Paper short abstract

My research demonstrates that the Swiss naturalisation process reproduces a complex, classed racial hierarchy. By foregrounding the intersection of class and race, it shows how whiteness operates as a structural yet elusive standard of belonging, organising inclusion and exclusion.

Paper long abstract

In the Swiss naturalisation process, whiteness functions beyond skin colour, operating instead as a structural yet slippery position produced through affective assessments of candidates’ integration that enable selective recognition or exclusion. I examine how these dynamics operate—and are simultaneously obscured—through notions of merit and “effort-making”, often condensed by local decision-makers into the expectation to feel a candidate’s integration.

Conceptualising naturalisation as a rite of passage (van Gennep 1999), I show how candidates are expected to transform into “one of us” within Switzerland’s hegemonic emotional regime, structured around a racialised binary between a white We and the racialised Other (Ahmed 2014). Drawing on the naturalisation interview of Tarik, a teenage boy with a Kosovan passport and a working-class background, I analyse how class and race intersect to shape a candidate’s ability to “pass as white” and, consequently, to be recognised as Swiss. I situate these processes within Switzerland’s often-neglected colonial entanglements, post-war labour regimes, and enduring fears of over-foreignisation, through which the categories of “foreigner” and “working class” have historically converged.

In doing so, I demonstrate how contemporary naturalisation practices reproduce a classed racial hierarchy that regulates access to citizenship and seeks to preserve the racial purity of the Swiss nation, as ideals of “Swissness” become increasingly aligned with white, middle-class norms, affects, and lifestyles.