Diasporic citizenship: (re)negotiating identity and reimagining home in the ‘in-betweenness’

This Special Issue rethinks diasporic citizenship by examining how migration, displacement, return, and transnational mobility disrupt conventional alignments among legal status, territory, identity, political participation, social recognition, and belonging. Bringing together studies of international students in Australia, Chinese professional migrants in Singapore, Rojhelatî Kurdish diasporans, Singapore Malay-Muslim return migrants, and Palestinian and Syrian refugee youth in Lebanon, it conceptualises in-betweenness as a durable and differentiated condition of contemporary citizenship. The collection advances the notion of negotiated non-congruence to capture how individuals and communities navigate disjunctions among rights, residence, home, recognition, temporality, and political agency. It demonstrates that in-betweenness may be practised, strategic, political, or institutionally imposed, depending on migrants’ resources and relationships with state power. The contributions highlight temporality, reconceptualise home as an active citizenship practice, differentiate liminality by power, and reveal citizenship as an unfinished and continuously negotiated relationship rather than a settled legal status.