Transformations in imaginings and practices of citizenship in Latin America

Routledge Handbook of Global Citizenship Studies Citizenship studies is at a crucial moment of globalizing as a field. What used to be mainly a European, North American, and Australian field has now expanded to major contributions featuring scholarship from Latin America, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. The Routledge Handbook of Global Citizenship Studies takes into account this globalizing moment. At the same time, it considers how the global perspective exposes the strains and discords in the concept of ‘citizenship’ as it is understood today. With over fifty contributions from international, interdisciplinary experts, the Handbook features state-of-the-art analyses of the practices and enactments of citizenship across broad continental regions (Africas, Americas, Asias, and Europes) as well as deterritorialized forms of citizenship (Diasporicity and Indigeneity). Through these analyses, it provides a deeper understanding of citizenship in both empirical and theoretical terms. This volume sets a new agenda for scholarly investigations of citizenship. Its wide-ranging contributions and clear, accessible style make it essential reading for students and scholars working on citizenship issues across the humanities and social sciences. Engin F. Isin is Professor of Citizenship in the Department of Politics and International Studies at the Open University, UK. He currently serves as Co-Chief Editor of Citizenship Studies, and is widely published within the field itself. Peter Nyers is Associate Professor of the Politics of Citizenship and Intercultural Relations in the Department of Political Science at McMaster University, Canada. He is Co-Chief Editor of Citizenship Studies, and has made many other contributions to the field of citizenship studies. This page intentionally left blank Routledge Handbook of Global Citizenship Studies Edited by Engin F. Isin and Peter Nyers First published 2014 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2014 selection and editorial material Engin F. Isin and Peter Nyers; individual chapters, the contributors The right of the editors to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the contributors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Routledge handbook of global citizenship studies / edited by Engin Isin and Peter Nyers. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. World citizenship. 2. Citizenship. I. Isin, Engin F. (Engin Fahri), 1959- II. Nyers, Peter. JZ1320.4.R68 2014 323.6–dc23 2013043537 ISBN: 978-0-415-51972-4 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-203-10201-5 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Cenveo Publisher Services Contents Contributors Acknowledgements Introduction: Globalizing citizenship studies Engin F. Isin and Peter Nyers Navigating global citizenship studies Jack Harrington xi xxii 1 12 PART I Struggles for citizenship 21 1 Contested citizenship of the Arab Spring and beyond Gal Levy 23 2 Genealogies of autonomous mobility Martina Martignoni and Dimitris Papadopoulos 38 3 Global citizenship in an insurrectional era Nevzat Soguk 49 4 In life through death: transgressive citizenship at the border Kim Rygiel 62 PART II Positioning citizenships 73 5 75 Decolonizing global citizenship Charles T. Lee v Contents 6 Practising citizenship from the ordinary to the activist Catherine Neveu 86 7 Sexual citizenship and cultural imperialism Leticia Sabsay 96 8 Topologies of citizenship Kate Hepworth 110 9 Citizenship beyond state sovereignty Aoileann Ní Mhurchú 119 10 A post-Marshallian conception of global social citizenship Hartley Dean 128 11 Can there be a global historiography of citizenship? Kathryn L. Wegner 139 12 Regimes of citizenship Xavier Guillaume 150 PART III Africas 159 13 Citizenship in Africa: the politics of belonging Sara Rich Dorman 161 14 Trends in citizenship law and politics in Africa since the colonial era Bronwen Manby 172 15 Activist citizens and the politics of mobility in Osire Refugee Camp Suzan Ilcan 186 16 Struggles of citizenship in Sudan Munzoul A. M. Assal 196 17 Transformations of nationality legislation in North Africa Laura van Waas and Zahra Albarazi 205 vi Contents 18 Conviviality and negotiations with belonging in urban Africa Francis B. Nyamnjoh and Ingrid Brudvig 217 19 Citizenship struggles in the Maghreb Delphine Perrin 230 20 Struggles for citizenship in South Africa Daniel Conway 240 PART IV Americas 251 21 Transformations in imaginings and practices of citizenship in Latin America Judy Meltzer and Cristina Rojas 253 22 Ecological citizenship in Latin America Alex Latta and Hannah Wittman 265 23 Citizenship and foreignness in Canada Yasmeen Abu-Laban 274 24 Performances of citizenship in the Caribbean Mimi Sheller 284 25 Non-citizen citizenship in Canada and the United States Thomas Swerts 295 PART V Asias 305 26 Emerging forms of citizenship in the Arab world Dina Kiwan 307 27 The invention of citizenship in Palestine Lauren E. Banko 317 28 Orientalism and the construction of the apolitical Buddhist subject Ian Anthony Morrison 325 vii Contents 29 Citizenship in Central Asia Vanessa Ruget 335 30 Gender, religion and the politics of citizenship in modern Iran Shirin Saeidi 344 31 Trajectories of citizenship in South Korea Seungsook Moon 355 32 Translating Chinese citizenship Zhonghua Guo 366 33 The category mismatch and struggles over citizenship in Japan Reiko Shindo 376 34 Urbanizing India: contestations and citizenship in Indian cities Romola Sanyal 388 35 Indian citizenship: a century of disagreement Niraja Gopal Jayal 397 PART VI Europes 407 36 European Union citizenship in retrospect and prospect Willem Maas 409 37 Migration, security and European citizenship Elspeth Guild 418 38 European Union citizenship rights and duties: civil, political, and social Dora Kostakopoulou 39 How European citizenship produces a differential political space Teresa Pullano viii 427 437 Contents 40 Experiences of EU citizenship at the sub-national level Katherine E. Tonkiss 446 41 Contested citizenship in Bosnia and Herzegovina Elena Cirkovic 455 42 Citizenship and objection to military service in Turkey Hilâl Alkan and Sezai Ozan Zeybek 466 43 The Romani perspective: experiences and acts of citizenship across Europe Peter Vermeersch 477 PART VII Diasporicity 487 44 Post-territorial citizenship in post-communist Europe Francesco Ragazzi 489 45 Imperial citizenship in a British world Anne Spry Rush and Charles V. Reed 498 46 Global gods and local rights:Venezuelan immigrants in Barcelona Roger Canals 508 47 Vietnamese diasporic citizenship Claire Sutherland 522 PART VIII Indigeneity 533 48 Beyond biopolitics? Ecologies of indigenous citizenship Sarah Marie Wiebe 535 49 African indigenous citizenship Noah Tamarkin and Rachel F. Giraudo 545 ix Contents 50 Indigeneity and citizenship in Australia Maggie Walter 557 51 The Aboriginal Tent Embassy and Australian citizenship Edwina Howell and Andrew Schaap 568 EPILOGUE 581 Citizenship: East, west, or global? Bryan S. Turner 583 Index 599 x Contributors Yasmeen Abu-Laban is Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Alberta. She has published widely on issues relating to the Canadian and comparative dimensions of gender, ethnicity and racialization processes, border and migration policies, and citizenship theory. She is the co-editor of Surveillance and control in Israel/Palestine: population, territory, and power (2011), co-editor of Politics in North America: redefining continental relations (2008), and editor of Gendering the nation-state: Canadian and comparative perspectives (2008). She is also the co-author (with Christina Gabriel) of Selling diversity: immigration, multiculturalism, employment equity and globalization (2002). Zahra Albarazi is a Researcher at the Statelessness Programme, an initiative of Tilburg Law School in the Netherlands. Her area of research and expertise has been the understanding of statelessness and nationality in the MENA region. She coordinated the 2011–2012 MENA Nationality project and was the principal researcher for a project looking at the link between statelessness and gender discrimination in the region. She has engaged in various trainings and outreach events on statelessness and holds an LLM in International Law from the University of Leeds. Hilâl Alkan received her BA and MA at Boğaziçi University, Istanbul. Her PhD at the Open University, UK, focused on Islamic charitable organizations as the loci of social citizenship and civic gift-giving. She was awarded her degree in 2013 and now teaches at a number of Istanbul universities. She is active in the Women for Peace Initiative, which tries to establish a longlasting and gender-aware peace in Turkey. She is especially interested in issues of citizenship, the sources and articulation of rights, and the paradoxes of gift- and care-giving relationships. Munzoul A.M. Assal is Associate Professor of Social Anthropology and Deputy Director of the Peace Research Institute at the University of Khartoum. Prior to his current position he was the Director of Graduate Affairs at the same university. His research focuses on refugees, internal displacement, and citizenship. His major publications include Sticky labels or rich ambiguities? Diaspora and challenges of homemaking for Somalis and Sudanese in Norway, (2004), Diaspora within and without Africa: homogeneity, heterogeneity, variation (2006), and An annotated bibliography of social research in Darfur (2006). Lauren E. Banko is a Senior Teaching Fellow in the Department of History, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. She received her PhD in 2013. Her research focuses on the history of the modern Arab Middle East and in particular, nationality, citizenship, xi Contributors and popular politics under the Palestine Mandate. She is also interested in the history of the Palestinian Arab diaspora and Arab politics during the interwar era. Ingrid Brudvig is a graduate student in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Cape Town. Her research focuses on transnationalism, Somali diaspora, and the role of micro-entrepreneurship on networks of conviviality and conceptualizations of global citizenship. Roger Canals works as a Researcher and Professor at the Department of Anthropology of the University of Barcelona. He holds a PhD in Social and Cultural Anthropology from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris) and the University of Barcelona. He has published numerous articles on Afro-American religions – mainly on the cult of María Lionza in Venezuela – as well as the book L’image nomade (Éditions Universitaires Européennes, 2010). A specialist on visual anthropology, he has made several ethnographic films, mainly on popular religiosity in Venezuela, Puerto Rico, and Barcelona. He has been invited to be a research fellow at the University of Manchester. Elena Cirkovic is an External Fellow with the York University Centre for International and Security Studies. She was previously a Visiting Scholar with the Bonn University North American Studies Program. She obtained her PhD at the Osgoode Hall Law School of York University. Her MA degree is from the Political Science Department, University of Toronto. She has published on the topics of international human rights law, transnational law, self-determination, and legal pluralism in the German Law Journal and American Indian Law Review. Daniel Conway, PhD, is Lecturer in Politics and International Studies at the Open University. He recently published Masculinities, militarisation and the End Conscription Campaign: war resistance in apartheid South Africa (2012) and is currently working on a project exploring the history, lives, and identities of the British in South Africa. Hartley Dean is currently Professor of Social Policy at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His 25 years in academia were preceded by a 12-year career as a welfare rights worker in one of London’s most deprived multicultural neighbourhoods. His principal research interests stem from concerns with poverty, social justice, and welfare rights. Among his more recently published books are Welfare rights and social policy (2002), Social policy (2006 and 2012), and Understanding human need (2010). He was previously an editor of the Journal of Social Policy. Sara Rich Dorman, PhD has degrees in Political Science from Memorial University in Canada and the University of Oxford in the UK. She currently teaches at the University of Edinburgh and is a past editor of African Affairs. She has a particular interest in African Politics, with an emphasis on post-liberation states, and conducted research in Zimbabwe and Eritrea. She has published on the politics of NGOs, churches, elections, and state-society relations, as well as the politics of nationalism, citizenship, and nation- and state-building in Africa, especially in the Horn of Africa and southern Africa. Rachel F. Giraudo is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the California State University, Northridge. She received her PhD in Anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley in 2011. Her interests include indigeneity and identity politics in southern Africa, cultural heritage, tourism, and development. xii Contributors Elspeth Guild, Jean Monnet Professor ad personam Radboud University, Nijmegen and Queen Mary, University of London, and associate senior research fellow at the Centre for European Policy Studies, Brussels, has specialized in EU borders and immigration law for more than 20 years. She coordinates the European Commission’s Network of Experts on Free Movement of Workers which the Radboud University manages, bringing together academic experts from the 27 Member States providing national reports annually on the implementation of EU law in the Member States, thematic reports, regional conferences, and a national conference each year. She is also co-editor of the European Journal of Migration and Law and Free Movement of Workers (the European Commission’s online journal) and on the editorial board of the journal International Political Sociology. She is co-editor of the book series Immigration and asylum law and policy in Europe published by Martinus Nijhoff. Xavier Guillaume is Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Edinburgh. He recently published International relations and identity (2011) and has edited, with Jef Huysmans, Citizenship and security (2013). Zhonghua Guo is Professor of Politics at the Department of Politics, Sun Yat-Sen University, China. He was previously Visiting Professor at the University of Sheffield, UK and Guest Professor at Umea University, Sweden. His recent publications include Citizenship in the context of modern politics (2010), with Xiao Bin and Guo Taihui, and Citizenship in changing societies (2011). He has also edited two special volumes on citizenship studies for the Political Review of Sun Yat-Sen University (vol. 6, 2011) and the Annual Review of Chinese Political Science (vol. 2, 2013). Jack Harrington is currently preparing a monograph on citizenship in the French and British empires. He has been a European Research Council funded Research Associate at the Open University, has taught at the universities of St Andrews and Edinburgh and been a Visiting Fellow at the University of Mainz. He holds a PhD from the University of Edinburgh. He has a background in volunteering policy. Kate Hepworth is a Research Associate at the Institute for Culture and Society, University of Western Sydney. She was awarded her PhD from the University of Technology, Sydney in 2012. Edwina Howell is an activist and academic who works on the Foley Collection at Moondani Balluk,Victoria University. In 2005 she was admitted as a barrister and solicitor to the Supreme Court of Victoria. She was awarded a PhD from Monash University in 2013 for her thesis on anthropology and the Black Power Movement in Australia. With Dr Andrew Schaap and Dr Gary Foley she recently edited The Aboriginal Tent Embassy: sovereignty, black power, land rights and the state (2013). Suzan Ilcan is Professor of Sociology at the University of Waterloo and Balsillie School of International Affairs in Waterloo, Canada. Her research focuses on global governance and international organizations in the context of humanitarian and development aid, social justice and citizenship, and migrant activism. She is the author of Longing in belonging: the cultural politics of settlement (2002), co-author of Issues in social justice: citizenship and transnational struggles (2013) and Governing the poor: exercises of poverty reduction, practices of global aid (2011), and editor of Mobilities, knowledge, and social justice (2013). xiii Contributors Engin F. Isin is Professor of Politics in the Department of Politics and International Studies (POLIS) at the Open University, UK. He is the author of Cities without citizens (1992), Being political (2002), and Citizens without frontiers (2012), and is one of the Chief Editors of the journal Citizenship Studies. Niraja Gopal Jayal is Professor at the Centre for the Study of Law and Governance. She is the author of Citizenship and its discontents: an Indian history (2013), Representing India: ethnic diversity and the governance of public institutions (2006) and Democracy and the state: welfare, secularism and development in contemporary India (1999). Among the publications she has edited, co-edited or co-authored are The Oxford companion to politics in India (2010), Democracy in India (2001), Local governance in India: decentralization and beyond (2005), and Drought, policy and politics in India (1993). Dina Kiwan, PhD, has been Associate Professor at the American University of Beirut, since September 2012. Educated at the Universities of Oxford, Harvard, and London, she was previously Senior Lecturer in Citizenship Studies at Birkbeck College, University of London, and Co-Director of the International Centre for Education for Democratic Citizenship (ICEDC). Publications include Education for inclusive citizenship and as editor, Naturalization policies, education and citizenship: Multicultural and multination societies in international perspective (2013). Dora Kostakopoulou is a Professor of European Union Law, European Integration and Public Policy at the University of Warwick. Formerly, she was Jean Monnet Professor in European Law and European Integration and Co-Director of the Institute of Law, Economy, and Global Governance at the University of Manchester (2005–2011) and Professor of European Union Law and Director of the Centre for European Law at the University of Southampton (2011– 2012). She is the author of Citizenship, identity and immigration in the European Union: between past and future (2001) and The future governance of citizenship (2008). Alex Latta is Associate Professor of Global Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University and in the Balsillie School of International Affairs in Waterloo, Canada. His research explores citizenship and socio-ecological conflict in Latin America, focusing on the politics of water, energy policy, and hydroelectric development in Chile. He has published work in Environmental Politics, Citizenship Studies, Latin American Perspectives, Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies, and Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment. Latta and Wittman’s co-edited Environment and citizenship in Latin America: natures, subjects and struggles (2012) examines intersections of environment and citizenship from various geographic and disciplinary perspectives. Charles T. Lee is Assistant Professor in the School of Social Transformation, Arizona State University. He works at the interface of critical social and political thought, cultural and postcolonial theory, and critical citizenship studies. His current research focuses on the cultural politics of everyday at the margins of liberal social life, involving a book-length study that investigates the quotidian practices and discourses of abject subjects such as migrant domestic workers, global sex workers, transgender people, and suicide bombers as alternative performances/ improvisations of ‘citizenship’, and their implications for rethinking agency, resistance, and social justice in the capitalist circuits of neoliberal globalization. Gal Levy, BA, MA, (Tel Aviv University), PhD (LSE), is a senior member of the teaching faculty at the Open University, Israel, and the founding academic director of NYU Tel Aviv. xiv Contributors He has published locally and internationally on the interrelationships between citizenship, education, ethnicity, urbanism, and class. He is co-chair of a research group on alternative Arab education in Israel (supported by ISF 217/09). Most recently he has published in Citizenship Studies, British Journal of the Sociology of Education, and Educational Review. He is currently working on a book tentatively entitled Thriving for citizenship: struggling for citizenship beyond rights. Willem Maas is Jean Monnet Chair and Associate Professor at Glendon College, York University, Toronto. He is the author of Creating European citizens (2007), the Historical dictionary of the European Union (2014), and editor of Multilevel citizenship (2013), Democratic citizenship and the free movement of people (2013), and Sixty years of European governance (2014). Bronwen Manby, is a Senior Adviser in the Africa Regional Office of the Open Society Foundations, responsible among other things for coordinating the work of the foundations in Africa on the right to a nationality. She was previously Deputy Director of the Africa Division of Human Rights Watch. She has written widely on citizenship rights, including Struggles for citizenship in Africa (2009) and Citizenship laws in Africa: a comparative study (2nd edition, 2010), as well as studies on Kenya, Zimbabwe, Sudan, and other countries. Martina Martignoni is a Researcher at the School of Management, University of Leicester. She is currently working on a project on postcolonial organizing, in particular on the practices and forms of self-organization of Eritrean migrants in Milan. A historian by training, she has previously worked and published on the genealogy of cultural and postcolonial studies (Saperi in polvere. Una introduzione agli studi culturali e postcoloniali. Collettivo Bartleby, Eds, (2012). Verona: Ombre corte) and on the concept of nation inside the French and Italian communist parties (in Diacronie. Studi di Storia Contemporanea). Judy Meltzer holds a doctorate in Political Science from Carleton University, Canada. Her research interests include citizenship, critical development studies, and social theory. She was previously senior analyst for the Andean region at the Canadian Foundation for the Americas. Her recent publications appear in Post-neoliberalism in the Americas (Macdonald and Ruckert 2009), the International studies encyclopedia (2010), and Environment and citizenship in Latin America (Latta and Wittman 2012). She is co-editor of a Special Issue of Citizenship Studies on Narratives of Citizenship in Latin America (2013) and Elusive peace: international, national and local dimensions of conflict in Colombia (2005). Aoileann Ní Mhurchú is a Lecturer in International Politics in the School of Social Sciences at the University of Manchester. Her research is located at the intersection of three areas: critical citizenship studies, international migration, and questions of time and space in political and philosophical thought. Her main interest is in exploring various experiences of multinational belonging – in terms, for example, of fluidity, lack, or exclusion – and investigating how these challenge traditional spatio-temporal statist understandings of political subjectivity. She has published in Citizenship Studies, and Alternatives: Local, Global, Political and has a forthcoming monograph with Edinburgh University Press. Seungsook Moon is Professor of Sociology at Vassar College where she served as Chair of the department and Director of Asian Studies Program. She is the author of Militarized modernity and gendered citizenship in South Korea (Duke University Press, 2005, reprinted 2007), Kunsajuŭie xv Contributors kach’in kŭndae: kungminmandŭlgi, simindoegi, kŭrigo sŏngŭi chŏngch’i, (Seoul: Alternative Culture Publication, 2007), and co-editor of, and a contributor to, Over there: living with the U.S. military empire from World War II to the present (Duke University Press, 2010). As a political and cultural sociologist and scholar of gender studies, she has published numerous articles on such topics as citizenship, military service, civil society and social movements, collective memories, and globalization and food. She is a recipient of the Fulbright Scholar Award and the Korea Book Review Editor of the Journal of Asian Studies. Ian Anthony Morrison is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the American University in Cairo. His publications include articles in Citizenship Studies and The Review of European and Russian Affairs, as well as several chapters in edited volumes. His research interests include continental, social and political thought, the sociology of religion, and citizenship and nationalism studies. Catherine Neveu is a CNRS Senior Researcher at IIAC (TRAM), Paris. Working at the junction of anthropology and political science, she has directed several international and national research programmes in France on citizenship processes. With John Clarke, Kathleen Coll and Evelina Dagnino, she recently published a co-written book: Disputing citizenship (2014). Francis B. Nyamnjoh is Professor of Social Anthropology at UCT, South Africa, which he joined in August 2009 from the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA) in Dakar, Senegal. He has researched and taught at universities in Cameroon and Botswana. Peter Nyers is Associate Professor of the Politics of Citizenship and Intercultural Relations in the Department of Political Science at McMaster University, Canada. His research focuses on the political struggles of non-status refugees and migrants, in particular their campaigns against deportation and detention and for regularization and global mobility rights. He has published widely on these themes, including authoring the book Rethinking refugees: beyond states of emergency (Routledge 2006), and is one of the Chief Editors of the journal Citizenship Studies. Dimitris Papadopoulos is Professor of Sociology and Organization in the School of Management, University of Leicester. His work on labour and transnational migration, on politics and technoscience, and on experience and subjectivity has appeared in numerous journals and in several monographs, including Escape routes: Control and subversion in the 21st Century (Pluto Press 2008), Analysing everyday experience: social research and political change (Palgrave 2006), and Lev Vygotsky: work and reception (2nd ed., Lehmanns Media 2010). He is currently completing Crafting politics. Technoscience, organization and material culture (forthcoming with Duke UP), a study of autonomous politics, materialism, and alternative interventions in technoscientific culture. Delphine Perrin has been granted an EU Marie Curie Fellowship to conduct a 2-year research project (2013–2015) on lawmaking in the domain of migration in the Maghreb (MIGRINTERACT), at Aix-Marseille University. She was previously a Research Fellow at the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence. She is Associate Researcher at IREMAM (Institute for Research and Studies on the Arab and Muslim World) in Aix-en-Provence and at the Centre Jacques Berque in Rabat. Her research interests include comparative law and policy on asylum, migration, and citizenship in North Africa and in the European Union. xvi Contributors Teresa Pullano is Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre of Political Theory (CTP) at the Université Libre de Bruxelles and teaching fellow at Sciences Po, Paris. She recently published L’espace de la citoyenneté en Europe (Presses de Sciences Po, 2014). Her research focuses on the restructuring of statehood in Europe, studying EU state space within processes of regionalization and globalization and reconceptualizing European citizenship. She holds a PhD from Sciences Po, Paris and was Fulbright-Schuman fellow at the Department of Political Science, Columbia University, New York. Francesco Ragazzi is Lecturer in International Relations at Leiden University, and Associate Researcher at the Centre for International Studies and Research (CERI / Sciences Po, Paris). He obtained his PhD in political science from Sciences Po, Paris and Northwestern University, Chicago. Prior to his appointment at Leiden University, he was a Research Fellow at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London (2008–2009). He is member of the editorial board of the journal Cultures & Conflits. Charles V. Reed, a historian of modern Britain and the British Empire, is an Assistant Professor of History at Elizabeth City State University, the University of North Carolina. He is completing work on a book on nineteenth-century royal tours of empire and British imperial culture, tentatively titled Royal subjects, imperial citizens: the royal tour and the making of British imperial culture, 1860–1911. He is also the List Editor and Book Review Editor for H-Empire, the H-Net listserv dedicated to the study of empires and colonialism. Cristina Rojas is Professor at the department of Political Science at Carleton University, Canada. Her research focuses on decolonizing global governance, critical development, and emancipatory practices of citizenship. Her current research is on indigenous women and the decolonization of the patriarchal state in Bolivia. Her most recent articles are published in Citizenship Studies, Globalizations, and Third World Quarterly. She is the author of Civilization and violence: regimes of representation in nineteenth-century Colombia (2002) and co-editor of Elusive peace: international, national and local dimensions of conflict in Colombia (2005). Vanessa Ruget is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Salem State University, Massachusetts. In the past, she taught political science at the American University – Central Asia and at the OSCE Academy in Bishkek, both located in Kyrgyzstan. She received her PhD in 2000 from the University of Bordeaux. Her current research focuses on citizenship, migration, and democracy in Kyrgyzstan. It has appeared in Problems of Post-Communism, Citizenship Studies, Communist and Post-Communist Studies, and Central Asian Survey. Anne Spry Rush is a Lecturer in British and Empire History at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her interests include identity, status, and culture in Britain and its empire, with an emphasis on colonials in the twentieth-century Caribbean and British Isles. She is the author of Bonds of empire. West Indians and Britishness from Victoria to decolonization (2011), which explores British imperial identity through a focus on war, radio, voluntary organizations, education, and royalty. Kim Rygiel is Assistant Professor of Political Science, teaches in the graduate program at the Balsillie School of International Affairs and is Research Associate with the International Migration Research Centre at Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada. She is the author of Globalizing citizenship (UBC Press 2010) and co-editor (with Peter Nyers) of Citizenship, xvii Contributors migrant activism and the politics of movement (Routledge 2012). Her work has appeared in the journals Citizenship Studies and Review of Constitutional Studies and as several book chapters including ‘The securitized citizen’ in Recasting the social in citizenship, edited by E. F. Isin (2008). Leticia Sabsay is a Research Associate at the Department of Politics and International Studies at the Open University, appointed to the ‘Oecumene – Citizenship after Orientalism’ ERC project. Until she left Argentina in 2002, she was Assistant Professor of Communications at the University of Buenos Aires. Since then she has continued to collaborate with this University as a faculty member of the Gino Germani Research Institute for the Social Sciences. She has authored Las normas del deseo. Imaginario sexual y comunicación (Cátedra 2009), Fronteras sexuales. Espacio urbano, cuerpos y ciudadanía (Paidos 2011), and The political imaginary of sexual freedom (Palgrave forthcoming). Shirin Saeidi researches on gender, sexuality, and nation-building in the Middle East, with a particular focus on post-1979 Iran. She completed her BA in government and politics at the University of Maryland, College Park and her MA in political science at George Mason University. In 2012, she was awarded a PhD degree from the University of Cambridge. She has been the recipient of several research awards at Cambridge, and her 2010 paper in the journal Citizenship Studies was selected as the editor’s choice article for the edition. Romola Sanyal is a Lecturer in Urban Geography at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She has previously taught at University College London, Newcastle University and Rice University, Houston, Texas. She received her PhD in 2008 from the University of California, Berkeley. Her co-edited book, Urbanizing citizenship: contested spaces in Indian cities (with Dr Renu Desai) was published in 2011. Andrew Schaap teaches politics at the University of Exeter. He is the author of Political reconciliation (2005) and editor of Law and agonistic politics (2009). He is co-editor (with Danielle Celermajer and Vrasidas Karalis) of Power, judgment and political evil: in conversation with Hannah Arendt (2010) and (with Gary Foley and Edwina Howell) of The Aboriginal Tent Embassy: sovereignty, black power, land rights and the state (2013). Mimi Sheller is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Center for Mobilities Research and Policy at Drexel University, Philadelphia. She has published extensively in the fields of Caribbean Studies and Mobilities Research. She is the author of Democracy after slavery (2000), Consuming the Caribbean (2003), Citizenship from below: erotic agency and Caribbean freedom (2012), and Aluminum dreams: lightness, speed, modernity (2014). She is founding co-editor of the journal Mobilities, Associate Editor of Transfers, and co-editor with John Urry of Mobile technologies of the city (2006) and Tourism mobilities (2004). Reiko Shindo is an Assistant Professor at the Graduate Program on Human Security at the University of Tokyo. Her research areas include the politics of claiming citizenship, the concept of borders, and the role of language in migration. Her articles appear in Citizenship Studies (2009), International Political Sociology (2012) and Third World Quarterly (2012). In 2011, she worked as a programme adviser at the PKO office in the Cabinet office, Japan. She was awarded a PhD by Aberystwyth University in 2013. xviii Contributors Nevzat Soguk is Professor of Political Science at the University of Hawai’i Manoa and Adjunct Professor of Global Politics at RMIT University, Australia. He is author of two books: States and strangers: refugees and displacements of statecraft, (University of Minnesota Press 1999) and Globalization and Islamism: beyond fundamentalism (Rowman and Littlefield Publishers 2010). He is also the coeditor of Arab revolutions and world transformations, (Routledge 2013) and International global governance, (Sage Publications 2013). His research is guided by an interest in international relations theory and global political and cultural transversality. He has presented his work at conferences around the world, including Indonesia, Thailand, Austria, France, Hungary, Canada, the UK, Mexico, and the USA. He was formerly Deputy Director of the Global Cities Institute at RMIT University, Australia. Claire Sutherland lectures in Southeast Asian politics at Durham University in the UK. Her core research interests are nationalist ideology and nation-building, with a comparative focus on European and Southeast Asian cases, and she has a developing interest in museum representations of the nation, migration, and citizenship. Publications include Soldered states: nation-building in Germany and Vietnam (2010) and Nationalism in the twenty-first century: challenges and responses (2012). Thomas Swerts is a PhD Candidate in Sociology at the University of Chicago. He previously received his Master’s degree in Political Science at the University of Leuven. His research interests include irregular migration, citizenship studies, social movements, and political theory. He recently published on transnational environmental activism in India (2013). For his dissertation research, he is currently conducting a comparative ethnographic study of the political mobilization of undocumented migrants in Chicago and Brussels. He also serves as a manuscript reviewer for the American Journal of Sociology and the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. Noah Tamarkin is Assistant Professor of Comparative Studies at the Ohio State University. He was a 2012–2013 Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Penn Humanities Forum. He received his PhD in Cultural Anthropology from the University of California Santa Cruz in 2011. His work has appeared in The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science and is fourthcoming in Cultural Anthropology. He is currently completing a book entitled Jewish blood, African bones: The Afterlives of Gentic Ancestry. Katherine E. Tonkiss is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the School of Government and Society, University of Birmingham, where she was also awarded her PhD in 2012. She recently published her first monograph, Migration and identity in a postnational world, with Palgrave Macmillan, and has also published a range of journal articles on subjects including migration ethics, postnationalism, European citizenship, and national identity. Bryan S. Turner is the Presidential Professor of Sociology at the Graduate Center, the City University of New York. He is a Professorial fellow at the Australian Catholic University, Melbourne, Autralia. He recently published Rights and Virtues (2008) and Religion and Modern Society: Citizenship, Secularization and the State (2011). He is one of the chief editors of the journal Citizenship Studies. He was awarded a Doctor of Letters by Cambridge University in 2009. Peter Vermeersch is a Professor of Politics at the University of Leuven in Belgium (KU Leuven), where he is affiliated with the Institute for International and European Policy and the xix Contributors Centre for Research on Peace and Development. In 2007 and 2008, he was a visiting scholar at the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, Harvard University. He is the author of The Romani movement: minority politics and ethnic mobilization in contemporary Central Europe (2006) and Het vredesfront (‘The peace front’, 2011). Laura van Waas, PhD, is Senior Researcher and Manager of the Statelessness Programme of Tilburg Law School in the Netherlands. She is the author of Nationality matters – statelessness under international law (2008), an in-depth analysis of the international normative framework relating to statelessness, in addition to numerous other academic publications on nationality and statelessness. She has worked for UNHCR on several successive statelessness projects, drafting public information materials, developing training programmes and delivering training on statelessness, and undertaking comparative regional research on statelessness situations. She has also been commissioned to undertake research or provide training for a number of other international organizations. Maggie Walter, PhD, a descendant of the Trawlwoolway people from north-eastern Tasmania, is a sociologist at the University of Tasmania. Her other roles include: Deputy Director of the National Indigenous Researcher and Knowledges Network, editorial board member of the journal Native American and Indigenous Studies, and long-term steering committee member of the national Longitudinal Study of Indigenous Children. Recent publications include Indigenous statistics: a quantitative research methodology (2013) and The globalizing era and citizenship for indigenous Australian women (2010). Kathryn L. Wegner is a College Research Associate at Clare College, the University of Cambridge. A historian of education, she earned a PhD from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2010, and is working on a book, Progressive citizenships: schooling youth in immigrant Chicago, 1900–1940. Sarah Marie Wiebe is an Assistant Teaching Professor at the University of Victoria. Her dis- sertation Anatomy of place: ecological citizenship in Canada’s Chemical Valley examined struggles for environmental and reproductive justice and the impact of pollution on the Aamjiwnaang First Nation. She has several forthcoming publications on the politics of reproductive justice and ecologies of indigenous citizenship. At the nexus of citizenship, biopolitics, and environmental politics, her research interests focus on the role of the body in citizen protest, mobilization, and struggles for knowledge. In addition to researching and writing on these topics, she has also published on critical methodologies and is currently working on several projects emphasizing visual research methods. As a collaborative researcher, she assisted indigenous youth with the production of a documentary film, Indian givers, which is publicly available online. Hannah Wittman is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Land and Food Systems at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. She conducts collaborative research on food sovereignty, local food systems, and agrarian citizenship with peasant and farming networks in Brazil, Guatemala, and Canada. Latta and Wittman’s co-edited volume Environment and citizenship in Latin America: natures, subjects and struggles (2012) examines intersections of environment and citizenship from various geographic and disciplinary perspectives. Her work also appears in the Journal of Rural Studies, Journal of Peasant Studies, Agriculture and Human Values, Canadian Journal of Development Studies, and Human Organization. xx Contributors Sezai Ozan Zeybek is an Assistant Professor at Bilgi University in Istanbul. He had tried to avoid military service as long he could, worked the system, and finally got a letter of exemption. His piece in this book with Hilâl Alkan is partly a review of that three-year-long struggle. Since then, he has taught on postcolonial thought and political ecology in Turkey and published essays on urban ecology, militarism, and provincial towns. In the summer of 2013, he took part in the Turkish Occupy Movement for Gezi Park – a hopeful new avenue for Citizenship Studies. xxi Acknowledgements We knew from the start that we wanted this Handbook to both shape a critical agenda for the field of citizenship studies and at the same time provide a glimpse of what people who are doing research in the field thought was important, vital, and relevant. To balance these two admittedly challenging aims, we combined an open call for contributions with carefully selected invitations to those whose work we find impressive. The very high number of submissions to our call for contributions and the enthusiastic response to our invitations were evidence of the vitality and variety of the field. We are immensely grateful to those who took the time to submit a proposal and all who accepted our invitations. To all the contributors to the Handbook we express our thanks for writing such rich, challenging, and politically incisive chapters. The high level of professionalism that each author demonstrated in meeting deadlines and responding to our successive comments was truly edifying. We learned so much from the chapters and we think readers of this Handbook will share our enthusiasm in reading them. We believe that the global scope of the Handbook as well as the conceptual depth and empirical richness of the individual chapters demonstrates the creativity, commitment, and intellectual courage that characterize citizenship studies today. Our greatest thanks go to Jack Harrington, who served as the managing editor of the Handbook. In addition to his formidable administrative and organizational skills that kept everyone and everything on track, Jack emerged as a challenging intellectual interlocutor whose ideas and contributions helped shape our thinking about globalizing citizenship studies. We are immensely grateful to him and very pleased that he accepted our invitation to write the introductory guide to the volume. We received invaluable support for this project from Lisa Pilgram and Radha Ray at the Open University. Our editor at Routledge, Gerhard Boomgaarden, with Emily Briggs and Emma Hart, have been extremely supportive of the project from day one. Thanks also to Nick Holdstock and Donald Watt for their expert copy-editing skills and to Sue Usborne for Meticulous proofreading. Engin Isin would also like to acknowledge that this project has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007–2013) / ERC grant agreement n° 249379. Peter Nyers acknowledges the financial and institutional support given by the Institute of Globalization and the Human Condition at McMaster University. Finally, we thank, as always, our partners and families: Evelyn, Oona, Géza, and Bea. Without their edifying presence in our lives a project such as this would neither be possible nor perhaps even a sensible endeavour. xxii Introduction Globalizing citizenship studies Engin F. Isin and Peter Nyers The field of citizenship: legality and performativity There are various ways of defining citizenship and, as we have witnessed in the interdisciplinary field of citizenship studies, each falls short of a satisfactory clarity or comprehensiveness. Whether citizenship is defined as membership, status, practice, or even performance, it carries an already assumed conception of politics, culture, spatiality, temporality, and sociality. To say, for example, that ‘citizenship is membership of the nation-state’ assumes so much and leaves so much out that it becomes an analytically pointless statement. Ironically, it is also the most common definition offered today. Similarly, to say that ‘citizenship is performance’ leaves as much unsaid as said about the way in which it comes into being and functions. Is there a wide-ranging approach that can capture something essential about citizenship without making too many assumptions about what it involves? Is there a definition that leaves plenty of room for questions but still provides a focused perspective? Our best offer is to define citizenship as an ‘institution’ mediating rights between the subjects of politics and the polity to which these subjects belong. There are several things of note in this minimalist yet broad-ranging definition. First, ‘institution’ here should obviously not imply a narrow conception of organization. It implies a broader conception of processes through which something is enacted, created, and rendered relatively durable and stable but still contestable, surprising, and inventive. Second, we use the term ‘polity’ to move away from the idea that the state is the sole source of authority for recognizing and legislating rights. There are international polities such as the European Union or the United Nations as well as many other covenants, agreements and charters that constitute polities other than the state. Third, note that we suggest using ‘political subjects’ rather than ‘citizens’ as the agents of the mediation in hand. This is because not all political subjects will have the designation of citizens. This also clarifies our use of ‘belongs’, which we take to include official and non-official forms, legal and extra-legal belongings. Note also that we use ‘subjects’ in the plural because citizenship involves collective mediations and not just the relationship individuals have with their polity. Either way, whether certain political subjects can make claims to being, or constitute themselves as, citizens is an important aspect of the politics of citizenship or politics for citizenship. Finally, note the double meaning of ‘political subjects’. Just now we used it to signify those people who have constituted themselves as subjects of politics in the sense that they 1 Engin F. Isin and Peter Nyers act as political subjects. But ‘political subjects’ can also mean those issues that are the topic of discussion under the designation ‘political’. In other words, the topics that come under discussion during the mediation of rights between political subjects and polities are themselves a political subject. So when we say ‘mediation between the subjects of politics and the polity to which they belong’, we mean that politics for citizenship involves both where and how this mediation occurs, who becomes implicated in these rights, and what rights are the focus of mediation. Yet this wide-ranging but focused statement still belies the fact that the citizen of a polity almost never belongs only to that polity but to several nested, if not overlapping and conflicting, series of polities ranging from the city, region, the state, and the international. Clearly, in the contemporary world the dominant polity is the state, but even its dominance is now implicated in various international and regional polities evinced by international covenants (e.g. the European Convention on Human Rights), multilateral agreements (e.g. the North American Free Trade Agreement), supranational bodies (e.g. the European Union) and shared sovereignty arrangements (e.g. Scotland or Quebec). This is further complicated by the fact that many citizens (and non-citizens) in the contemporary world do not reside in their birthplace but in their adopted countries. All this places a citizen in a web of rights and duties through which he or she is called upon to performatively negotiate a particular combination that is always a complex relationship. For these reasons it is misleading to begin thinking about citizenship as a unified (or unifying) and static relationship. A Chinese government cannot have a unified and singular relation with its citizens, since their lives are mediated not only through their rights from, and duties to, the Chinese state but also through human rights, environmental or cultural discourses to international politics beyond its borders. Similarly, a British government cannot have exclusive relations with British citizens, as their lives are implicated in, and interdependent with, the European Union as a supranational polity, the European Convention on Human Rights, and myriad other mutual rights and duties toward other polities. Even in the area of national security – long the domain of the sovereign, often in exceptionalist forms – private corporations have emerged as competitors in the emerging market for providing protection to citizens, militaries, individuals, and neighbourhoods. Whilst still dominant, the state, therefore, cannot be said to have an exclusive claim over its members. How do we then approach citizenship in the contemporary world? If indeed it is a negotiated and dynamic institution mediating rights between political subjects and their polities, two key dimensions require emphasizing. One is the combination of rights and duties that defines citizenship in a polity. The other is the performance of citizenship. Research in citizenship studies tends to follow parallel lines with scholars adopting or favouring one dimension over the other. We consider both dimensions to be indispensable for understanding how citizenship mediates rights between citizens and the polity to which he or she belongs. The combination of rights and duties is always an outcome of social struggles that finds expression in political and legal institutions. Traditionally, in modern state societies, three types of rights (civil, political, and social) and three types of duties (conscription, taxation, and participation) defined the relationship between the citizen and the state. Civil rights include the right to free speech, to conscience, and to dignity; political rights include franchise and standing for office; and, social rights include unemployment insurance, universal health care, and welfare. Although conscription is rapidly disappearing as a citizenship duty, taxation is as strong as ever and jury duty, even as it is increasingly challenged under certain circumstances, still serves a fundamental role. Moreover, new rights have appeared such as sexual, cultural, and environmental rights with varying degrees of success of institutionalization (e.g. witness the struggles over same-sex marriage in the United States and Europe). Again, as we have mentioned, whether 2 Globalizing citizenship studies classical (civil, political, social) or expanded (sexual, environmental, cultural), these rights and duties are mediated through other polities that influence the actual combination that obtains in a given polity at a given time. The older and more theoretical classifications of ideas of citizenship (such as liberalism, republicanism, and communitarianism) make much less sense now given the contemporary complications just mentioned. Since the combination of rights and duties and their performance vary greatly across polities, it is probably more accurate to speak about various citizenship regimes that characterize a similar, if not co-dependent, development of certain combinations. We can, for example, talk about an Anglo-American regime (e.g. Britain, the US), a North European regime (e.g. Denmark, Norway), a continental regime (e.g. France, Germany), a South American regime (e.g. Brazil, Chile), a South Asian regime (e.g. India, Pakistan), and so forth. We can also talk about postcolonial citizenship regimes (e.g. India, Brazil, Ghana), post-communist citizenship regimes (e.g. Poland, Hungary, even China), neoliberal citizenship regimes (e.g. Britain, the US), post-settler citizenship regimes (e.g. Canada, Australia), or settler regimes (e.g. Israel). Arguably, each of these regimes has a different combination of rights and duties of citizenship but each displays a recognizable culture of rights and duties. The proliferation of these overlapping regimes, moreover, speaks to the need for scholarship on citizenship to appreciate the multiple ways in which citizenship has itself been globalized. The field of citizenship studies is globalizing because people around the world are articulating their struggles through citizenship. The performance dimension of citizenship highlights two issues. First, rights and duties that are not performed remain as inert or passive rights and duties. These rights and duties are brought into being only when performed by citizens. Consider, for example, conscription as a duty. As we have mentioned, although declining, if it exists on paper, states may occasionally invoke this in times of conflict or war. Secondly, since citizenship is brought into being by being performed, non-citizens can also perform citizenship. In fact, those who do not have the status of citizenship but obtain it by making claims to it often negotiate many rights and duties. This performative aspect of citizenship has been expressed in various ways, most notably in the language of active versus passive citizenship. These two dimensions of citizenship permeate social and political life to a greater degree than meets the eye. It is citizenship studies scholarship that brings them into light in analytical terms. When people mobilize for legalizing same-sex marriage, rally for social housing, protest against welfare cuts, debate employment insurance, advocate the decriminalization of marijuana, wear attire such as turbans or headscarves in public spaces, leak information about the surveillance activities of their own governments, seek affirmative action programmes, or demand better health-care access and services, they tend not to imagine themselves as struggling for the maintenance or expansion of social, cultural, or sexual citizenship rights. Nor do governments recognize them as such. Instead, people invest in whatever issues seem most related and closest to their social lives, and dedicate their time and energy accordingly, and governments respond or fail to respond to these demands. There are two points to make about such struggles. First, they are irreducibly social struggles that arise from social existence. To classify such struggles either as redistribution (economism) or recognition (culturalism) misses their complexity and the political stakes involved. Secondly, while they may not clearly articulate it, it is important to acknowledge that when people engage with such issues, whatever differences may separate them in values, principles, and priorities, they are performing citizenship, even those who are not passport-carrying members of the state (non-citizens). But by so doing they shape both subjects of politics and political subjects. Thus, citizenship is certainly much more than legal status, although formal legal citizenship remains important for accessing citizenship rights. Although 3 Engin F. Isin and Peter Nyers it mediates between citizens and polities, citizenship does not always take the form of demands on government. We can conclude that if citizenship mediates rights between political subjects and the polity to which they belong, it also involves the art of being with others, negotiating different situations and identities, and articulating ourselves as distinct from, yet similar to, others in our everyday lives. Through these social struggles, citizens develop a sense of their rights as others’ obligations and others’ rights as their obligations. This is especially true for democratic citizenship, as it is the only form of citizenship that approaches the combination of rights and duties as a dynamic (and thus contested but changing and flexible) outcome and its creative performance as a fundamental aspect of a democratic polity. Citizenship, especially democratic citizenship, depends on the creative and autonomous capacities of political subjects whose performance of citizenship is not only the driving force for change but also the guarantee of the vitality and endurance of the polity. Governments may see domains of citizen engagement as separate from each other in the everyday governing of the polity and in the social lives of their citizens, but occasionally an event reminds everyone that citizens are indeed participating in the performance and enactment of citizenship. It is in this deep and broader sense that citizenship is social and polities (or, rather, authorities responsible for governing them) neglect this often with perilous consequences. This is where the responsibilities of citizenship studies scholarship may assume a significant public and political role. The figure of citizenship We have seen how central citizenship is to understanding how people become claimants and thereby constitute themselves as political beings in relation to the polities to which they belong. But what of the figure of the citizen? In contemporary political debates and analyses of political mobilizations, the figure of the citizen remains highly enigmatic, vacillating between being an object of desire and derision. The figure of the citizen is at once a figure of hope and enlightenment, on the one hand, and deep pessimism and suspicion on the other. Hope, because citizenship remains the dominant institution through which civil, political, and social rights are enacted and enjoyed. Enlightenment, because citizenship is said to confer upon its bearer human dignity, autonomy and agency. By contrast, the pessimism about citizenship arises because there are inevitable inequalities as to how these rights are distributed. The suspicion towards citizenship comes from misgivings about its ability to move beyond some fundamental exclusions it enacts on the basis of race, gender, place of birth, sexual orientation, and so on. Citizenship in this view is not just a name for membership, but a title or a rank that separates, excludes, and hierarchizes. While citizenship as an institution is dynamic and mutable, the figure of the citizen today is a polarizing figure. The citizen stands for inclusion, membership, and belonging, but at the expense of others who are excluded, non-members, and outcasts – strangers, outsiders, and aliens. The citizen stands on one side of the political, social, and cultural borders of the polity, with non-citizens on the other. The inside/outside logic of this narrative has not surprisingly generated significant criticisms, to the extent that some commentators, on both the Right and the Left, have declared citizenship to be an unsustainable category through which to organize modern political life. What is the substance of this criticism and why do we insist upon the continued relevance of citizenship? Caught as it is between these twin discourses of hope and despair, a commonly heard criticism of citizenship is that it is in decline. In its most general form, the criticism of citizenship is couched in a broad critique of modernity. Citizenship, it is said, suffers the same pressures as other categories from western political traditions – such as the state, sovereignty, society, and so 4 Globalizing citizenship studies on – that are being fundamentally problematized by processes of neoliberalization, globalization, securitization and postmodernization. In this rendering, all the categories of modern politics are in crisis and citizenship is no exception (Fahrmeir 2008). In contemporary political debates, the pessimism about citizenship is often framed in relation to the increasingly restrictive barriers that are being placed on international mobility and on attaining citizenship itself. These restrictions are enacted through the twin dimensions of legality and performativity that we discussed above. The proliferation of citizenship tests across national contexts is a good example. Here, one’s success in becoming a legal citizen is dependent upon the demonstrations of certain attitudes, dispositions and values. Studying for citizenship is not about critical consciousness or becoming an active, let alone an activist, citizen, but is rather about learning and conforming to the ‘correct’ form of civic behaviour demanded for newcomers. These misgivings about citizenship are not limited to how it erects barriers or excludes nonmembers, but also include criticisms about the present-day gap between the legal and performative dimensions of citizenship. As we have already mentioned, constitutional rights and duties that are not performed are passive rights and duties. Rights and duties are brought into being only when citizens actively perform them. The falling rates of voter participation, the widespread cynicism towards taxation, and the decline in military conscription are all key features in this passivity. Moreover, many of the rights of citizenship are being stripped away, often in the name of ‘national security’ (too risky to the polity as a whole to guarantee individual rights) or ‘responsible citizenship’ (some citizens are not worthy of rights because of their perceived behaviours). The traditional distinction between citizen and ‘second-class citizen’ is therefore giving way to a pluralized field of racialized citizens, neurotic citizens, irregular citizens, abject citizens, and so on. According to this line of critique, the promises of citizenship are empty promises. For example, while the pillars of Marshall’s (1949) figure of the citizen – as someone who enjoys civil, political, and social rights – have long been criticized for not taking into account deep social inequalities unaddressed by these rights, today a more disturbing critique is emerging: the performance of these rights is increasingly meaningless, without substance. We have performativity without content: citizens are workers, but there are no jobs; citizens are participants, but public spaces are disappearing; citizens are endowed with the capacity for political speech, but no one is listening. Yet, citizenship remains a part of the state’s apparatus of capture. In binding the individual to the polity of the state it forecloses the possibility for alternative forms of political subjectivity. The citizen becomes the prisoner of the state, or more ominously, of the institution of citizenship itself (López-Petit 2011). This line of critique has led some to conclude that the institution of citizenship is now a hopeless category that is complicit with the ongoing exclusions and exploitations of state and capitalist forms of power. As such, citizenship is beyond rehabilitation; it should be deserted, abandoned, and discarded. The task of reinvigorating progressive politics, according to one philosopher, must now begin by asking the question, ‘What if we refuse to be citizens?’ (LópezPetit 2011). These critiques are animated by a certain imaginary about politics, which claims that the only politics that can contest institutions of domination and exclusion come from the ‘outside’. Citizenship is too closely associated with the state – with the Inside – and is therefore complicit with existing systems of domination and exclusion. The space of freedom and autonomy must be created elsewhere. We therefore find ourselves in the situation where there is a competition to invent new names to describe the political subjects that are enacting political agency today. Whether it is the Activist or the Actant, the Militant or the Multitude, there is no lack of new concepts that are ready to sweep away and then take the place of citizenship. These gestures are provocative. Indeed, we share many of these criticisms, and we have written, along with others (Isin 2002, 2004, 2008, 2012; Nyers 2003, 2006a, 2006b, 2011), about 5 Engin F. Isin and Peter Nyers the limits of citizenship, conventionally conceived. We admit that there is something seductive about the gesture of ‘refusal’, which, like ‘exit’, ‘exodus’, and ‘desertion’, has come to inform debates on the Left about new forms of being political (Virno 1996). Ultimately, however, we are critical of gestures like ‘refusal’ when they are framed in relation to an imaginary of political space that is ‘outside’ citizenship. While the imaginary of the outside is quite deep-seated in debates on the Left, it is nonetheless marked by some serious limitations – not least a certain academicism. For example, a common counterargument is that those who argue most vociferously for rejecting citizenship can do so because they have nothing to risk. There is the paradox that it is precisely citizenship in its legal, constitutional form that enables a rejection of citizenship. Consider, for example, when activists who reject citizenship for its perceived connections with neoliberal capitalism and statism fall back on their citizenship to combat the excess of the state police forces (e.g. through court battles about civil rights to free speech, assembly, and so on). More fundamentally, at stake here is the larger issue of whether there is an outside from which one can speak, act, and be political. Here, we agree with Foucault, Deleuze, and others who argue that there is no such outside, only immanent relations and struggles. This does not preclude the possibility of ruptures, breaks, or disruptions of the relations between people and polities that the institution of citizenship mediates. On the contrary, the dynamism of these immanent struggles ensures that citizenship is subject to what Balibar (2004: 10) calls ‘permanent reinvention’. But if the challenge does not lie in finding an alternative to citizenship as a way of naming political subjects or even political subjectivity, a more difficult and uncomfortable question remains: Is citizenship something we can even reject? Derrida’s idea of ‘erasure’ provides some help in addressing this question (Derrida 1998). For Derrida, to write ‘under erasure’ is to write and delete simultaneously, to script and cross out, to present and bracket, create and destroy. Erasure allows one to posit something affirmatively and yet remain skeptical and question it as a problematic. Erasure brings both the concept and the deletion to the forefront in order to allow for some critical distance. In this way, erasure involves a different kind of temporality. Arendt put this time of erasure as the space between ‘no-longer’ and ‘not-yet’ (Arendt 2005: 158–62). It demands a disposition that is both, and yet not quite, after the past and before the future. Far from being politically debilitating, the indeterminacy of this orientation allows for the negotiation of many of citizenship’s paradoxes and ambivalences. To approach citizenship ‘under erasure’ is to script and delete the concept simultaneously. There are some important implications of Derrida’s sensibility for our relationship to citizenship. The ‘no-longer’ implies that we can no longer think of citizenship in the way we used to; the ‘not-yet’ reminds us that we are not quite at the situation where it no longer applies. In other words, we have a responsibility to what we inherit but that does not mean we have to be dogmatic. It is difficult to escape from the categories we inherit. We find in that space between the ‘no-longer’ and ‘not-yet’ neither optimism nor pessimism and neither hope nor despair but a space of hyper-activism – an activism without guarantees and without programmes and yet with considerable vigilance and skepticism. But if citizenship is always to come, do we even have the right to give it up? Do we have a choice about our responsibility to the past and that which is still to come? We believe that Derrida’s sensibility (with echoes of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Arendt) is what underlies much of what could be described as ‘critical citizenship studies’. The worlds of citizenship As the discussion above illustrates, not only do we think that citizenship can be understood as an institution mediating relations between political subjects and their polities, but also that this institution belongs to world history rather than arbitrarily drawn cultural segments of it such as 6 Globalizing citizenship studies ‘Europe’ or ‘The West’. This second assumption is harder to maintain and is controversial. This is because, for generations, especially since the beginning of the twentieth century, social sciences in the West operated with the assumption that citizenship was a uniquely Western institution that not only explained the differences between despotic and authoritarian regimes in the East but also ostensibly explained why the West ‘took off ’ and the East has stagnated. Thus the assumption crosses over from being an analytical distinction between East and West to include a normative assumption of the Western conception of the political subject being superior to its Eastern counterpart. Regrettably, we do not find this assumption only in the classics of the twentieth century but still pervading dominant forms of social sciences and humanities in the twentyfirst. It is still often assumed that if citizenship exists in the East (or South), it is only because it has been historically imported from the West. And since it is imported from the West, it always remains imperfect in its development and always catching up with the original, which keeps changing. That historically non-European or non-Western societies would have developed citizenship in the sense in which we defined it as a mediating institution between political subjects and their polities remains an alien assumption in dominant social sciences and humanities. This is often done by ignoring or neglecting the specific ways that citizenship is enacted globally and working with an all-encompassing idea of ‘liberal democracy’. So rather than analytically and specifically investigating the ways in which the relations between political subjects and polities are mediated, the preference has been for developing a definition of ‘liberal democracy’ that ostensibly obtains in the West and comparing whether Eastern societies have reached it as an end point. We have witnessed the operation of this logic (which we may call ‘democracy’s empire’) during the so-called rise of Brazil, Russia, India, and China at the beginning of this century.The question often asked about these societies is whether their economic growth can be matched with political development to reach liberal democracy. The answers invariably revolve around how liberal democracy pervades the West and is lacking in the East (and the South). The assumption here is that these societies could not find alternative and different ways of mediating relations between political subjects and their polities and that their economic development (a euphemism for capitalism) must be matched with political development (a euphemism for liberal democracy). This has been most visible in the development of the Copenhagen Criteria for entry into the European Union as a member state and the way in which such criteria as ‘democracy’, ‘rule of law’, ‘human rights’, and ‘the protection of minorities’ are understood and used in negotiations with successive Turkish governments. The imposition of such criteria has the effect of ruling out the possibility that Turkish society may wish to develop modern institutions mediating relations between political subjects and their polities in a manner that is not mimetic but authentic, carefully observing its historical trajectories. Thus, the mantra of liberal democracy, whilst bypassing citizenship as a mediating institution, performed a similar logic to nineteenthcentury orientalism though with a different focus and emphasis. If orientalism in the nineteenth century was at pains to describe why the East did not develop, and in the twentieth century it was used to explain why the bright future decolonization promised was seemingly not delivered, in its twenty-first century form orientalism sets the East on the path to the West’s development. We have also witnessed this neo-orientalism more recently during the so-called Arab Spring. Again, for many scholars it was convenient to interpret the uprisings and demonstrations in Libya, Tunisia, Egypt, and Syria as yearnings for liberal democracy, at the same time forgetting that these previously authoritarian regimes have been covertly or overtly either products of Western imperial and colonial adventures or have been supported by imperial powers not only through arms sales but also through cultural diplomacy throughout the twentieth century, but especially in its later decades and the early twenty-first century’s. Be that as it may, it has been particularly instructive to see a new orientalism at work. Without following the universal script 7 Engin F. Isin and Peter Nyers of liberal democracy, it seemed impossible that so many people who have lost or risked their lives and creatively and inventively challenged authorities and their violence could and would have been capable of imagining and enacting mediating institutions between political subjects and their polities. Many scholars have been unable to accept or entertain that possibility precisely because of the orientalist construct of liberal democracy. To investigate citizenship as a mediating institution between political subjects and their polities disrupts this game of benchmarking with liberal democracy and aims to focus attention on the ways in which the kernel of any political order – the political subject – is brought into being. This not only challenges contemporary forms of neo-orientalism, but also the historical hubris that comes with the assumption that certain key political concepts – namely citizenship – are only conceivable in terms of their Western origins. The struggles of citizenship So far we have emphasized how our definition of citizenship as an institution that mediates between political subjects and the polities to which they belong is a historical and dynamic definition, which is open to contestations about the meaning and content of the institution, the terms of the mediation, and the sites of belonging. Because contestation is at the heart of our definition, we believe that citizenship is fundamentally about political struggles over the capacity to constitute ourselves as a political subject. We use ‘ourselves’ here to indicate that as authors we do not see ourselves independent from these struggles, and also to emphasize that the constitution of political subjectivities is always simultaneously individual and collective struggles. As citizenship studies scholars we position our investigations of citizenship in ways that are attuned to, and part of, these struggles. As we have already seen, whether in terms of classical (civil, political, social) or expanded (sexual, cultural, environmental) rights, the rights of citizenship have always involved social struggle. This includes the struggle for a right to be recognized as a right in the first place, and then the struggle for the breadth and depth of these rights (who gets what and how much). If struggle both precedes the conferral of rights and extends long after its recognition as legitimate by the polity and other citizens, we argue that the same is true for citizenship itself. The point is that prior to being recognized as a rights-bearing subject, people engage in a struggle that requires the enactment of subjectivity that is capable of rights. Arendt famously described this as a struggle for the ‘right to have rights’ (Arendt 1973). We would revise this formulation slightly and emphasize the agential part of this struggle by insisting that what is at stake is the right to claim rights. This is the struggle for political subjectivity – that which we call citizenship. But are we merely interpreting every struggle as citizenship? The sensibility we ascribed to Derrida above would lead us to answer ‘no-longer’ and ‘not-yet’. Citizenship is not always about struggle – it is obviously part of the state’s toolbox of management and governance of the population, both at the national and international level. In response to the claim that citizenship has lost all its relevance to the contemporary politics, we would say ‘not-yet’. We insist that citizenship enables subjects to become claimants. It therefore always already involves moments of transformation: from the static recipient to the dynamic claimant, from passive to active. Crucially, this involves the claim to rights that one does not have or otherwise would have no business claiming. Struggles of citizenship in relation to the polity are most obviously made in relation to the modern state. However, we have already seen how citizens do not belong to one polity but to many overlapping and conflicting polities (city, region, state, international). These polities are not in a historical queue for dominance, but are rather coeval and marked by a contested coexistence.The struggles of citizenship are therefore also struggles about authority in spaces and times 8 Globalizing citizenship studies that are autonomous, yet implicated, in the space of the dominant polity of the state. The revival and international spread of the Sanctuary City movement is a good illustration of this struggle over space. Sanctuary movements aim to provide protection and rights to non-citizens who are living in a city but without the legal authorization of the state. As a result, refugees and irregular migrants are able to enact themselves as claimants in relation to the cities and towns in which they live. They are able to claim many of the rights of social citizenship through municipal authorities and agencies, even if many civil and political rights are denied them. Moreover, once local authorities, such as school boards, begin declaring certain zones or places in the city as off limits to immigration and removal officers, they begin to take on the duties of protection that are usually jealously guarded by state-level officials. Similarly, struggles over creating a digital commons without commercial and governmental intrusion to enable people to share their knowledge and expertise have offered us a glimpse of an incipient ‘digital citizenship’ in cyberspace. Our definition of citizenship can also apply to other cosmologies of being political. Many of our political concepts have different inflections when you combine them with other values or visions – e.g. indigenous approaches to protests will incorporate radically different ideas of space, time, and property rights. The border struggles of indigenous people living in territories that traverse international boundaries are a good illustration of this complexity. Making claims as a Mohawk living in Kanion’ke:haka territory and possessing a broader citizenship to the Haudenosaunee Confederacy gives radically different meanings to the terms citizen, polity, and the international. The terminology of the Westphalian system of states remains the same, but it is under erasure: it is ‘no-longer’ the citizenship, sovereignty, and internationalism of the Westphalian system, but it is also ‘not-yet’ a situation in which these categories for explaining the institutions involved in the mediation of political subjects with the polities in which they belong are no longer required. Since citizenship involves struggles that are not just about rights and recognition, but about the contested constitution of subjectivity and polities themselves, we argue that citizenship remains a significant site through which to develop a critique of the pessimism about political possibilities that we saw above. It is only when we assume that the powers of sovereignty and capitalism are ubiquitous that such a deep pessimism about political agency is able to take root. Our approach to citizenship is broader and speaks of the multiple forms of polities that people find themselves in a contested and conflicting relationship to. Again, while it is arguably true that the state remains the dominant polity today, this does not change the fact that there are a host of other polities, too, that involve both obvious and not so obvious forms of political community. We believe that the focus on the struggles of citizenship allows for both a critical engagement with sovereign power and capitalist power, but also rescues more contingent and unexpected moments of political action, subjects, and polities from being relegated to the sidelines of political analysis. The cover photograph of the Handbook captures this essential point. Pictured is a housing squat in Berlin, beautifully painted in lively colours and with evocative illustrations. Painted also is the slogan of this community: ‘Es wird immer komplizierter einfach zu leben.’ – ‘It is becoming ever more complicated to live simply.’The simple right to housing becomes an act of citizenship because it is a right that has to be repeatedly claimed and performed through social struggle. The incipient citizenship(s) There are then struggles all around the world that no longer recognize the limits imposed on people and their political subjectivities but have not yet articulated terms appropriate beyond these limits. Calling these struggles ‘incipient citizenships’ may remind us of our responsibility 9 Engin F. Isin and Peter Nyers as scholars to not only politically recognize these struggles but also analytically shape them. We know something that may well elude the agents engaged in the struggles over the space between ‘no-longer’ and ‘not-yet’, that new political subjectivities never became incipient citizenships without being waged against already established norms, authorities, dominations, and power relations. If women’s struggles for equal rights still sound so recent that is not only because the memories of the suffragettes are still fresh but also because these struggles still continue in the present (Mayhall 2003). Are there no traces of the suffragettes in Femen? Similarly, 2013 may well have ‘celebrated’ the fiftieth anniversary of Martin Luther King’s ‘I have a dream’ speech or seen the unveiling of Rosa Park’s statue in Washington, but is the struggle for civil rights for blacks not as intense as it was half a century ago? Finally, to a new generation the struggles over rights for lesbians, gays, queers, and trans peoples may appear ‘almost won’ but will they remember ‘Stonewall’, which symbolized decades of brutal police raids in New York, San Francisco, and Toronto (Armstrong and Crage 2006)? The point here is not simply to remember the lineages of continuing struggles over rights but to emphasize that the politics of citizenship, or perhaps politics for citizenship, requires, as Weber once put it, strong and slow boring of hard boards.Yet it not only takes passion and perspective, as Weber thought, but it also takes time. The space between ‘no-longer’ and ‘not-yet’ may sound like a small space but it is an enduring time. So politics for citizenship takes not only passion and perspective, and time; above all it requires boundless patience, perseverance, and resilience. All incipient citizenships embody these qualities in those who did their time for them. In an age of ‘clicktivism’, simultaneity, and instant gratification, this may well not be the lesson that will resonate.Yet it is perhaps the most enduring lesson that we learn from the history of struggles. This is a lesson that Foucault drew from his historical studies of political subjectivities (Foucault 1997). His approach to the present as being neither new nor eternal but a specific constellation inspires our approach to incipient citizenships signifying a space of politics between ‘no-longer’ and ‘not-yet’. For Foucault one of the enduring qualities that we inherit from the Enlightenment – not as an event but as an ethos – is precisely this approach to contemporary struggles that refuses to fit them into an already known series (such as ‘liberal democracy’) while acknowledging (as we did above with women’s rights, civil rights, and sexual rights) their lineages and inheritances. Methodologically, this requires us to approach contemporary struggles with a keen eye and ear for the practical vocabularies that people use and then evaluate whether and, if so to, what extent these struggles constitute incipient forms of citizenship. It may have come as a huge surprise to Edward Snowden that the American security apparatus is spying on American citizens as well as non-citizens. He may have interpreted this as a breach of the first amendment of the constitution. But it is scholars who identify it as a key issue of citizenship rights and remind us that the first amendment is a politically gained right of specifically American citizenship. Similarly, as the famous ‘bodies upon the gears’ speech by Mario Savio on 2 December 1964 taught us, the guarantee of free speech consists not only in its legality but also performativity (Vaughn 1998). Sometimes free speech must take the form of an interruption of the dominant speaking order. Unless there is vigilance about such rights – and, at times, a daring to enact them in defiance of dominant powers – corporate and state authorities will violate them in the name of commercial or security interests. We said earlier that it is in this performative sense that citizenship is social and polities (or, rather, authorities responsible for governing them) neglect this often with perilous consequences.Yet, the legal aspect of citizenship is equally significant, as it both enables and provokes its performativity. It is at the intersection between legality and performativity where the responsibilities of citizenship studies scholarship may assume a global public and political role. We hope this Handbook contributes to articulating those responsibilities. 10 Globalizing citizenship studies References Arendt, Hannah (1973), The origins of totalitarianism (2nd edn., New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich). Arendt, Hannah (2005), Essays in understanding 1930–1954: formation, exile, and totalitarianism (New York: Schocken Books). Armstrong, Elizabeth A. and Crage, Suzanna M. (2006), ‘Movements and memory: the making of the Stonewall myth’, American Sociological Review, 71 (5), 724–51. Balibar, Étienne (2004), We, the people of Europe? Reflections on transnational citizenship (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Derrida, Jacques (1998), Of grammatology (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press). Fahrmeir, Andreas (2008) Citizenship: the rise and fall of a modern concept (New Haven: Yale University Press). Foucault, Michel (1997), ‘What Is Enlightenment?’, Ethics: subjectivity and truth (The essential works of Michel Foucault, 1954–1984, 1; New York: New Press), 303–20. Isin, Engin F. (2002), Being political: genealogies of citizenship (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press). Isin, Engin F. (2004), ‘The neurotic citizen’, Citizenship Studies, 8 (3), 217–35. Isin, Engin F. (2008), ‘Theorizing acts of citizenship’, in Engin F. Isin and Greg M. Nielsen (eds.), Acts of citizenship (London: Zed Books), 15–43. Isin, Engin F. (2012), Citizens without frontiers (London: Bloomsbury). López-Petit, Santiago (2011), ‘What if we refuse to be citizens? A manifesto for vacating civic order’, borderlands e-journal 10:3, 1–11. Marshall, Thomas H. (1949), Citizenship and social class, ed. T. B. Bottomore (Pluto Perspectives; London: Pluto Press). Mayhall, Laura E. Nym (2003), The militant suffrage movement: citizenship and resistance in Britain, 1860–1930 (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Nyers, Peter (2003), ‘Abject cosmopolitanism: the politics of protection in the anti-deportation movement’, Third World Quarterly, 24, 1069–93. Nyers, Peter (2006a), Rethinking refugees: beyond states of emergency (London: Routledge). Nyers, Peter (2006b), ‘The accidental citizen: acts of sovereignty and (un)making citizenship’, Economy and Society, 35, 22–41. Nyers, Peter (2011), ‘No one is illegal between city and nation’, Studies in Social Justice, 4, 127–43. Vaughn, Pamela (1998), ‘Cicero and Mario: the scholar as activist’, Pacific Coast Philology, 33 (2), 87–96. Virno, Paolo (1996) ‘Virtuosity and revolution: the political theory of exodus’, in Michael Hardt and Paolo Virno (eds.), Radical thought in Italy: a potential politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), 189–209. 11 Navigating global citizenship studies Jack Harrington Thinking about citizenship studies globally requires charting the complex and diverse ways in which people constitute themselves politically. To the same degree, the global perspective also exposes and exasperates the strains and discords in the concept as we understand it today. The chapters of this Handbook are collected into two thematic sections, four broad geographic regions, and two deterritorialized groupings (‘Diasporicity’ and ‘Indigeneity’). Beyond the convenience of compiling and reading, these divisions represent little more than one of the few mutually exclusive ways of clustering the chapters. Even then, we talk of ‘Africas’, ‘Asias’, and so on. The plural denotes the multiple ways in which such conceptions are actually rendered. In terms of what they say about citizenship, the chapters can also be drawn together into many overlapping, sometimes jarring, sets of topics.The following guide aims to identify the most striking of those other groupings in order to indicate to the reader more detailed areas of interest and also to suggest trends of current and future concern. The themes identified below are by no means comprehensive; instead they reflect the multifarious nature of citizenship itself as it is experienced across the globe. Beyond the mix of disciplines and geographical foci, the chapters in this Handbook share a vision of citizenship as continually reconstituted and renewed through struggle across a range of sites and scales, and not simply at the level of the nation state. Four major themes will be elaborated below. The first examines the most pronounced methodological innovations and trends reflected in the Handbook as a whole. The second looks at the ways in which contemporary citizenship across the globe is conceived historically. When navigating global citizenship studies, western paradigms of a classic Greco-Roman lineage are often less relevant than the history of colonial struggle, modern state formation, and the erosion of social-democratic norms in the face of neo-liberalism. The third section reviews chapters that explore how citizenship in an era of globalization is increasingly less about membership of a polity and more about traversing boundaries between polities. The fourth and final section evaluates the unifying theme of the Handbook – citizenship as struggle. Methods for understanding citizenship on a global scale A number of common approaches and methodologies become clear in this global survey of citizenship. Few chapters preserve a neat division between citizenship as status and the ways in 12 Navigating global citizenship studies which it can be practised or performed. Yet, points where the two connect raise four major issues, discussed below: how to talk about citizenship as political subjectivity across a range of polities and cultures; the need for a topological understanding of how citizenship is located and related to concepts of borders; the idea of citizenship as something that is performed or enacted; and how citizenship as a grouping of rights connected to a polity is to be recognized. First, the Handbook moves beyond Euro-American dominance in thinking about citizenship. This can be seen as an attempt to abandon assumptions that come under unbearable strain when writing on a geographically global scale. An overwhelmingly strong principle that emerges is that an ever-expanding concept of the liberal subject should not be mistaken for the ability to perceive multiple political subjectivities. Edward Saïd’s Orientalism continues to trouble our understanding of why certain groups are assumed to be unable to enjoy certain rights, particularly with reference to Islam (see Banko, Kiwan, Perrin). In his chapter, Morrison reminds us that it is not simply Islam that has been attenuated as a political force by the perspective of orientalism. He argues that an effect of orientalism, and of Saïd-inspired critiques of it, has been the marginalization of Buddhism’s role in shaping Asian citizenships. Indeed, orientalism is merely a particular set of discursive strategies that suggest certain groups lack the full capacity to act as political subjects. Cirkovic likens the assumed unsuitability of citizenship norms for the Balkans to orientalism. Equally, the tendency to see indigenous political practices as simply traditional or somehow static is challenged by Latta and Wittman and by Wiebe. As Sabsay demonstrates with sexual citizenship, ‘the universalization of individualized free will, rationality, and moral autonomy as the conditions of possibility of sexual politics within the field of sexual citizenship, restricts our ideas of political subjectivity to a specific cultural tradition, namely that of liberalism’. At the same time, as Guo illustrates in relation to China, we must provide analytical space to understand how ‘Western’ concepts have been appropriated and resignified as much as they have been imposed. Indeed, as Lee cautions, discussing citizenship on a global scale increases rather than lessens the dangers of Western bias, Eurocentrism, or orientalism. At stake is the way in which conceptual frameworks limit our ability to analyse citizenship as it is manifested around the world. A major preoccupation in this regard is the binary of insider/outsider or the analogous one of citizen/ alien. The ways in which the mutability of such positions are used by governments for political expediency are considered by Dorman and Hepworth. Understanding citizenship as the capacity or the attempt to traverse this divide is the conceptual focus of a number of chapters including those by Hepworth, Nyamjoh and Brudvig, and Swerts.Yet, multi-ethnic populations and differentiated citizenship statues within polities expose the inadequacies of such binaries to convey the complexities of how people are excluded from the full enjoyment of citizenship (see Abu-Laban, Albarazi and Van Waas, Assal, Ilcan, Jayal, and Reed and Rush). Pullano and Ní Mhurchú both caution against foregrounding binaries of inclusion and exclusion at the expense of recognizing how a mesh of alterities is continually produced to mark the borders between who can and who cannot be a citizen (Isin 2002). Secondly, as citizenship becomes increasingly deterritorialized, problems of relating it to space become more apparent, and many chapters address the need for a topological approach. As Hepworth puts it, ‘while “illegality” has often been assumed to be produced at the border – in the act of crossing with or without authorization – it is, in fact, also produced beyond and within the borders of the nation-state through various technologies that differentiate and regulate individuals before, during, and after that crossing’. The concept of border cannot simply be understood spatially (see Pullano, and Martignoni and Papadopoulos). Rygiel’s concept of transgressive citizenship, using the example of recording and memorializing the deaths of illegal immigrants crossing borders, shows how bodies themselves have ‘the potential to subvert or undermine the ontological borders underpinning modern citizenship of whose lives should 13 Jack Harrington count, that is of who should be recognized as a political subject with the rights to have rights’. Indeed as Hepworth states: ‘A topological approach emphasises the proliferation of inside-out and outside-in positions that are produced through the act of delimiting the border.’ Thirdly, the question of how citizenship is enacted through what people do is a recurrent theme in the Handbook. The imposition of laws or the supposed enjoyment of rights that have actually been eroded or never exercised make peoples’ actions a major concern of citizenship studies. The growing body of academic scholarship on acts of citizenship is critically assessed at length by Guilluame, Ní Mhurchú, Neveu, and Soguk. Examples of how citizenship rights are claimed through acts are provided by Alkan and Zeybek, Canals, Conway, Guild, Meltzer and Rojas, and Swerts. Alkan and Zeybek, Lee, Neveu, and Rygiel all show in very different ways, that overtly political gestures of outward resistance are by no means the only kinds of actions that constitute acts of citizenship. Finally, to capture something so intricate, multiform, and mutable it is helpful to think in terms of regimes of citizenship. As Guilluame notes in his chapter: ‘The concept of regime of citizenship precisely enables us to understand citizenship in its necessary connected historicity but also interlinks it with other globalized phenomena.’ At the point where identity as a marker of citizenship is ambiguous, the idea of regimes is useful. This is most obviously the case in supranational contexts such as European Union (EU) citizenship. To select only one example, Pullano illustrates how the nexus of EU-level and national institutions provides multiple sites in which EU citizenship can be enacted institutionally, which in turn produces differential spaces and frontiers within the European space. Yet, an important element of the concept of regime is that it prevents us from subsuming questions of legal status beneath struggles over the performance and practice of who can be a citizen. As Manby says: ‘Statute law has sometimes been described as essentially irrelevant to the daily struggles of individuals to “belong” where they live; yet laws adopted by national parliaments nonetheless both reflect these struggles and have profound effects far from capital cities.’ Moreover, the tension between competing legal regimes is a frequent aspect of citizens’ struggles. This is seen most acutely when the presence of human rights becomes a channel for claiming citizenship rights, blurring the boundaries between the two (see Alkan and Zeybek, Ilcan, and Cirkovic). The concept of regimes is an example of how attempts to draw divisions between citizenship as status, as practices, or as enacted disguise the ways in which these are frequently interrelated (see Ní Mhurchú). Historical formations and their critique At first glance, surprisingly few of the chapters take Greek and Roman citizenship as their starting point, even for the purposes of critique. It is perhaps inevitable that a Handbook which exposes Euro-American bias and assesses the ways in which citizenship is being reconfigured and contested has only so much to say about the invented ‘classical origins’ of citizenship. The historicized vision of citizenship evoked and questioned by these chapters is decidedly modern and has three distinct but interwoven themes: the legacies of colonialism; the formation of the nation state; and Western twentieth-century social democracy as the basis for T.H. Marshall’s model of citizenship. Postcolonial legacies affect not simply peoples and states but also conceptions of how citizenship is bounded, conferred, and withheld. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries British imperial citizenship, for example, offered the paradox of a supposedly universal access to subject rights, at the same time as a de facto exclusion based on constructions of race (see Manby, Reed and Rush), orientalism (see Banko) or ethno-linguistic markers of nationhood (see Lee). This aspect is explored in the context of post-Soviet Central Asia by Ruget. As Manby notes in the 14 Navigating global citizenship studies case of postcolonial Africa, ‘although the question of colonial borders was addressed… the related issue of how to treat the peoples cut in half by those borders, or individuals who had moved within the previous colonial territories, was not resolved (even on paper) in the same way’. And as Nyamnjoh and Brudvig, and Sanyal show, the promise of a city-hopping cosmopolitan citizenship is in practice seldom within the grasp of those racialized groups that colonialism perpetuated.Yet, in many contemporary states, the pretence of citizen equality has at times prevented the remedying of historic injustices colonialism has inflicted on certain groups of people such as the Scheduled Castes in India (see Jayal) or Aboriginal peoples (see Walters). In the mid-twentieth century, colonialism in many cases was replaced by foreign (i.e. Euro-American) backing for repressive governments, as in South Korea, the Middle East, and North Africa (see Moon and Ilcan). European settler colonialism led not simply to movements of populations to other parts of the world, but also to the creation of new states and thus new citizenship statuses to assert territorial sovereignty (see Abu-Laban, Walters, and Meltzer and Rojas). As Manby observes, vast colonial migrations continue to make the granting of citizenship a contentious and politicized issue in many African states. Anti-colonial struggles also constitute many contemporary citizen identities.This can be in a technical legal sense, where much political capital has been made of granting or withholding citizenship on the basis of participation in colonial struggles (see Dorman and Manby). As Conway notes, in South Africa the need for unity in resisting the apartheid regime marginalized the demand for gay and women’s rights at the same time as benefitting from protest by these movements. In this sense, as Dorman and Sabsay among others remind us, colonial legacies have in turn been reshaped by subsequent political and social struggles. Lee’s chapter alerts us to the ways in which citizenship itself is a concept that can carry with it not only colonially imposed norms but also the possibility of neo-colonial interference, exemplified by US foreign policy on the invasion of Iraq in the early 2000s. While the decline of state power is a dominant theme, an equally common one is its resurgence, reconstitution, and resignification.The assertion of the legitimacy of contiguous mutually exclusive states brings with it certain historically derived assumptions about the role of the citizen in supporting such a claim. The granting or deprivation of citizenship rights and obligations is a central part of state-formation or of asserting the completeness or legitimacy of the state itself. Two chapters explore conscientious objection to conscription, one of the classic forms of obligation to the state. Protest over the citizen’s right to conscientious objection become a site of contest over the legitimacy of the state’s military aims and thus the state itself (see Alkan and Zeybek and Conway). Conscription exemplifies a common incongruity in citizenship as an institution, a universal obligation that only falls on certain members of the society – heterosexual men or ‘whites’, for example. In the same way, the public who deem themselves to have an interest in the state can be construed to include a broader international diaspora. Equally, the case of indigenous peoples frequently exposes citizenship status as a means for the state to assert territorial sovereignty. As Wiebe and Howell and Schaap show, if the conferring of national citizenship rights threatens to undermine indigenous peoples’ claims to use and settle on their lands, they have little choice but to reject that status in order to assert their precedence over that state’s claims to sovereignty. Hence, in 1972 Aboriginal protesters in Australia established a tent embassy (Howell and Schaap), and in 2012 an indigenous leader, Chief Theresa Spence, went on a 44-day hunger strike demanding state-to-state relations between her people and the Canadian government. In Africa, as Giraudo and Tamarkin note, the interstate roaming of indigenous peoples has been seen by many states as a threat to their sovereignty, as the internationally recognized rights and protections of such peoples can move with them across state boundaries. Thus Botswana has distinguished between indigenous people and autochthonous people, the latter supposedly being original to the state. In other words, to the extent that citizens are a marker of their state’s 15 Jack Harrington existence and its claims to sovereignty, the two concepts can, and frequently do, undermine as much as they reinforce each other. Critiques of T.H. Marshall’s model of citizenship reveal the inadequacy of a conception of such rights based primarily on the experience of Britain up to the social-democratic consensus of the mid-twentieth century. While Marshall’s division of civic, political, and social rights was a taken as a description to encompass the totality of citizenship rights, it was primarily conceived as a historically contingent, successive sequence of rights gained from the eighteenth through to the twentieth century in British history. It is the inappropriateness of this trajectory for other polities that is the basis of the critiques contained in this volume. The move beyond Marshall is a move beyond what is encompassed by the term and its geographical and historical specificity. Turner’s contribution reminds us that Marshall overlooked the issue of minorities or of social difference more generally. This creates an obvious tension in wealthy former white-settler states where one might think Marshall’s scheme would apply. As Abu-Laban observes: ‘The mere existence of indigenous peoples in Canada, many of whom live on reserves and exercise a unique set of rights, challenges our conventional ways of thinking about citizenship through individual, civic, or (neo-)liberal models.’ For Walters, the Marshallian model is the essence of what such states deny to indigenous peoples who supposedly enjoy such rights as citizens. As many of the chapters demonstrate, economic crisis and the neo-liberal restriction of the scope of social rights make the social-democratic model as anachronistic for ‘the West’ as for anywhere else. If this creates strains at a national level it also turns still emerging legal categories such as EU Citizenship into battlegrounds over social and civil rights (Guild, Kostakopoulou, and Pullano). As Abu-Laban, Dean, Guillame, Levy, Pullano, and Sheller all convey, the crux of the issue is not simply the historical specificity of Marshall’s concept: it is rather a vision of citizenship as something granted and fixed rather than embodied, enacted, or negotiated by would-be citizens themselves. But we can go further. As Dean suggests, abandoning the Marshallian model with social citizenship at its zenith allows for a radical reassessment of the place of the social. If the social is the site of negotiations and contestations, it not only precedes the civic and the political, as Dean argues; it is also the impetus for the excluded to demand civic and political recognition. As will be seen, the strong emphasis on citizenship constituted through struggle that permeates this book reflects this approach. Traversing frontiers of citizenship If the idea of citizenship as membership of a polity is not as coherent, contained, complete, and exclusive as it implies, there are two overarching reasons. First, if citizenship is membership of a polity, an individual must have multiple citizenship identities just as he or she is a member of several polities. The second is that, as Seyla Benhabib has observed, far from being a neat package conferred through membership, citizenship rights are increasingly disaggregated (Benhabib 2004). This leads to a series of analytical problems to do with the relationship between the citizen and his or her polity addressed at length in the Handbook, each of which is discussed in this section. These are: how the nation and the state coalesce (or fail to) in the citizen; how people express their belonging to a polity; how and why polities distinguish between citizens and foreigners or others; and how citizenship is enacted on the different scales and overlapping sites of multiple polities. The question of who is and who is not a citizen is still too often decided by political instrumentalism. Nation-building campaigns can be a way of asserting a state’s borders, a government’s legitimacy, or a particular group’s distinct rights. Such constructed identities can include elements that transcend the national. Perrin shows this using the example of the Arabization of 16 Navigating global citizenship studies Berbers in Algeria or the granting of citizenship to children of native Arabic-speaking fathers (see also Assal and Manby). Increasingly, as Ragazzi and Ruget show in the case of the former Communist bloc countries and as Sutherland illustrates with the case of Vietnam, a state’s attempts to build the nation through its citizenry can extend beyond national boundaries. Such moves create a deterritorialized citizenship, at odds with a general shift towards the postnational. The Indian government has at times reversed a trend towards acquiring citizenship through jus soli (birth), using jus sanguinis (descent) and even a religious element to exclude largely Muslim migrant populations from Bangladesh and accommodate low-caste Hindu migrants from Pakistan (see Jayal). Ruget uses the case of post-Soviet Central Asia to highlight the limitations of ethno-linguistic definitions of nationhood, when citizenship rights are also shaped by large-scale migration, issues of minority inclusion, and major shortfalls in social, economic, and political rights. In Bosnia-Herzegovina, Cirkovic sees international efforts to enshrine a multiethnic nationhood through group rights to political representation as an anomalous contravention of basic human rights. As Martignoni and Papadopoulos show: ‘The concept of integration in particular – based on a naturalization of borders – implies the existence of a coherent “subject of reception”, a homogenous and close-knit social group that should receive, welcome ‘the other’, and potentially integrate “otherness”.’ If the construction of ethnic identities can be used by states to confer rights, it can also be a site for rights-claiming. Resistance to the category of foreigner is one of the most common examples of such a struggle (Shindo). As Hepworth, Ní Mhurchú, and Rygiel illustrate, claiming the right to have rights fundamentally subverts the notion of the foreigner as inimical to the citizen. Canals uses the idea of religious practice and dance to show how this can be done without accepting the logic of assimilation. Equally, Brudvig and Nyamnjoh use literature to convey the ways in which intimacy and conviviality can overcome such divisions in a world more frequently characterized by migration. The scales on which people can be constituted are not simply a nested series running from the local, through the state-level, to the regional, and then the global. Dean observes that the ‘conscious process of social accommodation surely preceded, and now transcends, the invention of the city (that bestowed on citizenship its etymological root) or the nation-state (that bestowed on it its modern form)’. Equally, as Wiebe and Latta and Wittman illustrate, the citizenship practices and acts of indigenous peoples, particularly in relation to the environment, must not be recognized only at the point at which they interact, with or struggle against, the state. Nor should they be characterized simply as ‘traditional knowledge’. Yet, national citizenship, too, has become increasingly deterritorialized in an effort to incorporate diasporic communities (see Ragazzi and Sutherland). Other trends also challenge the notion of a postnational world of cosmopolitan citizenships (see Dean and Lee). Sanyal contrasts the vision of a new urban India of international elites with the lived experience of those poor and marginalized city populations who are most affected by such projects. If the city is one example of an alternative polity to the state, the refugee camp as a site of humanitarian government is another (see Ilcan). Undoubtedly, European citizenship is the most legally sophisticated example of a supranational regime. As Maas observes: no other continent has anything even remotely resembling a continental citizenship: the very limited additional rights that citizens of the United States, Canada, and Mexico have as a result of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) or those granted to citizens of member states of Mercosur or the African Union, for example, pale in comparison with the extensive equality promised by a European Union citizenship that removes EU member governments’ authority to privilege their own citizens over those from other EU member states. 17 Jack Harrington EU citizenship is not simply one scale up from national citizenship. Nor does its derivation from member-state citizenship tell us much about how the enactment of each relates to the other. As Pullano puts it: the tensions already existing in national citizenships between autonomy and equality, or between inclusion and exclusion, are not only still present in the European context, but they are taking up more complex and profound structures, since they involve the reshaping of national patterns of differentiation as well’ (see also Tonkiss). While it is clear that citizenship is frequently enacted on multiple scales, this necessitates a closer mapping of those different scales and their links rather than the presumption of a global or globalizing scale in all cases. Understanding citizenship as struggle As will already be clear, all of the chapters in the Handbook remind us that citizenship rights are not simply gained through struggle but constituted by it as an act in itself. Even understood primarily as status, citizenship is impermanent, capable of reconstitution, and therefore contestable. We are still left with the question of how to understand what is happening when struggles occur and what they produce. In different ways, many of the chapters affirm Dean’s observation that we need ‘a postMarshallian concept of citizenship that is truly social; that centres on negotiation around human needs and social rights, and is not necessarily subservient to frameworks for constitutional civil and political order’. Constituting oneself as a citizen is not simply a question of accessing rights through pre-existing civil and political channels; more often than not, it is a response to the unavailability of such recourse. While all chapters suggest struggle is intrinsic to citizenship, four major struggles recur throughout the Handbook. These are: resistance to narrowly economic rationales for citizenship; the plight of migrants, particularly irregular or undocumented workers; the continuing struggle to address the unequal treatment of women in citizenship laws and persistent gender inequality; the worldwide flourishing of protest movements in 2011 typified by the so-called ‘Arab Spring’. Struggles can arise from the tension between a narrowly economic definition of citizenship and a wider basis founded on the social. Soguk defines this narrowness in terms of a cold economism that disproportionately burdens the most vulnerable members of society, as it exerts a ruthless biopolitical logic (see also Rygiel). Equally, Latta and Wittman show how struggles against corporate and state-led extractivism in South America reveal ‘societal fault lines directly related to the uneven enjoyment of meaningful citizenship’. This is most apparent with regard to EU citizenship. As Kostakopolou argues, the task is not to expand the scope of EU citizenship beyond its economic basis. Rather, it is to refute the premise that its foundations were not social. Mobility rights were, she argues, ‘always intended to enable European workers to enjoy equal treatment not only in the workplace, but also in the broader social environment of the host member states and in the political arena’. This involves recognition of the social projects that have historically been integral to European integration (see Pullano and Maas). Moreover, as Tonkiss observes, it requires research and policy responses that acknowledges the impact such mobility has in terms of cultural and political integration into the life of host member states. As will be seen when we review coverage of the 2011 protest movements, a key element of understanding such struggles is recognizing that social justice is not only an underlying cause, but what ultimately gives them legitimacy as acts of citizenship. One of the most extensively covered areas is how migrants claim their rights as citizens. This is more than the plight of non-citizens or those deemed to legally not have the rights they go 18 Navigating global citizenship studies on to claim through struggle. All too often, migrants are vulnerable to being denied rights they legally possess. Within the European Union, Roma citizens of EU member states, have found the rights of mobility this confers upon them openly flouted by member-state governments (see Cirkovic, Maas, Pullano, and Vermeersch). As Tonkiss shows, the formal recognition of EU citizenship rights can belie barriers to belonging that EU migrants face in other member states.The implications of the EU border regime for so-called ‘Third Country Nationals’ are considered by both Guild and Rygiel. Canals uses the example of African-American identity for Venezuelans in Barcelona to illustrate how migrant communities can have their diasporic identities reconfigured in host countries. Methodological implications of understanding migrants’ struggles in terms of citizenship are critically examined by Martignoni and Papadopoulos. The ways in which irregular or undocumented workers have little choice but to act as political subjects and demand the rights that they do not have are discussed by Hepworth, Ilcan, Lee, Rygiel, Soguk, and Swerts. Through such actions the legal status of citizenship expands to incorporate new subjects (Nyers 2003). In this way, the experience of migrants highlights the inherent possibility of recognition through struggle that is a key aspect of citizenship even as it excludes. In many contexts, gender discrimination against women continues to be a common feature of citizenship. As legal status, it continues to enshrine discrimination against women in many nationality laws. Specifically, the slow decline of the practice of acquiring citizenship only through one’s father (patrilineal descent) is discussed by Albarazi and Van Waas, Dorman, Manby, and Moon. Saeidi provides a nuanced account of the ways in which the regime of the Islamic Republic of Iran has restricted certain rights for women (such as access to certain professions) at the same time as depending heavily on women as political organizers and campaigners. The overarching question of how the citizen as a political subject remains gendered is discussed in the context of the Caribbean by Sheller. As Sheller shows, the category of citizen ‘historically excluded women, dependents, slaves, former slaves, and servants, precisely because their bodies were stigmatized as overly sexual, emotional, and incapable of the higher rationality of disembodied objectivity, which was understood as a bourgeois, white, and heterosexual masculine trait’ (see also Reed and Rush). Lee cautions that the apparent need to assert acceptable gender norms in terms of citizenship rights can frequently become a source of neocolonial interference. When we conceive of struggle on a global scale, not confined to a specific national or other jurisdictional context, a number of questions arise. The first is what struggles across the world actually share in common. The power of common languages and action of struggle, rather than a deeper essential unity, is a theme taken up by Levy and by Martignoni and Papadopoulos. Howell and Schaap show how the black power movement in the US provided an inspiration and a possible political language for Aboriginal campaigners in Australia the 1960s and 1970s. The second question addressed in the Handbook is that of the legacies of the protests, street occupations, and other movements that began in 2011, typified for many by the ‘Arab Spring’. Insights into the Arab Spring itself are offered by Kiwan and Perrin. Levy and Soguk provide analytical frameworks for linking the 15M movement in Spain, Occupy in North America and Europe, and events in North Africa and the Middle East. As Levy states, one must be sceptical of: explanatory frameworks that left us misinformed on the possibility of a protest of this magnitude until the very moment of its eruption. Instead, it is time to focus on the actors themselves, to explore their vocabulary, and to listen to the words they weave into their actions. In this sense, the events of 2011 and their repercussions remind us of the need to continually question and reassess what it is that we call citizenship. 19 Jack Harrington The Handbook certainly demonstrates that citizenship as a concept is constantly being reconfigured. Historical and contemporary accounts show that struggles to be regarded under the label of citizen and to enjoy commensurate rights are what actually comprise citizenship itself. As the following chapters attest, only an interdisciplinary approach can capture and analyse such a dynamic. In the same way, thinking about citizenship globally necessarily involves working on multiple scales and investigating the connections between them. Referring to EU Citizenship, Kostakopoulou writes of its ‘radical potential’. Conceivable only as the interaction of several polities and as something defined by the promise of what it can become as much as what it has overcome, EU citizenship is, in this sense, little different from the range of citizenships explored in the Handbook. As the different chapters show, the nexuses that make up the sites where citizenship occurs are so various that normative models derived from the historical experience of particular regions have become self-evidently inadequate. If the chapters prove that we cannot talk about a ‘global citizenship’, they also demonstrate that it is only at a global level that we can begin to appreciate that it is ultimately citizens who constitute themselves. References All references are to chapters within the Handbook unless otherwise stated. Benhabib, S. (2004) The rights of others: aliens, residents, and citizens, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Isin, E.F. (2002) Being political: genealogies of citizenship, Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Nyers, P. (2003) ‘Abject Cosmopolitanism: The Politics of Protection in the Anti-Deportation Movement’, Third World Quarterly, 24, 1069–93. Saïd, E. (1979) Orientalism, London:Vintage Books. 20 Part I Struggles for citizenship This page intentionally left blank 1 Contested citizenship of the Arab Spring and beyond Gal Levy Remember this: We be many and they be few. They need us more than we need them. Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing. Arundhati Roy, Confronting Empire, 20031 When do we know that something that happens is an event, that is, ‘produce[s] a rupture in the given order’ (Isin 2012: 131)? How can we be informed about an event while it is ongoing, as we are trying to capture the transformative moment? Eric Hobsbawm, in the wake of a controversy about the French Revolution gave a pretty simple answer. Rejecting the revisionist interpretation of this event, he sided with contemporaries, because they ‘were not concerned with historical analysis for its own sake [and hence] tended to emphasize what they saw as new and dynamic, rather than what they regarded as relics of the past due to move to the margins of social reality’ (Hobsbawm 2004 [1989]: 477). This view tacitly implies a rejection of the notion that an explanation can outweigh the experiences of the actual players. Accordingly, even the lack of adequate words to describe the new social reality could not take away from the discovery of contemporaries that what they were experiencing was a new reality. Thus, when the existing epistemological frameworks no longer satisfy the search for an explanation we may hear, as Roy did a decade ago, ‘another world that is on her way’. How can we conceive of these times, after the ‘Arab Spring’ and the protests that engulfed the world from 2011? The answer, I propose here, should be sought not in ‘the search for an essence hidden behind human activities’, but rather ‘the surface aspects that give them meaning and significance’ (Tully 1999: 163). In other words, the meaning of the Social Protest – encompassing the events of the Arab Spring, the encampments of 15M in Spain and the Tents Protest in Israel, and the Occupy Movements in democratic capitalistic regimes – needs to be construed not from explanatory frameworks that left us misinformed about the possibility of a protest of this magnitude until the very moment of its eruption. Instead, it is perhaps timely to focus on the actors themselves, to explore their vocabulary, and to listen to the words they weave into their actions (Emmerich 2011). This chapter seeks to discern the new voices and vocabulary that redraw the extent and expanse of political subjectivity in a post-protest era. Rather than imposing explanations, 23 Gal Levy I first examine the unfolding of the protest and its coalescence across various locations, spaces, and contexts, to create a single event which, for the sake of simplicity, I term the social protest. Evidently, this event was at once directed against dictatorial and neoliberal regimes, and despite these diverse contexts, it spoke in one language. Next, I explore this language of citizenship as a site and a means of resistance, making particular reference to New Social Movements (NSMs), civil society, and radical democracy. These paradigmatic epistemological frameworks of analysis have shaped our understanding of social change and critical thinking in the post-World War II period, and animated the extension of citizenship and the rendering of rights discourse universal. In the final part I revisit the notion of rights in order to point out its limits and to explore the new language of democracy that emerged in the course of the social protest. More particularly, I propose to see the social protest as a game-like activity that has broadened the struggles of and for democracy and, all the more, reshaped the ways of participation and representation, thereby offering citizenship new trajectories in the post-protest era. Protest Anti-establishment and anti-capitalism protests are neither new nor exclusive to specific societies in the post-World War II era. In this period, the world has witnessed the growth of capitalist democracies and the birth of new states in the wake of decolonization, and also seen New Social Movements advocating against the malaise of ‘modernization’ (e.g. Slater 1985); the expansion of civil society against the shrinking of the political (Cherniavsky 2009); and the call for radical democracy to undercut the limits of liberal democracy (Purcell 2013). These conceptions have been at once descriptive and prescriptive. Their power lies in being not merely analytical tools, but informing our sociological and political understanding on what is to be done. NSMs, civil society, and radical democracy called upon citizens to act, while reshaping our vocabulary about social change. However, in light of the social protest it becomes timely to revisit them and ask what is and what is not left of their legacy that would render explicable contemporary conceptions of citizenship and democracy beyond the Arab Spring. When the social protest erupted across the globe in 2011 it soon became evident that one major trigger and source of inspiration for it was the popular uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, each marking an earthquake that shook the ‘old global order’ within and beyond the Arab world. If, as is commonly contended, the Arab countries constituted the last bastion against democratization, then these uprisings unearthed repertoires of action that were seen to be absent in this part of the world. However, the ‘Arab street’, notoriously and unjustly known as a space for futile political rage and harsh oppression (Bayat 2010), spawned a new public sphere, a space that has been reappropriated by subjects of despotic regimes, who sought to reconfigure themselves as political activists. Technology was part of this, but it was the physical contact and presence in the urban space that mattered (Lopes de Souza and Lipietz 2011: 620). At least in Egypt, this was in addition to the building of a counter-political society in the streets of the large cities (Bayat 2010; el-Ghobashy 2011). In ‘the West’, these events were observed with astonishment and scepticism, at least in the highest echelons of power and amongst brokers of ‘knowledge’ in the corporate media (DeLuca, Lawson, and Sun 2012). Soon, this ‘knowledge’ turned out to be partial and stereotypical, as professionals, workers, and political activists were inspired to act by new knowledge that emerged from the streets of Cairo and Tunis (Trudell 2012), and formed the basis of a new subject – an activist citizen, who is not merely a player in the political arena, but, rather, willing to redefine the rules of the game (Isin 2009). When this happened, it also became clearer that the Arab Spring was about toppling not only the old despotic regimes from within, but also the global economic neoliberal order from without (Armbrust 2011; 24 Contested citizenship of the Arab Spring Bergh 2012). Against this shared enemy, the protesters in the affluent economies and in the forsaken South could articulate a common call for a new democratic order. Inspired by the events, mainly in Egypt as well as Tunisia (Kerton 2012), before long the protest unfolded at a rapidly increasing pace. On 15 May 2011, the harsh repression of a small demonstration by Democracia Real Ya! (Real Democracy Now),2 ignited a larger-scale protest in Madrid’s Puerta del Sol, known as 15M and also as the indignados (‘the outraged’). No single issue united the protesters.Yet, they shared a resentment toward the political partisan system for being corrupt and detached from the people, rage against the banking and financial systems, and anger for being dependent upon a precarious labour market (Marti-Puig 2011). The immediacy of technology allowed the protest to spread rapidly both geographically and through various public spaces, rendering, to a degree, traditional concepts of leadership undesired. The virtual networks thus summoned the protesters, while concomitantly allowing them to sound their own voices (Fuster-Morell 2012). In an echo of some feminist movements of earlier decades, being leaderless was a praxis of liberation (Gautney 2011). Soon, the virtual space translated into a real physical space of encampments and assemblies, where spaces for open discussion and debate were formed, rendering meaningful the ideas of deliberative and direct democracy and non-hierarchical decision-making (Hughes 2011; also Benhabib 1996;Young 2003). The new space foregrounded a new political subjectivity, at first in the Arab cities and later in the different sites of the Occupy Movement (Abourahme and Jayyusi 2011; Kerton 2012). One symbolic figure who marks this transition is Mohamed Bouazizi, the Tunisian street vendor who, like Jan Palach in Prague, set himself on fire on 17 December 2010 in protest against his humiliation by municipal officials. Thus, the Arab Spring, like the Prague Spring of 1968, was literally ignited. The subsequent image that comes to mind is of young men and women – in Prague and in China’s Tiananmen Square, and again in Cairo’s Tahrir Square – standing still, unshielded in the face of the armoured tanks surrounding them. Abourahme and Jayyusi (2011: 626) echoing Michel Foucault’s observations from revolutionary Iran, argue that this ‘is the most enduring aspect of the Arab revolts: the sense that people, ordinary people – through this novel relationship between politics and experience – were remaking themselves, shedding off years of conditioning and inertia to emerge as political subjects’. It was also, the authors propose, a moment of creation of new collective subjectivities, when people self-organized to protect and care for themselves in newly created public spaces. It was a moment of both confusion and clarity. The realization of a new self, capable of transcending the neoliberal moment, had given the protesters a sense of clarity in becoming political subjects and moreover in articulating their collective subjectivities (Harvey 2012: 161–2). Thus, one participant in an Occupy UK encampment testified: The striking and amazing thing in those first weeks was how much people were actually listening to each other. Many of us came from a fairly radical political background, and had strong opinions, but Occupy seemed to promise a way of getting beyond all sitting in separate corners, shouting, ‘You’re wrong!’ at everyone else. (Anonymous 2012: 442) This (female) observer was soon disillusioned, especially by the difficulty of keeping the camp safe, mostly for women, but also by the challenge of remaining inclusive in an unwelcoming environment. In a different manner, six months into the protest and after the toppling of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, it appeared that ‘there is no counter totality, no ideological assemblage to carry us into the “permanent revolution” and towards new formations of political structure’ (Abourahme and Jayyusi 2011: 626). The subsequent ousting of the democratically 25 Gal Levy elected president Mohamed Morsi in 2013 by a military coup was a bloody testimony to this sense of uncertainty. While not suggesting that the purpose and reasoning underlying this series of events were unclear to its participants, it brought to the fore the discrepancy between a new will for collective action and a reality of fragmented social solidarity and continuous de-politicization of citizenship under neoliberalism and tyranny (Brown 2011; Dean 2011). Nonetheless, the absence of readily available ‘ideological assemblages’, in Egypt or elsewhere, was not necessarily a misfortune for the moment of the protest. This moment was an opportunity to form a ‘broad-based democratic uprising’ (Brown 2011); it created new openings for deliberation, largely previously unknown to many of its participants. From Tahrir Square to Tel Aviv’s Rothschild Boulevard, to Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan, it was a moment ‘to foster the creation of sites and processes of deliberation among diverse and disagreeing elements of the polity’ (Young 2003: 104). A new language of hand gestures that emerged from the indignados encampments in Spain alongside other innovations like the ‘human megaphone’, traversed the globe, compelling the protesters to rethink ‘old’ notions of deliberation, connectedness, and communality, and, to borrow from Deleuze and Guattari, to escape domination in ‘smooth space’, where ‘desire is relatively free from the apparatuses of capture and can produce according to its will.’ (cited in Purcell 2013). This was a moment when the absence of a new vocabulary for participation and representation stimulated an open-ended deliberation which allowed others’ points of view to be heard (Halvorsen 2012: 428), and hence made it possible to transcend particularistic interests (Young 2003: 106). This was, in other words, a ‘smooth space’ where, to paraphrase Young, deliberative democracy theory qua democratic theory understood itself as a critical theory, exposing ‘the exclusion and constraints in supposed fair processes of actual decision-making, which make the legitimacy of their conclusions suspect’ (2003: 118). As protesters around the world were occupying, indeed reclaiming, the public space, they not simply ‘revived the classical image of the nation as res-publica’, as Brown (2011) contends. They indeed spawned new relationships between the public and the private, whether by redefining the spatial boundary between them or by rendering the interests of citizens visible in the public sphere (Harvey 2012: 159–164; Aslam 2012). At the time of writing (2013), two years after the kindling of the worldwide protest against the tyrannies of authoritarianism and neoliberalism, it still remains to be seen where this event is heading. Whichever way one turns, our understanding of the social protest should not, however, be separated from a critical reading of the 2008 global financial crisis, and of the traces of the distancing of the major democratic capitalist economies from the post-World War II Keynesian model (Streeck 2011). It was not by happenstance that ‘the end of the Cold War pronounced the free market victorious and neo-liberalism the best growth policy for countries’ (Sassen 2011), rendering the financial markets free from territorial constraints. Nor was it surprising that the most famous utterance of the time was Margaret Thatcher’s ‘there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families’.3 The disintegration of the concept of society, perhaps more than anything else, connected the fate of authoritarian and democratic neoliberal regimes. As both types of regime aimed at breaking social solidarities, or preventing them from forming, they furnished a parallel will to rise against them, a will that crosscut most, if not all, social divisions (Rose 1996; Brown 2011). In the wake of the global financial crisis, then, the availability of networked communication technologies (Dean 2011) has been turned around as a means of undermining individualization. These technologies thus allowed individuals to transcend their solitary existence as they gathered in a new physical public space (Aslam 2012; Castells 2012). Furthermore, social media technologies formed the grounds for collective action, not only within bounded polities, but 26 Contested citizenship of the Arab Spring also across them. In other words, they created a new opportunity for individuals to speak again in the first person plural, and to replace the neoliberal ‘I-self ’ with a new political subjectivity. Resistance In recent decades, citizenship has grown into an extensive field of study. If at first most writing followed the path of T. H. Marshall’s now classic concern with the evolution of individual rights – whilst expanding our understanding of the legal, institutional, and social meanings of this evolution, and of the ‘civilized existence’ of the working class – contemporary scholarship has extended into new terrains. Mainly, citizenship studies has become a critical prism, rendering our ways of seeing social struggles subtler and richer. Consequently, the less we focus on the citizen as a rights-bearing member of society, the more we are able to see the person behind the citizen as a claim-making agent. Similarly, the more we turn our attention away from the ‘doer’ – the active agent – to the ‘deed’ of claim-making, the more we are capable of capturing the enactment of citizenship rather than the condition of being a citizen (Isin 2008). Within this shift, I ask us to revisit our conception of citizenship between designating membership status in a society of rights-bearing individuals and necessitating political subjectivity. Our understanding of citizenship oscillates between seeing the political subject as a passive bearer of rights and as an active political agent in a given social order. According to western classical thought, in the Greek polis the pendulum tilted, at least in the so-called classical age, towards action. Thus, for instance, in Aristotle’s view, the human was ‘a creature formed by nature to live a political life’ (Pocock 1998: 35). Political life was to be materialized in the public sphere, where laws were written and lived by. Being a Roman citizen was about ‘the possession of things and the practice of jurisprudence’ (Pocock 1998: 36). Citizenship implied the freedom to act by law and to seek the law’s protection. In modernizing Europe, the conception of citizenship became entangled with the rise of capitalism and nation-states. It designated the citizen at once as a bearer of rights – primarily protecting the right of the male citizen to his private property – and committed to the good of the nation, chiefly as a soldier. As the idea of citizenship outgrew the walls of the medieval city, so did the territorial boundaries of the nation-state become its terrain (Weber 1998), and so did politics come to be identified with society (Rose 1996: 333). For Marshall (1998), this view of the nation-state as a homogeneous, totalizing space was crucial to rendering the evolution of citizenship a way of granting the working class access to ‘civilized existence’ (Benhabib 2004: 172). With the suffragists’ struggle and the extension of rights to women, the contours of citizenship were redrawn once again, overlapping the boundaries of the nation-state’s territory. In the 1960s and 1970s, this single space was seen as fragmented and hierarchical rather than homogeneous and levelled. The rise of NSMs in relation to the rapid advancement of the welfare state in Europe and the US marked the first crisis of post-World War II democratic capitalism (Streeck 2011: 10). This also posed the first of many subsequent challenges to the conception of citizenship in the west. More particularly, in the eyes of its contemporaries, the uprisings of 1968 was seen as ‘a pivotal moment’ establishing that ‘the state is primarily an agent of repression rather than liberation’ and that ‘class is only one of many axes around which people mobilize’ (Purcell 2013). Ideologically, the NSMs struggled to materialize the principles of universality and egalitarianism on which the ideals of modern citizenship were premised (Pfister 2012: 244). Two strands were identified with the NSMs – that is, beyond the working classes, who in retrospect, ‘made the 20th century their own’ (Therborn 2012). One strand was the unaffiliated (Rose 1996: 440), mainly non-whites and women. Left behind by the workingclass movement and now hoping to move to the centre, they were fighting for basic citizenship rights. The other strand was led by middle-class ideologues and activists who challenged 27 Gal Levy the destructive physical aspects of progress (Brand 2012: 283). The ideologies of the NSMs, chief among them environmentalism and disarmament, transcended national boundaries. Their organizations and patterns of popular mobilization remained bounded by the territory of their respective nation-states. Nonetheless, NSMs uniquely tied together questions regarding the unequal distribution of goods and risks within societies, with demands for recognition, which gave rise to a new politics of identity. The NSMs and the rising politics of identity were both predicated on the fundamental ideas of citizenship (Kymlicka and Norman 1994), and eventually substantiated the idea that in democratic capitalism, economic progress is a citizenship right in itself. This ‘translated into political expectations, which governments felt constrained to honour but were less and less able to, as growth began to slow’ (Streeck 2011: 10; also, Harvey 2007). Subsequently, democratic capitalism shifted into a new phase, whereby full employment was no longer a condition for political legitimacy and ‘the struggle between market and social distribution moved from the labour market to the political arena’ (Streeck 2011: 14). Electoral pressure thus replaced tradeunion demands, and as governments were adhering to the new doctrine of ‘the rule of the free market’, a new space was opened – civil society. Certainly not a new concept, civil society designates different things for different people. It includes Non-Governmental Organizations comprising the fast-growing aid-oriented ‘Third Sector’, caring for society where the state is rolling back, but also politicized, human-rights oriented NGOs that sought to challenge the neoconservative politics of the rising neoliberal state. Thus, whereas the former organizations contributed to the depoliticization of social citizenship, the latter were working against the neoliberal state’s inclination to curtail any attempt to politicize social issues by rendering them too specific or too particular rather than symptomatic or universal (Dean 2009: 15; Cherniavsky 2009: 15). Yet, as Dean (2009: 16) convincingly demonstrates for the US, civil society became a refuge for the ‘left’, that was in fact accepting the triumph of capitalism, and hence contributing to the depoliticizing of the social effects of the reign of the free market. So while the ‘right’ politicized almost every aspect of life – from school curricula to climate science, from stem cell research to the family, civil society was constantly deprived of its political edge. As society itself was fragmenting into lifestyle communities and spaces of control (Rose 1996), ‘being political’, at least for the ‘left’, became satisfied by a relatively modest aspiration. Civil society, argued Michael Walzer in The Civil Society Argument (1998: 306), ‘is sufficiently democratic when in some, at least, of its parts we are able to recognize ourselves as authoritative and responsible participants’. Against this, the call to ‘radicalizing the site of democracy required a rethinking of the place of citizenship within politics’ (Rasmussen and Brown 2003). Whether or not we accept Dean’s assertion that depoliticization was mainly a problem for the left not the right, repoliticizing social relations became pertinent. This required understanding citizenship as an activity rather than identity, or, to reiterate Isin and Nielsen (2008), shifting our perspective from the doer to the deed. But it also entailed that the ‘location of struggle […] is at the site of subject formation, in the way citizens understand their relationship to the political world and themselves’ (Rasmussen and Brown 2003). In this context, depoliticization is indeed a misleading term, because it succumbs to the idea that citizenship is fixed and agreed upon, and that citizenship acts are restricted to the formal institutions of democracy (Tully 1999). However, even if, the left seems to have forsaken the political game, or to cite Dean (2009:18) again, when it is ‘in a position of true victory’, when ‘our enemy speaks our language’, the game is not over and done with. Beyond the seeming cosiness of the middle class, there are those who incessantly push the boundaries of citizenship to fit them to their own size. ‘Becoming political’, writes Isin (2002: 275) in the concluding chapter of his genealogical investigations of citizenship, ‘is that moment when the naturalness of the dominant virtues is called 28 Contested citizenship of the Arab Spring into question and their arbitrariness revealed.’ In the 1990s, the making of the neoliberal state was no longer an exclusive project of the conservative right. A new Third Way politics was seeking a middle ground between right and left, and between capital and labour, mobilizing the corporate business sector by supporting their ‘downsizing’ strategies, which resulted in increasing levels of unemployment among native citizens. The state, now led by ‘transformed leftists’, was enacting anti-immigrant policies, accusing immigrants of ‘taking the jobs’ from the unemployed, while concomitantly increasing its pressure on the latter by cutting welfare allocations and rendering the state (super)punitive for the poor (Rose 2000; cf. Zinn 2003: 643; Wacquant 2012: 75–76). In Israel too, in the early 2000s, the middle class was reassured that what it was experiencing was the trickling down of economic growth. In fact, as Israel was entangled again in a bloody conflict with the Palestinians, the middle class had not only turned away from its support of the ‘peace process’; it willingly devoted itself to the thorough marketization of the economy (Shalev and Levy 2005; Ram 2008). In 2003, an anticlerical campaign led by the neoconservative Shinui Party led to the staggering achievement of fifteen parliamentary seats, gained with the support of the middle-class vote. However, long before the Tents Protest, the rolling back of the state was already felt at the margins of society. People in peripheral working-class towns were losing jobs and income-support benefits; workers in public services were facing downsizing as a result of privatization; and the Organisation for the Disabled was protesting against the cuts in disability benefits. A symbolic figure of this struggle was Vicki Knafo, a single mother of three, who marched from her southern home town to Jerusalem, where she set up a tent in front of the Ministry of the Treasury. Israel Twitto, a social activist, took his three teenage daughters from the deserted bus which they had made their home and set up an encampment in Tel Aviv’s most exclusive shopping area, ironically named the State Circus (Kikar Ha-Medina), renaming it the Bread Circus (Kikar Ha-Lekhem4; Sarig 2003). This was the outcry of what is known as ‘the Second Israel’, the Jewish (Mizrahi) working class that found itself left behind when the state stampeded to embrace the global markets. Twitto was optimistic about the strength of this protest: ‘Quiet Revolution’ I call it, like Gandhi, […]. Slowly we shall wake Israeli society up. It’s not easy to get people out into the streets, especially people who are ashamed of their situation. But this revolution will succeed, because the government […] does not give the citizens a chance to survive. On the contrary, it only creates more difficulties. And the more public awareness and sympathy [the protest] receives […] the faster it will happen. (Sarig: 2003) This political moment remained restricted, however, in two ways: first, by being confined to the Jewish society, as class-based conflicts usually do not transcend the ethno-national divide; and secondly, by not drawing the support of the middle class, which ignored the inclusive message that came out of the camps: ‘We are not homeless: we are fighting for the character of Israeli society.’ If citizenship is ‘the point of view of those who dominate the city’ (Isin 2002: 275), the Bread Circus Protest failed to penetrate its unity. Almost a decade later, much of the middle class came to realize that a class war was being waged and that the war cut through its ranks. Thus, in the Tents Protest, the middle class called upon all Israelis, Jews and Arabs, poor and well off, to join their struggle against the infringing of their social-citizenship rights. Rights The Tents Protest is not necessarily emblematic of the social protest everywhere. Still, the effects of this sweeping wave of anti-neoliberal protest, before, during, and after the general elections 29 Gal Levy (January 2013), permit a preliminary attempt at generalization based on this case. Particularly, in Israel, as in other capitalist democracies, subsequent elections left the neoliberal ideologues in power. To put it differently, not only did the ‘old regime’ remain intact in most places, but no serious opposition party emerged. Nonetheless, one could hardly dispute the newness of these times, as we are witnessing the rise of new conflicts, or better, old conflicts in new guises, and seeing the fundamental questions that pertain to the rise of modern democracy being re-posed. Namely, we envisage the articulation of a new public debate – also, thanks to recent technological innovations, in a new virtual public space – about questions of representation, privileges, and rights in a manner unknown in recent decades (see also Gitlin 2013: 11). In the second half of the twentieth century we saw the rise of a politics of rights – encompassing struggles for recognition by the margins and by the unaffiliated (again, mainly women and people of colour), the quest to undo the wrongs of modernization (mainly disarmament and ecological movements), and to expand civil society as an alternative political arena, mainly for the middle class. In these times we have also seen the class struggle being depoliticized, and more significantly, the rise of a ‘new right’ that marginalized leftist politics (Dean 2009). Yet, in parallel, the struggle for citizenship has grown in both importance and scope. Evolving from a right-bearing member in a territorially bounded society into a claimant of rights beyond frontiers, the citizen became the focal point of the social order as well as of social analysis (Kymlicka and Norman 1994; Isin 2012). Does the social protest mark a new course of action for citizens and non-citizens seeking to change the balance of power between them and the state? Let me answer this by looking at the social protest as an event (Isin 2012), or a game-like activity (Arendt 1961) where citizens (and non-citizens) become engaged in free activities as ‘struggles of and for more democratic forms and practices of participation in the games in which we are governed’ (Tully 1999: 180). It is now clear that since the 1970s, we have been increasingly governed by a single game – where ‘we’ includes capitalistic democracies and almost any contemporary state – namely, the neoliberal game. This form of governance or governmentality is characterized by a transformation which is both economic and political, and, accordingly, ‘the market is the organizing and regulative principle of the state and society’ (Brown 2003). Under this regime, state legitimacy is based on the health of the economy, for which the state (interestingly, not the market, as the 2008 meltdown proved) is responsible, even at the cost of the health of its individual citizens. This new structure of legitimacy – grounded in a neoliberal ideology that ‘normatively constructs and interpellates individuals as entrepreneurial actors in every sphere of life’ (Brown 2003) – shifts the social order away from a conception of citizenship as binding the bourgeoisie to the disciplinary forms and practices of the modern nation-state and to the notion of civic participation (Cherniavsky 2009). To a degree, and not in full accord with the ‘depoliticization’ argument, the neoliberal governmentality does not negate the idea of citizenship. Rather, it construes a specific kind of citizen, configured exhaustively as homo oeconomicus whose activism is manifested in being a rational consumer of politics. This does more than delineating the ‘model neo-liberal citizen [as] one who strategizes for her/himself among various social, political and economic options, [and] not one who strives with others to alter or organize these options’ (Brown 2003); it also demarcates a clear distinction between the responsible moral citizen, who adheres to this logic, and those who lack that moral responsibility. This new governmentality yields a sterilized ‘body politic’ (Brown 2003), rendering the ideal citizen, in Isin’s (2009) terms, ‘active’ (namely playing within the rules) rather than ‘activist’ (i.e. challenging them). Being political, then, is about making (a calculated) choice, without asking what we are choosing or what we are choosing from. Here neoliberalism dissociates the 30 Contested citizenship of the Arab Spring bourgeoisie from the disciplinary forms and practices of the nation-state. If in the post-1945 era the aim of public policy was to solidify the bond between the state and the bourgeoisie (and the mobilized working class) by offering state-based solutions to societal demands, since the 1970s, the state gave way to the market in addressing social needs. Increasingly, the state retreated from the notion of social citizenship, and citizens were asked to entrust their fate to market-based, mostly for-profit organizations offering supposedly non-political solutions to allegedly nonpolitical problems. Against this backdrop, for citizens to opt out of politics was not a matter of indifference or apathy. Rather, the terms of being political were changing.5 For the conservative right of the 1980s, the assertion that ‘there [was] no such thing as society’ implied that individuals were required to manage themselves and that collective action was now a thing of the past. This became evident in the breaking up of trade unions, as well as in the decline in partisan membership across the political spectrum and in all capitalist democracies. In the 1990s, Third Way solutions were designed to rectify the declining popular support in the left (Rose 2000). In its new politics – where ‘Citizenship becomes conditional on conduct’ (Rose 2000: 1407; see also Wacquant 2012) – the Third Way did not mark a critical break with neo-right politics, other than perhaps in bringing the community to the forefront of politics, and giving ‘civility a definite shape, that of a civil religion’ (Rose 2000: 1409). In this sense, Third Way communitarianism on the left, just like individualism on the right, marked the limits of the political, and hence of citizenship activism. Whether the rational consuming-minded citizen for the right, or the ethical self-managed working citizen for the left, the subject of government was almost one and the same. Either on the right or on the left, the (neo-)self became embedded in the prevailing logic of the market. Manifestly, the market was the determinant boundary of the political, rendering the ‘rights discourse’ its organizing principle. ‘There are no natural rights’, writes philosopher Raymond Geuss (2001: 146), and yet, ‘we can expect with reasonable confidence that rights discourse will continue to flourish’ (ibid., 150). One reason for this is that ‘an economically advanced society will be understandably obsessed with efficiency, predictability, and security, especially in assigning powers and responsibilities for the control of economic assets’. The second is that ‘a doctrine of “individual human rights” is connected in a plausible way with deep human needs and powerful human motives’ (ibid., 151). It gives one ‘control over objects of immediate use’ by determining a relation of possession. But ‘if I insist on seeing the social world as a collection of rights, perhaps it will be true that what I take to be “my rights” will be respected’ (ibid., 151–2). That is to say, the rights discourse persists not because of its intrinsic value to sustaining individual freedoms, as its capacity in this respect is limited.6 It endures because it helps in maintaining a seemingly orderly society, and more pertinently, a liberal one (ibid., 154). In neoliberal times, ‘everyone’, citizens and non-citizens alike, has become a ‘consumer’ of human rights, subjugated by a ‘human rights’ discourse. This of course is not to suggest that everybody enjoys equality. Rather, if, being a claimant of rights underlies all struggles for citizenship, as Isin (2002) aptly demonstrates, in the post-1945 era we witness the rapid extension of this struggle from within the citizenry to groups lying outside the scope of legal citizenship (e.g. McNevin 2011). Non-citizens in particular have proved the vitality of citizenship as they looked to stretch ‘beyond the habitual’ (White 2008), thus changing the meaning of being a citizen and of citizenship acts (Isin 2012). Also, the rise of the alter-globalization movement, as well as of global migratory movements, reduced the importance of territoriality in determining ‘the right to have (or claim) rights’ (e.g. Benhabib 2004: 65), and still without rendering the state redundant. Thus, the scope of the struggle over citizenship has moved to another terrain, transcending territorial boundaries, but still grounded in local contexts. The social protest, I propose in conclusion, embodied this change. 31 Gal Levy A retrospective look at the Tents Protest in Israel from the perspective of the 2013 general elections reveals some of the unique features of this event. Events, writes Isin (2012: 131), ‘are actions that become recognizable (visible, articulable) only when the site, scale and duration of these actions produce a rupture in the given order’ (my italics). Seen from this prism, calling the Tents Protest an event requires further justification; the following attempt to do so also sheds new light on the conception of citizenship in the wake of the social protest. Site Interestingly, in Israel and elsewhere, the social protest was not simply taking place in specific spaces or places. The movement, and each event, became known separately by the space in which they took place. Tahrir Square thus became synonymous with the anti-dictatorial uprising in Egypt, and the 15M was identified with Spain’s Puerta del Sol, as was the Tents Protest with Tel Aviv’s Rothschild Boulevard, from where it spread throughout the country; and of course, the Occupy Movement was all about the space it occupied. The act of reclaiming the public space was not merely a habitual act of demonstration, as it has been previously, in numerous marches or rallies. Rather, the protesters were demonstrating the will of citizens, or perhaps their duty, to reclaim their ‘right to the city’ (Harvey 2012; Purcell 2013). It was, moreover, a statement on how the separation of the public from the private, through processes of privatization, was stripping individuals of their powers, rendering them politically alienated. Thus, as they imbued these occupied spaces with new meanings, turning the cityscape, to use Henry Lefebvre terminology, into an ‘urban society […] characterized by active citizens who commit to managing themselves and their space autonomously’ (Purcell 2013), the citizens turned places into sites. They have instilled in them ‘the strategic value for the struggle for rights that is the basis of enacting citizenship’ (Isin 2012: 133). Eventually, the site of struggle in Tel Aviv – the boulevard – was evacuated and renovated so that it would be unfit for a similar encampment in the future. Over two years later, a small encampment across from the train station, populated by truly homeless individuals and families remains as a reminder of the site there once was. As is attested by its being overlooked by passers-by, the media and politicians, it is doubtful whether this new location could be called a site in Isin’s sense. Scale In Israel, the protest’s slogan read: ‘the people demand social justice’, prompting questions regarding the ambiguity of the term ‘people’, given Israeli society’s ethnicized character (e.g. Monterescu and Shaindlinger 2013). Thus, the protest has temporarily left aside typical categories and scales – such as ethno-nationalities, ethnicities, or religions – and introduced instead ‘the people’ as a seemingly all-encompassing homogeneous and consensual collectivity. This new scale indicated or suggested the coalescence of a new constituency, a public, which welds together the various parts of society (Hickel 2012; Calhoun 2013). The overarching support for the protest was indeed a manifestation of a new scale, revealed also in the array of speakers from across the social spectrum. This spirit nonetheless dissipated as the 2013 general election campaign accelerated, foregrounding an empty discourse of ‘new politics’ and a call to bring the middle class back to the centre of public attention. Eventually, while the elections failed to undo the old divisions, it generated a political awareness amongst citizens that proved the scale of the social protest, its reach and scope (Isin 2012: 134), attesting to the uniqueness of its effects and to its becoming an event. 32 Contested citizenship of the Arab Spring Duration If we accept that the actual time an event takes up does not account for the length of an act (Isin 2012: 134), then it makes sense to claim that the social protest in Israel lasted longer than the ten weeks of the actual occupation of the public space. Indeed, the duration of this act, which makes this event into an act of citizenship, is manifested in the new political jargon and awareness that became prevalent during the election campaign and, perhaps more importantly, still lingers in the post-election public discourse. Thus, beyond what is normally counted as extra-parliamentary activism, the social media have become a vociferous platform where representatives’ actions and speeches are being evaluated and judged against that which is constantly reconceptualized as the social protest’s values or goals. In this respect, the protest has not yet lost ‘its performative force through which subjects become political’ (Isin 2012: 134). We can now wonder whether the social protest was, or is, an act of citizenship, and hence, an enactment of a new political subjectivity (Isin 2012: cf. Ch. 4). To put it differently, if the neoliberal constitution of the self has reached a hegemonic status, rendering invisible the actual construction of the neoliberal citizen, it is timely to ask whether, and in what way, does citizenship after the social protest constitute a shift in what it means to be political. If in the post-1945 period of decolonization and the growth of the welfare state, to be political had been about incorporating the conception of rights into the institution of citizenship, what does it mean to be a citizen when the rights discourse has already been naturalized in our political language, whether we approve of it or not (Geuss 2001: 154), and whether its spokespersons are from the right or from the left (Dean 2009: 18)? I end with one of many examples that became ubiquitous in the post-protest era. The new Israeli government (formed 18 March 2013) is headed by the veteran Likud party and its main ally Yesh Atid (literally, ‘there is a future’), a new centre-right party that came second, brought forth by the call for a change that came out of the protest.7 Its leader – an inexperienced politician, a former publicist and TV presenter – presents himself as the ultimate spokesperson of an all-Israeli middle class, fighting to eradicate the protectionism of the Ultra-Orthodox minority, which is presumably undermining the financial solidity of the middle class. Appointed Minister of the Treasury, he was assigned the task of presenting the government with a new budget, which had been the main pretext for calling early elections. Less than a fortnight after his appointment, the new minister was about to face his opponents. Three activists went to scout out the minister’s street in preparation for the first Saturday night demonstration against the proposed budget cuts. Approaching his villa, in an affluent Tel Aviv neighbourhood, they were stopped by a security guard. They asked politely whether this was the minister’s residence, but the guard refused to answer. In return he asked who they were, and they simply answered: ‘We want to organize a demonstration.’ ‘But who are you?’, he insisted, and they responded casually: ‘We are … democracy. Democracy …’.8 This short and simple statement, I propose, encapsulates the change in the political subjectivity in the post-2011 era. One activist group that takes part in organizing the weekly demonstrations against the budget is wittily named ‘the Not-Nice People’, referencing PM Golda Meir’s utterance ‘They’re not nice’ at the Israeli Black Panthers, who in the early 1970s demonstrated against the continuous deprivation and state of poverty of Jews from Islamic and Middle Eastern origin (Mizrahim). In the Israeli discourse however, it is not they but the Ashkenazi (Jews of European descent) middle class – the Minister of the Treasury’s electorate – who are recognized as democratic. Hence, as these three proclaimed Mizrahi activists were heading towards the villa in the name of democracy, they personified the post-2011 ‘new politics’, but in a rather opposite way to that offered by the villa’s proprietor and his triumphant middle-class party. Whereas 33 Gal Levy for the latter, ‘new politics’ remains an empty slogan, masking its neoconservative agenda with a political list of non-professional politicians. For this grassroots activist group – like groups of its ilk – ‘new politics’ is about shattering the building blocks of the old order, where the unaffiliated were considered undemocratic and as being unable to represent themselves. Unlike the NSMs, these new activist groups do not run big organizations or offer extensive ideologies, although their ideas are far from superficial and at times they mobilize masses to rally their causes. Such groups also challenge and re-extend ‘the boundary drawn around the use of “democracy” in the eighteenth century […] to refer to any activity in which people assemble and negotiate the way and by whom power is exercised over them, on the ground that these too are games of “governance” (in the non-restrictive sense)’ (Tully 1999: 178). The ‘Not-Nice’ group also echoes Chantal Mouffe’s notion of ‘agonistic pluralism’. It rejects the coherence of a social movement by suggesting the element of struggle among different particularist groups, thus using rather than ignoring the tension between the principles of universalism and particularity. For ‘agonistic pluralism’, Mouffe writes (2000: 103), ‘the prime task of democratic politics is not to eliminate passions from the sphere of the public, in order to render a rational consensus possible, but to mobilize those passions towards democratic designs’. This calls for a new relation between ideas and political organization. One activist expressed his dilemma in a Facebook post titled ‘A Homeless Idea – I have no Community’.9 ‘The reception of the idea of democracy in the ‘Not-Nice’ organization’, he explains, ‘is different (and naturally more difficult) than in an organization that makes democracy its direct demand.’ Having lost faith in civil society or in big social movements, he seeks a place where ‘an idea can be matched to a community’, thus not becoming ‘home-less’, and hence unidentified and misinterpreted. To be part of ‘a struggle community’, he claims, would be to subscribe to one ideational demand – ‘democracy or revolt’. This activist, a lawyer by profession, is active in legal battles as well as on the streets, and he is not unfamiliar with the principles of democratic deliberation. Yet, by not seeking a rational consensus, he defies the current state of affairs as a charade, offering instead to establish democracy by forming small, face-to-face, leaderless struggle communities that transcend superficial social divisions. The alternative to this action, he states clearly, is revolt. Finally, while we are still living the legacy of the paradigmatic epistemological frameworks of the NSMs, civil society, and radical democracy, all of which were shaping the rights discourse and rendering citizenship paramount in setting the terms of the relationship between subjects and the state, and between citizens themselves – a new epistemology is making its way up. The post-2011 social protest vocabulary has not relinquished the discourse of rights, and yet the new sites of struggle, its new scale, and its endurance beyond the protest itself, may all suggest that this is an event, an enactment of citizenship (Isin 2012: 131). If Mark Purcell (2013) is correct in suggesting that the neoliberal state shares a specific form of oligarchy with both the welfare state and state socialism, rendering each primarily concerned with only a part of the citizenry, the various protesters too share a common answer. Their answer is derived from the long-fought struggle over citizenship, but it is all the more sharply aimed at rejecting the neoliberal subjectivity, which relieves the state of its responsibility to care for all citizens (and non-citizens). The voice that thus surfaces from the protest, in the social media, in the streets, and in the parliaments, is not seeking more rights, but simply to ‘be the public’ (Calhoun 2013). This voice undermines the main thrust of neoliberalism, which attempts to create rights-bearing selves. Instead, it offers to redraw the boundary around democracy so that the struggle over citizenship in the years to come can create new forms of political activism. 34 Contested citizenship of the Arab Spring Notes 1 A speech at the World Social Forum, Porto Alegre, Brazil, on 27th January, 2003. Available online at www.sustecweb.co.uk/past/sustec11-4/following_speech_by_arundhati_ro.htm (accessed 30 May 2013). 2 For their manifesto, see www.democraciarealya.es/manifiesto-comun/manifesto-english/ (accessed 10 December 2013). 3 Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, talking to Women’s Own magazine, October 31 1987. Available online at http://briandeer.com/social/thatcher-society.htm (accessed 13 September 2013). 4 In Hebrew, Bread Circus is a pun, simultaneously meaning a ‘loaf of bread’ and a public place of assembly (landmark, plaza, roundabout) named Bread’. 5 It is beyond our scope here, but still noteworthy for the sake of avoiding nostalgia. The welfare state, too, bears its own responsibility for rendering the citizens politically apathetic and idle. See e.g. Cherniavsky 2009, Purcell 2013. 6 Particularly after the social protest it has been shown that governments have become even harsher on political activists, monitoring their activities on social media and forcefully repressing almost every protest. 7 Yesh Atid won 19 of the 120 Knesset seats, making it the second-largest party in the 19th Knesset, and hence pivotal in the ruling coalition, against most if not all expectations. 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Ethnocracy: land and identity politics in Israel/Palestine, University of Pennsylvania Press: Philadelphia, PA. Young, I. M. 2003. ‘Activist challenges to deliberative democracy’. In J. Fishkin and P. Laslett (eds.), Debating deliberative democracy, Blackwell Publishing: Malden, MA, 102–20. Zinn, H. 2003. A people’s history of the United States 1492–present, Perennial Classics: New York. 37 2 Genealogies of autonomous mobility Martina Martignoni and Dimitris Papadopoulos Approaching mobility from an autonomous point of view requires shifting our perspective from the order of instituted control to the primacy of migrants’ movements, that is to read the formation of sovereignty through mobility, rather than the other way round. An autonomous perspective on mobility attempts to see migration not simply as a response to political and economic pressures but as a constituent force in the making of polity and social life (Karakayali and Tsianos, 2005; Mezzadra, 2006, 2010; Papadopoulos et al. 2008; Papadopoulos and Tsianos, 2013; Rodriguez, 1996). Yann Moulier Boutang has offered an impressive account of this movement historically (Moulier Boutang, 1998). The autonomy of migration approach foregrounds that migration is not primarily a movement that is defined and acts by making claims to instituted power. It rather means that migrant mobility itself becomes a political movement and a social movement that subsequently forces constituted power to reorganize itself. The autonomy of migration thesis highlights the social and subjective aspects of mobility before control. It rejects understanding migration as a mere response to social malaise (e.g. Jessop and Sum, 2006). Instead migration is autonomous, meaning that it has the capacity to develop its own logics, its own motivation, and its own trajectories that control comes later to respond to (Transit Migration Forschungsgruppe, 2006). This does not of course mean that mobility operates independently of control. Very often it is subjected to it and succumbs to violent state or private interventions that attempt to tame it; probably the politics of detention and deportation is the best example of such violence that shows how migrant mobility can be halted and brutally controlled (Schuster, 2003; Tyler, 2010). In this sense, the autonomy of migration thesis is about training our senses to see movement before capital – but not independent from it – and mobility before control – but not disconnected from it. One of the most common critiques of the autonomy of migration approach (Düvell, 2006; Sharma, 2008) is that it replaces all these different migrant subjectivities and the diverse concrete spatialities of movements with a big narration of migration. When we talk about autonomous migration we do not intend to subsume all different types, cases, and approaches to migration under one single sociopolitical movement; rather, we attempt to articulate their commonalities, which stem from the struggles for movement that each of the different migrations is involved in. The supposedly abstract and homogenizing category of migration 38 Genealogies of autonomous mobility does not try to unify all the existing multiplicity of movements under one single logic but to signify that all these singularities contribute to an affective and generic gesture of freedom that evades the concrete control of moving people. Mobility in the autonomy of migration approach implies a kind of politics that neither entails uniformity nor abstraction. Rather mobility here refers to a concrete empirical condition: the real struggles, practices, and tactics of migrants that facilitate movement and escape control (Anderson et al. 2009). This approach to migration is an answer to the heterogenizing practices of state regulation of mobility: sovereignty breaks the connectivity between multiple migratory subjects in order to make them visible and render them governable subjects of mobility. This is achieved by operationalizing the category of the citizen and by creating different classes of citizens – in particular through their immigration status (Anderson, 2010). The heterogenizing effects of power should not be confused here with the multiplicity of mobile subjectivities and struggles. Citizenship and borders are the main two (interconnected) tools for governing and controlling the autonomy of migrations and at the same time they are continuously challenged and reshaped by people on the move. These two tools, far from being used to affirm a sharp inside/ outside distinction – in terms of presence in a country, or access to citizenship and rights – are instead used in order to divide, differentiate, and, ultimately, control mobility (De Genova, 2002). The inception of differentiated ways to access a country and the invention of different categories of citizens are therefore processes that strengthen and simultaneously erode the institution of citizenship itself. If in fact ‘full citizenship’, meaning access to full rights, could be seen as the maximum goal of migrants, the creation of different ‘levels’ of citizenship undermines the meaning of citizenship itself and who is a legitimate citizen. In this sense, autonomy of migration affirms that mobility has the power, because of the movement of people itself, to put in crisis citizenship as one of the main institutions of the nation-state. This does not mean that migration is all about struggles over citizenship, though; rather, struggles over citizenship are the effects of the control of – and at the same time an opportunity for – autonomous mobility. The autonomy of migration approach opens the possibility of looking at migration as a complex movement that entails the creation of new meanings and practices of belongingness, everyday life, and politics as well as of new imaginaries of hope that go beyond the battle over citizenship. Migratory mobility nurtures the possibility of freedom of movement not only as a practice but as an affect: it embodies the hope which gives strength to people to move when they are on the road. Migration in this sense exists as a virtuality that becomes actualized and materialized through the diverse movements of people. These multiple aspects of autonomous mobility are configured and reconfigured differently in each specific historical chronotope. It is therefore impossible to talk about a single genealogy of autonomous mobility. Rather, we encounter various genealogies that sometimes meet and reinforce each other, and sometimes develop in independent ways. What follows describes three different trajectories of autonomous mobility ‘embodied’ in historically determined cases: first, the capacity of migrations to trigger processes of creation of new forms of life; secondly, the power of migrants to challenge and continuously redefine borders and polity; and thirdly, migration as affirmative of autonomous political struggles in labour markets. These three genealogies of autonomous mobility are discussed by using three vignettes that allow us to trace various forms of autonomy inside migration processes: the creation of new forms of life inside migrations is approached through the experiences of radically divergent organizations born in the encounter of the two sides of the Atlantic between the sixteenth and the eighteenth century; the challenge to, and redefinition of, borders is developed through a focus on contemporary migrations, particularly those between Mexico and the US and in Europe; finally, the question 39 Martina Martignoni and Dimitris Papadopoulos of labour is approached by examining forms of exodus from relatively stable systems of labour organization that forced capitalist production to reorganize itself and introduce new patterns of work and production. Vignette 1: Creating new forms of life Autonomy of migration draws attention to the irreducibility of contemporary migratory movements to structural economic or social explanations and suggests that migratory processes often exceed the relation to organized sovereign control by building alternative transnational communities of existence. Autonomous mobility is therefore about investigating contemporary migration as a social movement that interrupts sovereignty as well as as an organizing practice for supporting and facilitating freedom of movement. Here we mean a form of organizing and modes of relationality that are entailed within, but also go beyond, the traditional question of mobilizing migrants against their oppression and for their rights vis-à-vis existing institutions. We rather understand organization as the practice of producing alternative ontologies, that is alternative everyday forms of existence and alternative forms of life (Bishop, 2011; Papadopoulos, 2011, 2012; Papadopoulos and Tsianos, 2013; Winner, 1986). A crucial moment in which the violence of control over mobility was powerfully deployed but at the same time multiply challenged was the transatlantic slave trade. We can find inside the ‘Middle Passage’ and the history of the encounter of people and the exchanges of goods between the two sides of the Atlantic not only a history of slavery, violence, and expropriation, but also one of self-determination, autonomy, and continuous and multi-faced revolt against oppression. Marcus Rediker and Peter Linebaugh (2000) described the ‘many-headed hydra’, a restless composition of the oppressed of the Atlantic, which remained for a long period the most worrying social actor for the ruling classes of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Mulot and Tsianos, 2010). Refusal and revolt against slavery, indentured labour, and the expropriation of the commons created the possibility for the encounter of different mobile people and the creation of autonomous interethnic cultures and mobile multiracial communities. Interestingly, race, nation, religion, and belonging were not an issue for these organizations – and they would not be until the end of the eighteenth century. The very different groups of people composing the ‘rebels of the Atlantic’ first of all invented and adopted a new language for communicating. This language emerged in the everyday life of the ships: slave and trade ships, but also pirate ships. The ship was indeed ‘a meeting place where various traditions were jammed together in a forcing house of internationalism’ (Linebaugh and Rediker, 2000, p. 151). Slavers used to fill their ships with people from different territories of West Africa, which were very rich in linguistic difference, so that communication would be more difficult. But during the long middle passage enslaved people established novel ways of exchange through the creation of new languages, sometimes using previous knowledge based on ‘maritime tongues’ such as English- or Portuguese-based pidgins, created for trade reasons. Pidgin languages developed further on the ships, where the enslaved ‘would call each other shipmate, sibbi (Dutch creole), or malungo (Portuguese in Brazil), all the equivalent of brother and sister, creating new kin to replace what had been destroyed by their abduction and enslavement in Africa’ (Christopher et al. 2007, p. 15). Those new languages, formed amid the violence and terror of the slave ships, would become means of communication in the New World and also in Europe. Present in various communities, pidgin ‘became an instrument, like the drum or the fiddle, of communication among oppressed: scorned and not easily understood by polite society, it nonetheless ran as a strong, resilient, creative, and inspirational current among seaport proletarians almost everywhere’ (Linebaugh and Rediker, 2000, p. 154). Together with 40 Genealogies of autonomous mobility language, a religion of the ‘oppressed of the Atlantic’ arose and migrated on the ships from one side of the ocean to the other. Biblical jubilee, joining religion and political action, is an interesting example of a widespread belief in the Atlantic. Present in the Old Testament, the jubilee is the year that comes around every fifty years when lands should go back to original owners, debts should be cancelled, slaves should be freed, and people should not work. Jubilee was adopted by many radical religious groups in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the Americas and in Europe (Linebaugh, 1990). Like religion and language, new forms of life developed in the encounter of people from Africa, Europe, and the Americas who were subjected to histories of forced plantation work, imprisonment, indentured labour, religious persecution, and dispossession of lands. The organizations they created were much more than a ‘mosaic’ of experiences and cultures. In the same way in which a new language, even if invented out of the mixture of other languages, has its own autonomy and characteristics, these multi-ethnic organizations – such as the maroon societies formed by fugitive slaves in many parts of the New World, from Cuba, Colombia, Venezuela, and Mexico to the Caribbean, from Brazil to Jamaica and the United States – revealed a capacity for the hybridization of differences and the creation of wholly new realities of everyday existence. Enslaved people were almost all brought from Africa, but they belonged to different areas and cultures of that continent and they often mixed with local communities; maroons did not share a common language, common culture, or forms of organization. How did they create ways of common understanding and organizing? While keeping as a starting base their diverse African heritages, they built a new Afro-American culture and form of life. Africa functioned as a common reference for a ‘deep-level organizational principle’, although ‘no maroon social, political, religious, or aesthetic system can be reliably traced to a specific tribal provenience; they reveal rather their syncretistic composition, forged in the early meeting of peoples bearing diverse African, European, and Amerindian cultures in the dynamic setting of the New World’ (Price, 1979, pp. 28–29). Relying on the knowledge of the territory gained during their enslavement and also playing on the unstable political situations that characterized the Americas of the eighteenth and the beginning of nineteenth centuries, slaves were able in some cases to escape and create autonomous ways of living (Nelson, 2008). Maroon communities represented one radical form among the many different expressions of resistance employed by forced migrants and enslaved people. A multiracial composition was also animating revolts and insurrections, mutinies, and anti-impressment mobs in many parts of the Americas: Barbados 1649, Virginia 1676, New York 1741 are just some of these moments (Linebaugh and Rediker, 2000). Autonomous communities also arose inside the cities, like the Seneca Village in New York between 1825 and 1857, a strong autonomous black community where slave fugitives could find protection and alternative political movements were emerging (Alexander, 2008). All these autonomous mobilizations and cultures symbolically culminate in the St. Domingue slaves’ revolution of 1791 (James, 1980) that established the first black republic in history. In all these instances, autonomy is not only a form of reaction to imposed oppression and control but primarily an act of creation of new forms of life. Vignette 2: Redrawing borders and the contours of citizenship Many authors – using different concepts and images (e.g. borderland, diaspora, double space, in-between, double consciousness) – have highlighted how migrations create transnational networks and subjectivities which do not ‘adhere’ to one single identity defined through citizenship but inhabit complex and fractured social spaces and, indeed, borderlands (Anzaldùa, 1987; Appadurai, 1996; Bhabha, 1994; Clifford, 1994; Gilroy, 1993). Although struggling for 41 Martina Martignoni and Dimitris Papadopoulos obtaining formal rights, migrants are rarely concerned with citizenship per se in their country of residence (Mezzadra, 2006, pp. 62–3). In this sense the concepts of ‘assimilation’ and ‘integration’ are no longer sustainable and from the autonomy of migration point of view neither possible nor desirable either (Wimmer and Glick-Schiller, 2002). The concept of integration in particular – based on a naturalization of borders – implies the existence of a coherent ‘subject of reception’, a homogenous and close-knit social group that should receive and welcome ‘the other’ and potentially integrate ‘otherness’. Citizenship and borders, instead, far from being ‘natural’, are two interconnected concepts and tools constituting variable techniques of containment and management of mobile populations that contribute not only to determining their civic status but also their place in the global labour market and their exploitability (Anderson, 2007a, 2007b). It is therefore necessary to abandon any idea of borders and citizenship as fixed and immovable entities that are strictly and simply related to a sovereign territory (Rigo, 2006). The example of the European system of control of the Schengen area is paradigmatic of how borders ‘develop into areas where sovereignty is shared among different actors and is sometimes delegated to private agents’. Borders perform ‘diverse functions according to the side from which they are crossed’ (Rigo, 2006, pp. 98–9). The southern borders of the European Union and USA especially have to be thought of first of all as crossed borders, a relation between the autonomous mobility of people and a varied form of private and state control. Since without the crossing there is no border – ‘[i]t’s just an imaginary line, a river or it’s just a wall…’ (Biemann, 2002, p. 32) – the very nature of borders is defined by the crossing of mobile people who continuously pass through them and reshape their order. At the same time this relation between crossing people – harragas1 – and borders, is performative of the subjectivities on both sides of the border. The border between Mexico and the USA, for example, creates and, simultaneously, is inhabited and constantly modified by a myriad of different hybrid subjectivities (Anzaldùa, 1987; García Canclini, 1995) which often contribute to the multiplication of the material and symbolic nature of borders – involving not only national belonging but also regional, religious and gender identities, etc. (Vila, 2000, 2005). Borders are by definition porous and are permanently responsive to the migrations of people (Papadopoulos et al. 2008, p. 162 ff.). In fact, one can say that borders are shaped by responding to the autonomous movements of people and then reorder and reshape themselves as migratory flows vary in intensity and routes change in geographical location or mode of transport. Borders therefore have to be thought of as flexible tools because they change, ‘making a world rather than dividing an already-made world’ (Mezzadra and Neilson, 2012, p. 59) and also because they move with people. In this sense borders are not only lines of separation between states or geographical and political areas but also lines of differentiation that proliferate inside these same areas (Mezzadra and Neilson, 2013). They create systems of differential membership, that is different grades of irregularity and citizenship (Nyers, 2010a). It is through these differentiations of citizenship that the autonomy of mobility is channelled and the resulting legal categories produce exploitable subjects in labour markets. However, the introduction of different categories of citizens (and non-citizens) deeply undermines the system of citizenship itself that is ultimately founded on the dichotomy inside/outside – a dichotomy that cannot stand up to reality, as the autonomous movements of people put citizenship continuously under pressure to reorder itself (Nyers, 2010b). Indeed, while we need to be aware of the intrinsic exclusionary function of citizenship (Papadopoulos and Tsianos, 2013), we also have to look at how the system of citizenship is practically contested and rendered incoherent by the very presence of illegalized migrants inside the territory of Europe and the USA. Not only do migrants often contest directly the intolerable regime in which they are forced to live but their mere everyday presence in a country challenges 42