This article analyses the citizenship regime of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). Current literature on ASEAN regionalism has refrained from examining the link between community-building and citizenship building, and the prevailing assumption remains that ASEAN lacks a citizenship regime. This assumption derives from the premises that a regional citizenship regime is the result of the reconfiguration of national citizenship rights and that it is a legally defined status. By deploying the concept of citizenship regime based on the dimensions of rights, access, belonging, and responsibility mix, the article argues that there is an emerging citizenship regime in ASEAN built on citizenship-related policies. This citizenship regime is informal, developing, and atypical – and the unintentional outcome of ASEAN trying to fulfil its agenda on community-building. The analysis contributes to citizenship studies and ASEAN regionalism by offering a nuanced understanding of how citizenship regimes are built through citizenship-related policies and practices.

This paper explores the variation of citizenship in eight regional organisations (ROs). Since the 1980s, ROs have increasingly served as spaces for developing, regulating, and providing citizenship. However, current literature primarily takes a rights-based approach and focuses on a narrow set of cases without providing an account for the variation of citizenship in ROs. This paper offers a broad, conceptual approach to the study of regional citizenship and deploys a three-tiered conceptual framework consisting of rights, access, and belonging, to analyse how citizenship varies across different ROs. It challenges the current theorisation of regional citizenship, which is primarily rooted in the study of the EU’s rights-based approach. The analysis contributes to citizenship studies and comparative regionalism. It shows how citizenship varies across ROs, thus providing the first comprehensive cross-regional comparison. The empirical findings lead to the following insights. First, citizenship in regional organisations can be conceptualised as constitutional or practice-based. Second, there are different pathways to regional citizenship where practices might precede law or where citizenship in ROs remains a practice-based concept. Third, there is variation in the link between national and regional citizenship and how ROs provide access to regional citizenship.

This paper explores the Economic Community of West African States’ (ECOWAS) citizenship regime by investigating the institutional perceptions of five departments of the ECOWAS Commission. Creating a citizenship regime has been a central objective of the organisation's institutional framework but previous research has refrained from examining its multiplicity. The paper uses the concept of citizenship regime consisting of the dimensions rights, access, belonging and responsibility mix as the conceptual lens and draws on institutional documents and primary data from interviews conducted at the ECOWAS Commission. The paper contributes to current debates in citizenship studies and African regionalism and the literature on supra-national citizenship building, regional integration and governance research in Africa and elsewhere. The empirical data show that movement is central to the ECOWAS citizenship regime, whether formulated in terms of a right, as a way to facilitate access, or a way to establish a sense of regional belonging.