Acts of Belonging: Second Generation Youth in South Tyrol, Italy

Abstract

This article studies citizenship beyond its manifestation as a formal legal status, by exploring citizenship as a process shaped by people’s everyday practices and experiences of belonging. Through investigating the daily struggles over belonging and membership of young people with migrant background in the autonomous province of South Tyrol in Northern Italy, this study pays particular attention to the ways in which belonging on the macro scale (the nation, the state) and the micro scale (the village, the city, the region) clash, intersect and interact with each other. By highlighting practices of belonging at the margins of a state by actors considered to be at the margins of the state, this article contributes to scholarly debates that “decentre” citizenship by studying it at, from and for the margins.