Abstract

This paper examines the everyday experiences of “digital sojourners” (remote-income foreigners without permanent residency) in Turkey and Georgia, focusing on Istanbul, Tbilisi, and Batumi amid the emergence of digital nomad mobility regimes. I argue that the figure of the sojourner is analytically useful for understanding temporary cross-border mobility that is not well captured by migration frameworks centered on settlement, integration, or long-term incorporation. Grounded in individuals’ mobility plans rather than legal categories alone, the concept of digital sojourn makes it possible to analyze how rights, obligations, and belonging are negotiated under conditions of temporality, relationality, and uncertainty. In doing so, the paper disentangles categories of analysis from bureaucratic and everyday practice and rethinks temporary mobility beyond the migrant-as-settler model.

Empirically, the paper draws on 30 semi-structured interviews combined with interactive mapping, conducted in person in September-October 2025, as well as participant observation in online contexts over the past year. It shows that Turkey and Georgia pursue different legal and regulatory strategies toward foreign mobile populations, yet these differences produce strikingly similar outcomes at the level of lived experience. In both cases, digital nomad regimes and adjacent transformations in mobility governance simultaneously generate privileges for a very specific type of foreigner: an ideal figure imagined mainly as politically and socially disconnected, digitally enabled, and primarily valuable as a consumer. At the same time, these regimes intensify the securitization of other forms of foreign presence and limit mobility and belonging opportunities for those who do not fit this model. Rather than simply facilitating mobility, these arrangements selectively distribute access, recognition and livability through a subscription-like logic.

By focusing on everyday emplacement, conviviality, and relations with local communities, the paper demonstrates how mobile foreigners navigate both inclusion and exclusion alongside, and sometimes against, state-assigned migration labels and classifications. It contributes to scholarship on migration, mobility, and belonging by showing how privileged temporary mobility regimes restructure inclusion through selective desirability rather than settlement, and how digital nomadism is sustained through unequal distinctions among foreigners themselves. More broadly, the paper shows that divergent legal strategies can converge in practice, producing similar hierarchies of mobility, belonging, and emplacement.