Proceeding from discussions within a multidisciplinary working group, this text outlines key dimensions and identifies affective registers with regard to the notion of belonging. It presents case studies from two research projects: an ethnographic account of a Vietnamese migrant community in Berlin and a literary analysis of writings of the contemporary German-language author Herta Müller. The cases highlight the simultaneously cohesive and disruptive forces at play in relational processes of belonging, bring into view the heterogeneously constituted settings where such processes unfold, and finally, effectively disturb the causal logic that belonging necessarily stems from conditions of mobility.