THE CENTRAL EUROPEAN UNIVERSITY

NATIONALISM STUDIES PROGRAM

cordially invites you to a lecture by

Yossi Harpaz

Princeton University

Privatizing Citizenship: Strategies and Discourses of Dual Nationality in Serbia and Mexico

For most of the 20th century, dual citizenship was prohibited by most countries. Since the 1990’s, however, many countries changed their laws to permit dual and multiple nationality. The rise of dual citizenship also created new and dramatic opportunities for individuals outside the West. Millions of people in Eastern Europe and Latin America discovered that their migration history, family roots or ethnic identity made them eligible for a second citizenship from a European Union country or the U.S. In this paper, I examine two cases of dual citizenship: Hungarian (EU) citizenship in Serbia which is acquired on the basis of ethnic origin, and U.S. citizenship in Mexico which is acquired through birth in U.S. territory. Many applicants use opportunistic strategies in order to gain citizenship: Serbs study Hungarian and Mexicans travel to the U.S. to give birth to their children (so-called birth tourism). Drawing on material from fieldwork and interviews conducted in 2014-2015, I compare these cases along three dimensions: citizenship laws, applicants’ strategies and the discourses that are used to justify dual citizenship.

Thursday, 03 December at 6 p.m.

Faculty Tower 309

Yossi is a Ph.D. candidate in Sociology at Princeton University. He holds an M.A. in Sociology and Anthropology from Tel-Aviv University. His research interests include citizenship, nationalism, migration and globalization. Yossi’s dissertation project compares formations of dual citizenship in Serbia, Mexico and Israel. His work was published in International Migration Review, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies and other venues. Yossi Harpaz has been offered a contract (effective of October 2016) by the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the Tel Aviv University.