Claiming a postcolonial differential citizenship. Contestation of family migration rights in the Netherlands in the wake of Suriname’s independence

This research article is written by Eline Westra, Saskia Bonjour and Floris Vermeulen. Political struggles over national belonging often involve ideas on what a ‘proper’ family looks like. This article connects this important insight from the field of family migration politics to the study of postcolonial citizenship. Rather than focusing on dominant (State) perspectives, we ask: how do citizens from formerly colonised territories themselves conceptualise ‘the family’ and ‘the nation’ in the former metropole? We do so in a historical exploration of the political claims that three different Surinamese–Dutch organisations made regarding family migration rights, in the wake of Suriname’s independence (1975). We find that the organisations collectively claimed the recognition of Suriname-specific family forms in Dutch migration policy, such as unmarried coupledom (konkubinaat) and temporary foster children (kweekjes). Thereby they put forward a vision of postcolonial citizenship which challenged dominant conceptions of nationhood in the Netherlands, assuming instead that formerly colonised subjects and their ‘difference’ inherently and inevitably belong to Dutch national history and identity. In this vision, they reframed the Dutch nation’s spatio-temporal boundaries (the colonial past did not end at independence and there are ongoing transnational ties), and cultural boundaries (‘Surinamese difference’ is a constitutive element of Dutch postcolonial citizenship). In view of contemporary calls for decolonisation of European societies and scholarship, these claims represent important and inspiring contributions to ongoing debates on citizenship in a postcolonial nation.

The article is available open access on the website of Migration Politics.