Introduction

Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) has long attracted citizenship scholars due to the post-1989 profound changes affecting state borders, constitutional frameworks, migration flows, and the statuses of nations and national minorities. The fall of communist regimes, the resurgence of nationalism, and the dissolution of formerly federated states, most notably the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, reignited fundamental questions about citizenship, including ‘who is in and who is out’ (Walzer, 1993, p 55) and ‘what binds citizens together into a shared political community’ (Beiner, 1995, p 3). Unsurprisingly, much of this scholarship has concentrated on citizenship as a ‘top-down’ mechanism that regulates the statuses and rights of citizens and defines the legal structures of newly established political communities. Notable works include Brubaker's (1992, 1994, 2000) analysis of citizenship changes in the new Baltic and post-Soviet states, Shaw and Štiks's (2013) exploration of the pivotal role of new citizenship regimes in post-Yugoslav state consolidation, and Baubock's (Baubock et al, 2009; Baubock, 2010) research highlighting the connections between transnational citizenship, migration, and minorities within ‘citizenship constellations’ in CEE, among others.

However, relatively less attention has been devoted to the transformation of citizenship as a lived experience and a bottom-up practice of enacting statuses and rights (Vasiljević, 2018). Without attempting to overstretch the concept (Heisler, 2005), we want to emphasize that citizenship is also an embedded identity or, better yet, a social practice that unfolds and is performed in one's local or national community alongside one's fellow citizens.