Ambivalent citizenship and extraterritorial voting among Colombians in London and Madrid

Abstract

In this article, we explore the nature of extraterritorial voting among Colombian migrants in the 2010 elections in London and Madrid. To address the neglected issue of why voter turnout from abroad has been so low, we take into account the views of voters and non-voters alike to show that, while the external vote privileges the professional and well educated, this does not mean that migrants are not interested in politics back home. Drawing on Bauman (1991), we conceptualize ambivalent citizenship as the paradoxical manner in which, through the external vote, states impose hegemonic notions of citizenship from above, which people embrace in an ambivalent manner from below. We show that the workings of the state make voting a difficult process; they create structural ambivalence for migrants who, even if they practise their citizenship in other ways, exercise individual ambivalence because they find it difficult to engage with a political system back home that they do not trust. The conceptualization of 'ambivalent citizenship' therefore encompasses the contradictory complexities inherent in the provision of external voting rights that actively privilege and exclude migrants in mutually constitutive ways.

Older immigrants living in Switzerland and ambivalence related to return around the retirement period

“…The concept of ambivalent citizenship was also thematized more recently by McNevin (2013), who analyzes the case of irregular migrants looking for an improvement in their rights in an institutional world that does not offer them many opportunities to be recognized as citizens. McIlwaine and Bermudez (2015) also show that home states create structural ambivalence by making external voting-taking part in native-country elections from the host country-a difficult process for migrants, who are both privileged and excluded in this process.…”

Temporary migrants as an uneasy presence in immigrant societies: Reflections on ambivalence in Australia

“…Ambivalence as a feeling, attenuation, or attitude—as a response to life’s risks and uncertainties—is an emergent response to the experiences, actions, and reactions of temporary migrants. By emergent, I propose a double meaning; first, that ambivalence is an expression particular to the uncertainties and “splitting” that mark temporary migration, and second, in the sense that migration scholars recently gravitated to this concept for its explanatory use (Kivisto and La Vecchia-Mikkola, 2013; McIlwaine and Bermudez, 2015; McNevin, 2013; Uehling, 2002; Warriner, 2013; Weisberger, 1992). Ambivalence is a common dynamic in key social processes from the development of conscience and the opposing forces of repression and domination of impulses and feelings (Freud, 1955), to the migrant as stranger experiencing life as “matter out of place” (Bauman, 1991), to the dynamics of seemingly oppositional affective orientations understood beyond the range of consciousness and calculation as “rational choice” expressed in behavior as “adaptation” and being “reasonable” (Smelser, 1998).…”

Introduction: Ambivalence and the social processes of immigrant inclusion

“…Along these lines, ambivalence has been highlighted as a salient aspect of migrants’ transnational family life (Madianou, 2012; Sun, 2017) but also, interestingly, of their reactions to diaspora-reaching discourses and policies promulgated by the governments of sending countries. Extra-territorial voting rights are a case in point (McIlwaine and Bermudez, 2015; see also, on diasporic relations in a context of “forced” migration, Belloni, 2018). Ambivalence here has to do not only with the coexistence of migrant “distant status” and “local status” (Morawska, 1987), but also with the contrasting reactions elicited by each status.…”