvoir’s distinction between immanence and transcendence (de Beauvoir, 2011), and Hannah Arendt’s differentiation between labor and work (Arendt, 1998).

Home is also constructed through connections created between the past, present, and future. Howes and Hammett (2016) point out the “temporariness and precariousness and attachments to multiple, transnational locations” (p. 22) Home, in this sense, is constructed symbolically through the migrants’ memories and through their life stories. An idealized past often becomes a peaceful harbor to which the migrant escapes from the discomfort of the present. An inevitable consequence of this escape is longing and nostalgia, often expressed towards childhood to which there is no return (Lam & Yeoh, 2004). The ‘temporal home’, as described by Taylor (2009), refers to the refugees’ place in time as much as space. For people who have lost their physical homes, the present is marked by exile, the past characterized by their lost home, and the future shaped by an uncertainty of return or continued exile.

Home is often thought of as a set of social relations, friends, family, and roots. Jackson (2016) finds that home is described as ‘roots, a sense of rootedness’, also found in Blunt and Dowling (2006). For the Chinese-Malaysian participants in Lam and Yeoh (2004), their strong family and friendship bonds locate ‘home’ in Malaysia, despite their daily life in Singapore. In the same vein, the destruction or deterioration of these social relations is the most important reason participants in the same study cease to refer to Malaysia as home. Taylor (2009) demonstrates how the destruction of social relations, because of forced migration and expulsions, presents the greatest source of loss to refugees. Also, when trying to reconstruct their homes in exile, diaspora members rely on ‘community organizations, shops, cafes and social venues” (Taylor, 2009, p. 19). Reviving social relations gives those who have been uprooted, a chance to reestablish their homes.

The concept of home is closely related to the nation. In fact, it is often perceived as the “cornerstone of national identity.” (Macpherson, 2004, p. 92) Barrington et al. (2003) emphasize the importance of territoriality, which in their interpretation is understood as home and homeland, for national identity. In addition, emotional attachment to the homeland is developed in parallel to the development of national self-consciousness (Barrington et al., 2003). An alternative contrast between the concepts of ‘home’ and ‘nation’ is provided by Isin (2004). For this author, home becomes the place where the neurotic citizen is produced. The ‘home security’ industry of surveillance mechanisms and gated communities in fact exploits the anxieties of the neurotic citizen and becomes a parallel to ‘homeland security’. “Thus, the home and nation become both the same and different–the same because they provide models for each other and different because each provides an evasion or sanctuary from the other” (Isin, 2004, p. 231). The result is not a rational, self-interested citizen, but a neurotic citizen whose stable home is placed in service of the homeland.

It can be claimed that the broad notion of ‘Home’ evokes similar images for people around the world; however, there is some research to suggest that the concept might not be universal. For example, Magat (1999) points out that different people attach different meanings to the concept of home and that these meanings also differ for the same person at different periods of their life. Differences in how home is conceptualized are particularly pronounced when contrasted with national identity. By comparing Japanese and Israeli immigrants in Canada, Magat (1999) demonstrates how the two groups have different interpretations of home depending on the relative strength of their national identity and on how strongly the concept of ‘home’ is conflated with that of the ‘nation.’ While the strong national identity of Israeli immigrants prevents them from establishing homes elsewhere, it is possible for Japanese immigrants to have multiple homes and still keep a strong Japanese national identity. For the Israelis, ‘home’ and ‘nation’ are synonymous and the only true home is in Israel. For the Japanese, these two concepts are separated from each other, which makes it possible for these immigrants to establish multiple homes and senses of belonging. In a similar vein, Lam and Yeoh (2004) discover that the defining features of home specific to the Chinese-Malaysian transmigrants are: social relations, nostalgic memories, national identity and practical lifestyle needs. Keeping these findings in mind, it might be necessary to provide some context-specific features of the concept ‘home’, while framing the discussion within universalizing elements.

2.8 Belonging: Place-Belongingness and the Politics of Belonging

For some social theorists, the concept of belonging is “self-explanatory” (Antonsich, 2010) and therefore with no need for a definition. However, as it appears in a range of fields: human geography, political science, sociology, cultural theory, even without clear definitions, some general characteristics of the concept can be identified. The classical examples of how the concept of belonging has been used include Tonnies’s distinguishing between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, Emile Durkheim’s mechanical and organic solidarity and Karl Marx’s conception of alienation (Yuval-Davis, 2006). Mee and Wright (2009) view belonging as primarily a geographical concept, because belonging “connects matter to place” (p. 772). Similarly, Ignatieff (1994) proposes belonging to be “a dynamic emotional attachment that relates individuals to the material and social worlds that they inhabit and experience.” Furthering the emotional attachment focus, for a number of authors (Yuval-Davis, 2006; Jackson, 2016), the concept of belonging is closely related to feeling at home, feeling safe and secure.

Antonsich (2010) provides an analytical framework to help us think through the concept of belonging, by identifying its two distinct dimensions: place-belongingness and the politics of belonging. Mas Giralt (2015) presents a succinct clarifying distinction between these two dimensions, in which place-belongingness refers to “personal emotions of feeling in place” (p.4), while the politics of belonging relates to whether society, formally or informally, recognizes the person as “being in place” (p.4). Antonsich (2010) defines place-belongingness to be characterized by feeling safe, feeling at home. The “place is felt as home” (p. 646). The politics of belonging involves a boundary-making process designed to separate humanity into an “us” and a “them,” referred to by some authors as the “dirty work of boundary maintenance” (Crowley, 1999). These boundaries define the political community, founded with guardians and administrators who decide on who gets to be “inside” and who is left “outside” of that political community. On this boundary, there is a lively interaction between two contrary sides, the claimant and the grantor of belonging, and it includes a constant interplay of rejecting, violating, and transgressing. The grantor establishes requirements of belonging, which might range from the most restrictive categories, often with assimilatory objectives, such as common: race, origin, place of birth, a “myth of common descent”, language, culture and religion to the more open categories of shared values based on “human rights” and “democracy” (Yuval-Davis, 2006. p. 209). Political belonging is instrumental to citizenship because the claim to belonging is often accompanied by a residence and work permit. The personal feeling of belonging is negotiated with social practices of inclusion/exclusion (Antonsich, 2010). In the words of Yuval-Davis et al. (2005), the “sociology of emotions” is negotiated with the “sociology of power.” Boundaries between “us” and “them” are constructed by both the personal dynamic of the individual seeking to belong and the political project of those in power to define what constitutes belonging.

Citizenship and belonging are closely related and intertwined. While conducting a literature review on the relationship between citizenship and belonging, Antonsich (2010) finds that the two terms are often used synonymously in geography, political science, sociology, anthropology, and history. In contrast, Yuval-Davis (2006), argues that the two concepts are not identical, since most of the current discussions on the politics of belonging center on “who belongs and who does not” (p. 207), regardless of citizenship status. The subject of these debates is the lowest common denominator in terms of descent, as well as cultural and other norms thought of as necessary prerequisites for belonging. Also, the political struggle for full participation in citizenship has been the focus of many socially excluded and marginalized groups, seeking to gain “full and legitimate belonging (Yuval-Davis, 2006, p. 206). Other authors, such as Bloemraad et al. (2008) define a “sense of belonging” to be a dimension of citizenship, together with “legal status, rights, political and other forms of participation in society” (as cited in Ahmed, 2016, p. 113). According to Ho (2009), emotions act as an intermediary between the belonging aspect of what citizenship represents and what citizens subjectively perceive to be their rights for meaningful participation in society.

Belonging should not be only seen through a cognitive perspective, but as having a strong emotional component. Constructions of belonging “reflect emotional investments and desire for attachment” (Yuval-Davis, 2006, p. 202). People “long” (Probyn, 1996), to create attachments to places and social collectivities. As Antonsich (2010) claims, longing is always expressed toward some place ‘there’, a place of perceived belonging, while the ‘here’ is seemingly devoid of belonging. A frequent outcome of this neither here, nor there phenomenon is the immigrants’ “myth of return” (Antonsich, 2010, p. 651) to the lost place of intense yearning. On the other side, developing belonging to the newly arrived at place, the ‘here’ involves emotional attachments through “everyday practices of belonging” (Fenster, 2005; Mas Giralt, 2015) as well as “collective practices of belonging” (Fortier, 2000; Mas Giralt, 2015). The performances and practices of belonging, learning about the places of settlement as well as establishing oneself in social networks, serve as vehicles for the immigrant to develop emotional attachments, which produce a sense of belonging.

Belonging can be viewed as an element of emotional citizenship. Jackson (2016) finds that the four common dimensions used by participants in her study to discuss emotional citizenship are: “belonging and connection, home, safety, and the laying down of one’s roots (p. 822). On one hand, these four dimensions are closely related and have significant areas of overlap; however, there are also points of difference. For example, Ho (2009) asserts that the “figurative use of emotional metaphors, such as roots, home, family and friends” (p. 794) serves as an instrument to generate meaning for citizenship. The “emotional metaphors” are not identical in substance, but are in fact instrumentally used to give meaning to a broader concept, citizenship. Belonging is often referred to as “thicker” (Crowley, 1999) than citizenship because belonging goes beyond the formal acquisition of equal rights and political entitlements. Belonging can be conceived as an “emotionally constructed category” (Ho, 2009, p. 791) producing meaning for citizenship or it can be conceived as an element/dimension of emotional citizenship.

To further clarify the role of belonging in the construction of the emotional dimension of citizenship it is useful to contrast it to citizenship without exclusive belonging. Skulte-Ouaiss (2013) demonstrates this distinction when examining the case of Lebanese citizens also holding various European citizenships. On one hand, there is citizenship based on “residency and a contract between the individual and the state” (p. 145). This understanding of citizenship may or may not include belonging, but it is certainly not premised on national belonging. Opposite to this conceptualization is citizenship based on “national belonging being the bedrock” (Bloemraad, 2004 cited in Skulte-Ouaiss, 2013, p. 145). Depending on the developing notions of citizenship in Europe, the Lebanese dual-citizens might be forced to choose between holding onto their Lebanese citizenship with full national belonging or renouncing it in favor of a more secure, but alien European passport. Similarly, Mavroudi (2008) theorizes the concept of pragmatic citizenship and shows its application in the case of the Palestinian diaspora. Brown (2014) explains “performances of emotional labor” (p. 428), which seem to be necessary for immigrants to invest in order to gain national belonging. The specific type of emotional labor refers to the “uniquely German form of negative civic emotion”, but the analysis could be foreseeably extended to other cases. The problem of the absence of belonging from the individual perspective of the immigrant is described by some authors (Antonsich, 2010; Howes & Hammett, 2016) as a “sense of loneliness, isolation, alienation and dis-placement (Antonsich, 2010, p. 649). Antonsich (2010) is also careful to point out that this situation is the outcome of the absence of place-belongingness and not necessarily exclusionary politics of belonging.

Numerous empirical studies (as cited in Ehrkamp & Leitner, 2006) have also pointed to the existence of multiple belonging in contemporary migration. Multiple belonging refers to migrants being embedded, identifying with and taking part in multiple communities, while not even being anchored in one. Connections created through “complex webs of mobilities and belongings” (Howes & Hammett, 2016) also act as a challenge to state-bound understanding of citizenship. Multiple allegiances and loyalties “question the very concept of citizenship,” (Kastoryano, 2000, p. 308) as they blur the lines between rights and identity. In fact, “engaging in transnational practices may result in an institutional expression of multiple belonging, where the country of origin becomes a source of identity, the country of residence a source of rights, and the emerging transnational space, a space of political action combining the two or more countries” (Kastoryano, 2000, p. 309). According to this interpretation of belonging, the immigrant is not faced with an “either/or” situation, as with Skulte-Ouaiss (2013) or, to some extent with Mavroudi (2008). The newly created transnational space allows for multiple belongings to flourish, as opposed to the immigrant facing the dilemma of mutually exclusive choices of citizenship or belonging.

2.9 Conclusion

To sum up, this chapter presented a survey of how the concepts of return migration, diaspora/transnationalism, ‘political’ emotions, citizenship, emotional/affective/intimate citizenship, belonging and home have been developed within an interdisciplinary literature. The conceptual framework is built on the broad foundation of defining and debating the concepts of return migration and diaspora/transnationalism; followed by an investigation into how emotions have (not) been studied in the social sciences and ending with a brief review of citizenship scholarship. The second part of the conceptual framework delves into greater detail of the nexus between citizenship, emotions and diaspora/transnationalism, starting with Marcus’s premise that emotions are relevant for the study of citizenship and on the findings of Ho (2009) and Jackson (2016) that the way individual citizens conceptualize the emotional dimension of citizenship is through the concepts of home and belonging. The final two sections of the chapter explore the nature of home and belonging, by examining how these concepts have been defined, debated and developed along various dimensions and disciplinary perspectives.

The review has revealed substantial gaps in the surveyed literature(s). First, voluntary, or using more specific terminology “chosen or decided” (Cassarino, 2008), return migration to post-conflict societies has been understudied, particularly when discussing its non-economic motivations (Halfacree, 2004). Second, although highly significant for our understanding of political phenomena emotions have been significantly understudied. The systemic reasons for this historical neglect of emotions from the social sciences and political theory have been surveyed. Third, emotions are relevant for the study of citizenship, yet scholarly inquiry into the ‘emotional dimension’ of citizenship is in its infancy. Fourthly, studies within citizenship scholarship which place the primary focus on how individual citizens conceptualize citizenship are gravely missing (Aker, 2014), with only a few such examples. Similarly, return migration scholarship severely suffers from an over-emphasis on structure and insufficient attention given to the migrants’ own agency, whether at the individual or household level (Achenbach, 2017). Finally, previous researchers have established a firm connection between emotional citizenship and the concepts of home and belonging. Further inquiry into these areas revealed that, although work on connecting the distinct emotions of “patriotic love”, fear, safety/security and shame has been completed, still much research needs to be done on the specific and distinct emotions constituting citizenship. Thus, when offering a solution to the theoretical problem central to my book, the point of contribution lies at an interdisciplinary intersection of literatures on return migration, citizenship, home, belonging, and distinct ‘political’ emotions as experienced by individual citizens.