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The concept of citizenship in Europe after World War II faces two major challenges: migration and European integration. This introduction precedes a group of articles examining debates and law-making processes related to the concept of citizenship in Europe after World War II. The introduction sketches the historical development of citizenship in European representative democracies, taking into account four basic dimensions (access to citizenship, citizenship rights, citizenship duties, and the active content of citizenship) for analyzing changes in the concept of citizenship.

This volume focuses on citizenship as a contested concept. We understand citizenship-as well as other key concepts in politics and Political Science-as objects of interpretative disputes both in their empirical reality and when they are used as analytical categories. This theoretical and methodological perspective on concepts challenges the common understanding and usage of concepts in Political Science in general, and in Comparative Politics in particular.A widely shared understanding in Political Science is that concepts serve as our tools, or lenses, with which we analyse reality. This is why it is important to carefully reflect on the concepts used. The way we choose and interpret a concept also shapes the lens with which we analyse reality-it shapes our angle, our way of analysis and our research design. The character and properties of the lenses and tools we use affect the way we obtain different views on reality and they can change our analytical results.To carefully reflect upon a concept is especially important where it is the basis for the comparative method of analysis. This is why a number of renowned comparativists such as Giovanni Sartori (1970) or Philippe Schmitter (2017) have underlined that it is crucial to be precise and reflected in defining and operationalising the research concepts. In a positivist approach, which is not infrequent in Comparative Politics, a concept then is understood as something that just needs to be defined and operationalized, in order to measure something on this basis.In this volume we argue contrary to such a positivist and essentialist view and suggest a reflexive and constructivist perspective on concepts instead. This opens up a broader

This chapter analyses migration as a political question for the EU and in global governance. It outlines the interplay and tension between sovereign and decentralised power and the role of facts and narratives in this interplay. The aim is to discuss the possible political shift that is ongoing both as a United Nations led and a European driven effort. This means the initiatives to tackle migration as a political issue through recognition of framing, facts, accurate information, data and communications tools as key features in the debates. It is also a shift to acknowledging, directly and indirectly, that states, as the main subjects of international law and the ones with the responsibility to respect, protect and fulfil human rights and can be held more accountable for their actions in tackling e.g. disinformation and radical right discourses against human rights. The chapter illustrates this through selected cases, such as recent initiatives of the EU Fundamental Rights Agency and the UN Global Compact for Safe and Orderly Migration. The motivation behind the analysis is the way the emergence of the hybrid media space means that it is no longer possible to ignore the contemporary channels of information as crucial sites of power struggle in the politics of migration. This development is, the chapter argues, now an important feature in Europe Union institutional politics and global migration governance.