Ethnic capital, migration, and citizenship: a Bourdieusian perspective

This article examines how ethnic capital operates in ethnic affinity migration and external citizenship. Criticizing the “methodological nationalism”, inadequate theorization of the state, and “groupist” understanding of ethnicity that characterize existing scholarship on ethnic capital, I develop an alternative account drawing on Bourdieu. I highlight the importance of state power that consecrates ethnicity as a legitimate element in classifying non-citizens and determines the key criteria for coethnicity. The conversion of ethnicity into a migration-facilitating resource, however, is not monopolized by the state. I pay attention to how aspiring migrants, assisted by various intermediaries, challenge the state’s definition of ethnic group boundaries or deliberately cultivate specific ethnic markers, with varying implications for their ethnic self-understanding. Instead of treating ethnicity as what migrants are, I analyse what states, migrants, and intermediaries do with ethnicity – how they shape the valorization, conversion, and legitimization of ethnic capital in macro-political, meso-institutional, and micro-interactional contexts, with different agendas and asymmetrical power.