Lived citizenship beyond legal status: Afghan migrants, memory, and mobility

Abstract

This article examines how Afghan migrants reconfigure citizenship through everyday practice shaped by displacement, mobility, and survival. Drawing on 110 in-depth interviews conducted along the Afghanistan–Türkiye–France migration corridor, it employs the conceptual lens of lived citizenship to explore how migrants navigate exclusion, assert autonomy, and claim recognition across precarious legal and spatial contexts. Rather than equating citizenship solely with legal status or formal state membership, the analysis reframes it as a dynamic process, enacted, negotiated, and persistently pursued through informal infrastructures, spatial coping strategies, and transnational solidarities. A novel contribution of this study lies in its integration of collective memory into the analysis of lived citizenship, addressing it as a mechanism of influence that operates both as a cognitive framework shaping decision-making and as a practical archive of survival knowledge. Migrants’ shared remembrance of war, exile, paperlessness, and intergenerational displacement informs their present actions and future aspirations. These memories underpin a repertoire of survival strategies, securing forged documents, mobilizing family-based networks, or navigating border regimes, which function as situated enactments of citizenship. Documentation, often lacking or precarious, emerges as a powerful symbol of existence, rights, and protection. Enduring mobility, frequently interpreted as failed settlement, is instead revealed as a tactical response activated whenever lived citizenship is constrained or better negotiated elsewhere. By foregrounding memory as a structuring force in Afghan migrants’ lived experience of citizenship, this article advances a historically grounded and relational understanding of citizenship, not as a stable legal status, but as a mobile, contingent, and dynamic process enacted from the margins through negotiation, recognition, and the persistent pursuit of dignity.