Facing Administrative Limbos: Conditions of Administrative Liminality and Individual Resistance Strategies of Foreign Applicants for Belgian Citizenship.

The paper deals with the agency of foreign applicants for Belgian citizenship during the file compilation phase in interaction with the municipal administration in charge of checking the application’s legal requirements. Knowing that there are inequalities in access to public policies and that interactions with state institutions represent ‘administrative burdens’ (Burden et al., 2012) for citizens, I ask how and to what extent applicants for Belgian nationality can be in a zone of administrative limbo, and how it is possible to face limbo individually and collectively. To do so, I draw on a series of semi-structured interviews with applicants for Belgian nationality, intermediaries (lawyers and associations) and Brussels local authorities. Firstly, I show how Brussels local authorities use their discretionary powers, and examine how some of these practices create situations of administrative liminality for certain applicants during the file compilation phase. Secondly, I highlight the way in which applicants resist administrative limbo by examining a particular form of capital: administrative capital (Masood and Nisar, 2020). I show how this capital is acquired both through repeated interactions with street-level bureaucrats and with intermediaries (lawyers and associations). By showing how intermediaries help applicants to understand and appropriate the law, I highlight their role in strategies for resisting situations of limbo. This analysis shows the administrative limbo that emerges from the implementation of Belgian nationality, and the hidden face of the strategies used by applicants to cope with an onerous policy. Postulating that applicants resist in these situations of limbo, by resorting to intermediaries, I argue that one needs to open up studies on migration and vulnerable groups by analyzing the implementation of public policies and the interactions between different heterogeneous actors, taking into account the way in which individuals' administrative capital is built up.