Refugee integration and citizenship policies: the case study of Croatian Serbs in Vojvodina

During the turbulent 1990s, nationalist elites of the post-Yugoslav republics utilized citizenship policies for the realization of the nationalist projects, aiming to create „imagined“ ethnically homogenous polities over ethnically heterogeneous territory. Such exclusive policies on the one hand aimed to integrate and formally include all ethnic-kin to a new nation-state, while on the other hand promoted the exclusion of unwanted ethnic minorities from the membership in the polity. Once the violent conflicts transformed ethnic minorities into refugees, citizenship policies enacted by the nationalizing states established impediments for their possible return, hence promoted the newly established ethnic homogeneity within the boundaries of the state. On the other hand, for the refugees, reaching the final destination of their flight (their external kin state) did not necessarily led to the end of the refugee cycle nor did lead to the uncontested integration to host society. 

The proposed presentation aims to study the integration experiences of the Serb refugees from Croatia who left country in the aftermath of the military operation Storm, and sought protection in Serbia. In the focus of the study will be the access to citizenship and access to the alternative legal statuses as determinants of the specific integration outcomes.   While the forced migration literature highly emphasizes the refugee agency in the construction of the sense of integration to a society, neither of the approaches neglects the legal aspects of the integration process (Lomba 2010). As Kibreab argues, the access to citizenship status and rights associated to it greatly determine the refugees’ decision whether to stay in the host country, return to the country of origin or migrate to countries of third destinations (Kibreab 2003). Hence, this research aims to threat refugees as active agents, who make their decisions in response to a given citizenship opportunity structure (Baubock 2010: 849).