Temporary legality as a mode of governance
What happens when the right to remain is no longer secure?
This project examines how residence and citizenship are becoming increasingly conditional, subject to ongoing reassessment, and open to revocation.
Photo by Rayson Tan on Unsplash
Project abstract
This project advances temporary legality as a framework for analyzing how legal status is governed through temporality, conditionality, and racialized differentiation. Developed in my earlier work to capture a prevailing condition of asylum marked by legal conditionality and protracted deportability, temporary legality describes how the right to remain is rendered continuously contingent on meeting shifting requirements. It reflects a broader transformation in which the possibility of deportation no longer disappears once protection has been granted but is continually reproduced through an expanding range of laws, policies, and institutions. Border control thus becomes embedded in domains far beyond the immigration system itself.
The project extends this analysis beyond asylum to examine how similar logics increasingly shape the conditions of all types of residence and citizenship. Through this lens, temporary legality is approached not simply as a feature of specific legal categories, but as a broader mode of governance that extends beyond migration status to encompass those positioned as not fully belonging to the national community.
Empirically, the project engages with policy developments such as language requirements, vandel (good conduct) criteria, and proposals enabling the withdrawal of citizenship for dual nationals. While framed as universal and neutral, such criteria operate through racialized distinctions in access to legal status, extending processes of regulation and evaluation into domains of everyday life where language, social practices, and forms of self-expression become subject to scrutiny. These processes are examined through qualitative analyses of legal reforms and policy developments, focusing on how changing forms of governance regulate access to residence and citizenship.
By tracing how conditionality, (re-)evaluation, and revocability extend across the spectrum of legal status, the project explores how the logic of temporary legality increasingly shapes not only the margins of membership, but the terms of citizenship itself.
Funding
This project is funded by the Asylum, migration- and integration fund (AMIF, cofunded by the EU) grant 20373329.