Citizenship studies

When a group of undocumented migrants blocked a road in San Bernardino, California, in the
summer of 2011, it was at first sight one out of many events organized by the protest movement
of undocumented youth. While they marched down the road and started their action of civil
disobedience, they were chanting “education not deportation” and wore academic caps and tshirts
with the campaign slogan “The DREAM is coming” as a reference to higher education
and the federal DREAM Act . On the one hand, they were thus continuing the activism of the
undocumented youth movement, which became nationally known because of its struggle for the
rights of students without legal status in the US since its inception in the early 2000s (cf. Nicholls
2013; Corrunker 2012; Anguiano 2011; Unzueta/Seif 2014; Seif 2014; Costanza-Chock 2014;
Eisema/Fiorito/Montero-Sieburth 2014; Negron-Gonzales 2014, 2015). On the other hand, this
direct action was symbolic of a shift in the movement that heavily impacted the political practice
of groups, coalitions and alliances of undocumented youth in California over the last years.

Current critical theorizations within citizenship studies on the condition of migrants and refugees celebrate the nomadic dimension of the contemporary migrant/refugee figure and assign her the potential to disrupt hegemonic practices of capital and state-centric citizenship. However, such enthusiastic accounts need to exercise a sense of caution in conceptualizing the fragile and unstable condition of the migrant, and need to distinguish between various experiences of mobility, hybridity, and citizenship. Such a differentiation between these different lived experiences of citizenship echoes Aihwa Ong's critique of the ‘unified moralism attached to subaltern subjects [that] now also clings to diasporan ones, who are invariably assumed to be members of oppressed classes and therefore constitutionally opposed to capitalism and state power’. My analysis points to how class, race and language structure various experiences of mobility and citizenship and make tenuous easy celebrations of postcolonial hybridity within critical re-configurations of citizenship. I argue that practices of postcolonial mobility in the Franco-Maghrebian context have produced differentiated and unequal hybridities, and, consequently, asymmetrical experiences of citizenship. By distinguishing between various practices of mobility and hybridity, I indicate that postcolonial hybridity can also be employed to re-constitute the rigid boundaries of nation and citizenship.

Displacement and Citizenship: Histories and Memories of Exclusion intends to capture the crises of forced migration, internal displacement due to conflict situations and development-induced migration. The essays in this volume record the experiences of societies in South Asia (India, Bangladesh), Latin America (Peru), Europe (Germany, Austria) and Africa (Reunion Island, Namibia, Rwanda), each of which has histories marked by large-scale displacement caused by colonial policies of land capture, slavery or indentured labour, or partitions and other exclusions in the very birth of the nation-state. The essays are more than mere cautionary tales. They articulate how the denial of 'belonging' leaves a mark not only on individuals, but also on the nation that excludes, as well as the implications it has for citizens' access to rights and the solidarity of fellow-citizens.

The chapter begins with an overview of cultural and historical issues for Canadian citizenship and a comparative analysis of two of that country’s most notorious contemporary child and youth citizens - Nobel nominee and Free the Children1 activist Craig Kielburger, and Guantánamo prisoner Omar Khadr2 - both of whom began their journey in Toronto-area elementary schools. The following section moves to a critical review of the contours of an emergent global “assemblage” (Sassen, 2008, p. 5) on child and youth citizenship that argues two main points. First, there remain innumerable untapped potentials for mentoring active, democratic, and critical children’s citizenship within both present and coming generations. Secondly, a transdisciplinary re-theorising of adult-centric citizenship concepts through application of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989) opens up new opportunities for such partnerships from local to global scales.

With this forum we start a debate concerning the way in which the work of Michel Foucault and some of his analytical categories – like governmentality – are used in the critical studies on migrations and borders. Nicholas De Genova, Brett Neilson and William Walters, among the most relevant scholars in the field, reflect on how Foucaultian analyses have opened new modes, sites and patterns of research on migrations. They also dwell upon the limits and the critical issues related to the use of Foucault’s toolbox.

The proliferation of more restrictive border controls governing global mobility provides important sites of crystallization through which differentiated and stratified rights to movement are produced, negotiated, and reimagined. One such form, the detention of migrants, is often understood through a logic of exception as the exclusion of unwanted migrants from the borders of the political community. Critical scholarship on detention informed by an autonomous migration perspective suggests a more nuanced reading of detention as the differential inclusion of migrants through positions of precariousness, transformations of legal statuses and subjectivities, and control over the direction and temporality of migratory flows. Building on this trajectory, this paper argues that the very meaning of the camp also needs to be brought into the analysis of a politics of migration and of control. For spaces of detention are sites of contestation that can be used by migrants (and those in solidarity with them) as resources to navigate border controls, reimagine political community and subjectivities and through which migrants engage in practices of citizenship. Reflecting on the destruction of the migrant camps in and around Calais, the paper examines three different images of the camp space known as ‘the jungle’ and draws attention to camp spaces as social and political spaces, in which the struggles to define them are an integral part of what is at stake in the struggle between a politics of control and a politics of migration.

This paper challenges existing theories of radicalization and secession that are presented as “natural” tendencies of minority nationalism. It demonstrates the affinity between the strategies of national minorities and those of social movements, claiming that excluded minorities seek to reframe and expand the meaning of their citizenship, as do social movements, by utilizing the structures of opportunities available to them

Interagendo con il vivace dibattito storiografico sulle scritture di " supplica " e le varie for-me di appello alle autorità in differenti contesti spaziali e temporali, l'articolo ha per ogget-to l'analisi di un gruppo di domande di " discriminazione " inviate alla Direzione generale per la demografia e la razza dalle cittadine italiane " di razza ebraica " , all'indomani dell'entrata in vigore della legislazione antisemita fascista. Rappresentando una minoranza all'interno del corpus più ampio di richieste di deroga alla normativa antiebraica, le lettere delle donne costi-tuiscono nondimeno una fonte di grande rilevanza, tanto per illuminare il carattere tutt'altro che marginale della procedura di " discriminazione " nell'esperienza di chi fu vittima della po-litica antisemita, quanto per riprendere da altre angolature il dibattito sul " dilemma della cit-tadinanza " femminile nel regno d'Italia.

Writing to Demorazza. Jewish women's " discrimination " requests and the conflict over citizenship (Italy, 1938) Interacting with the lively debate on petitions and the various forms of appeal to the authorities written in different spatial and temporal contexts, the article deals with the analysis of a group of " discrimination " requests addressed to the General Directorate for Demography and Race by a sample of female Italian citizens qualified as belonging to the " Jewish race " in Autumn 1938. Women's petitions represented a minority within the broader corpus of requests for derogation from the Anti-Semitic Fascist legislation. They are nonetheless a source of great importance, both to illuminate the relevance of the " discrimination " procedures from the persecuted point of view, and to shed fresh light on the " dilemma of women's citizenship " debate in unified Italy.

The concept of post-socialism evolved into an “area study” while its “era” content became mostly excluded from the discourse. This paper discusses the necessity of integrative approach in post-socialist studies to understand the phenomenon in depth. It offers a comparative study of the post-socialist period through the EU trajectories of the three neighboring states: Bulgaria (2007), Greece (1981), and Turkey (candidate since 1999). Comparative studies mostly dealt with intra-post-socialist states. State-socialist regimes’ differences from their capitalist neighbors are mentioned, but usually not included in comparative studies. I argue that by compartmentalization under the label of post-socialism, we miss the similarities that transcend state systems of capitalism and socialism. I argue that one of the fundamental similarities between former state social list countries and their “capitalist” neighbors is migration and citizenship regimes driven by nationalism and their politics of “unwanted” vs. “desired” populations. While the influx of refugees is currently at primary agenda of the EU politics, migration and refugees were also among the concerns of the post-socialist era in the 1990s. Post-socialist migrations had various motives, such as refugees from civil wars as in the case of former Yugoslavia, asylum seekers from destabilized post-socialist regions, and economically motivated emigrants. Through examples from Bulgaria, Greece, and Turkey, this paper analyzes the three countries' socio-political trajectories as well as migration and citizenship policies. I evaluate migration of the “co-ethnics” and citizenship policies in the three countries, and show how similar their motives are, how they are interrelated with each other, and finally with the dissolution of state-socialist regimes and the growth of the EU, how they produce similar effects. I argue that the EU could neither change nor even challenge the politics and discourse of “unwanted” vs. “desired” populations in the three states.

P.S. This paper is also available in an Open Access journal. Please follow the link to access the whole text: http://js.ugd.edu.mk/index.php/BSSR/article/view/1901

Field theory can help to produce more nuanced analyses of the relationship between media change the rise of new citizen movements. In turn, this can be of invaluable assistance in our comparative understanding of the world’s current ‘crises of citizenship’. Taking as my example Spain’s indignados (15M) movement and its recent political offshoots, I explore the potential uses of a range of field concepts, including a pair of contrasting notions introduced here for the first time: ‘field of civic action’ vs. ‘unorganised civic space’. I argue that Spain’s 15M movement is best understood not as a continuous flow of events but rather as a series of discrete, ephemeral fields of civic action separated by a long hiatus of unorganised civic space. These transient, complexly mediated fields can be regarded as socio-political games of a certain kind, namely as contests in which civic ‘players’ with unique sets of skills, including ‘freedom technologists’ (Postill 2014a), enter into relationships with other individual and collective players in pursuit of common goals and rewards. Of particular salience in the Spanish case is the emergence of citizen-led initiatives (e.g. PAH, Podemos, Barcelona en Comú) that have learned how to bridge the civic vs. establishment media divide to great effect. Together, these initiatives – and their forerunners – have mobilised hundreds of thousands of Spanish citizens, imbuing them with a new agonistic vocabulary (‘us’ vs. ‘them’, ‘the citizenry’ vs. the caste’) and with a heightened awareness of their social rights that many have put into practice.

This article develops a conceptual taxonomy of five emerging digital citizenship regimes: (i) the globalised and generalisable regime called pandemic citizenship that clarifies how post-COVID-19 datafication processes have amplified the emergence of four intertwined, non-mutually exclusive, and non-generalisable new techno-politicalised and city-regionalised digital citizenship regimes in certain European nation-states’ urban areas; (ii) algorithmic citizenship, which is driven by blockchain and has allowed the implementation of an e-Residency programme in Tallinn; (iii) liquid citizenship, driven by dataism – the deterministic ideology of Big Data – and contested through claims for digital rights in Barcelona and Amsterdam; (iv) metropolitan citizenship, as revindicated in reaction to Brexit and reshuffled through data co-operatives in Cardiff; and (v) stateless citizenship, driven by devolution and reinvigorated through data sovereignty in Barcelona, Glasgow, and Bilbao. This article challenges the existing interpretation of how these emerging digital citizenship regimes together are ubiquitously rescaling the associated spaces/practices of European nation-states.

This article argues that the ‘rule of law’ has become a central goal in popular struggles the world over, and it is citizenship struggles which infuse the rule of law with substantive, as against a thin procedural, meaning. This is especially true in post-colonial societies like India, with a tradition of inherited colonial law designed for subject-hood rather than citizenship, growing inequality which affects both the enactment and interpretation of law, and the violation of law by those who are meant to protect it. Demanding implementation of existing laws, breaking laws that are patently unjust whether through armed struggle or non-violent social movements, or seeking to change laws in favour of new and more democratic laws, are all major avenues by means of which people express their aspirations as citizens. However, law's mutually constitutive relation with social practice means that people enter into political and legal negotiations already constituted as certain kinds of legal subjects, which constrains their imagination in certain ways.

In der nationalstaatlich geordneten Welt – sowie in der Demokratieforschung und -theorie – wird Migration vielfach als ein Problem beschrieben. Die Positionen und Perspektiven derjenigen, die als Migrant_innen gesehen werden, und die die damit verbundenen Zuschreibungen kritisieren, werden dagegen vielfach ausgeblendet. Der Beitrag nimmt eben diese auf und analysiert migrantische Kämpfe gegen Entrechtung und repressive Migrationspolitiken in Deutschland. Die Ansätze radikaler Demokratie – insbesondere von Jacques Rancière und Etienne Balibar – ermöglichen dabei eine Wissensproduktion, in der diejenigen, die für Gleichheit und Freiheit kämpfen als politische Subjekte begriffen und ernst genommen werden. Sie bilden eine Theorie der Gleichheit ‚von unten‘ und der Gleichheit des Nicht-Identischen, die eine Objektivierung von Migration weitgehend vermeidet und durch die die Forderungen und Begehren der migrantischen Kämpfe zu deren eigenem Maßstab werden. Diese Praxis radikaler Demokratie zeigt sich in den Protestbewegungen von Geflüchteten, die seit 2012 in verschiedenen europäischen Ländern entstanden sind. Durch eine Analyse der Aktionen und Erklärungen des Protestmarsches der Geflüchteten von Würzburg nach Berlin aus dem Herbst 2012 wird untersucht, inwiefern deren politische Praxen als radikale Demokratie beschrieben werden können und wie das Verhältnis von Migration und Demokratie neu gedacht werden kann.

The impact of freedom of movement in the EU on the restructuring of national social citizenship has long been a subject of vigorous debate in both political and academic discourses. This chapter brings in the insights of critical citizenship theory to move beyond the individualistic approach to transnational rights in liberal cosmopolitanism on one hand and the static approach to solidarity in the defence of national closure on the other. Critical citizenship studies focus on acts, performances, and claim-makings outside formal institutions of participations as processes of political subjectivisation through which the citizen subject is brought into being. Rather than a fixed collection of social rights and a finalised national project, social citizenship can be understood as an open-ended process shaped by ongoing collective struggles over needs and social inclusion. Relations of solidarity and reciprocity can emerge in such processes rather than a precondition external to them. The article then considers the political significance of non-institutionalised forms of contestation over the social rights of migrants that resist and challenge the individualist and discriminatory logics in the governance of free movement. As practices geared towards constructing new solidaristic relations and identities across borders, these acts of (social) citizenship articulate an alternative understanding of mobility as social and spatial practices that enable collective engagements and set in motion inclusive forms of solidarity that traverse the boundaries of the national, the European, and the legal.

In October 2014, on the anniversary of a large migrant shipwreck in the Mediterranean Sea, activists in Europe and Africa commemorated the victims and protested their deaths by launching the WatchTheMed Alarm Phone. The Alarm Phone functions as a 'hotline' for travellers who find themselves in emergency situations when crossing maritime borders toward EUrope. Its shift-teams offer information, advice and the possibility of raising public alarm, also in order to pressurise (state) rescue services to act. Based on my own engagement in the project, I portray an activist network that acted on the desire to intervene more directly in a deadly space that is often considered a 'maritime void' or as 'reserved' for state and EU (border) authorities. I argue that the Alarm Phone's transformative political potentiality arises precisely from its capacity to connect its constitutive engagement in (under the surface) mobile commons that facilitate 'unauthorised' human movement with public campaigns that call for and (thereby) perform international citizenship.

This study uses the China case to revisit some of the central assumptions of the literature on citizenship, showing how citizens and states are formed in and through the local places where citizenship is practiced. It suggests that the location of the political and of citizens have been an understudied aspect of citizenship orders, not just in relation to the growing impact of global and transnational forces, but also in sub-state entities.
Through fine-grained examination of the daily interactions between citizens and state agents, this study shows how citizenship in China is embedded in local relationships of belonging, participation and entitlement anchored in institutions that organize people in workplaces, urban neighborhoods and rural villages. Based on 10 months of ethnographic fieldwork in four communities in Tianjin, China, the study examines how two such institutions, the villager and residents committees, act as a nexus for participation and formal rights, while also providing social welfare to the needy. The practices of these institutions bind citizens to the state through a face-to-face politics that acts both as a mechanism of control and a channel for claims-making and pressure from below, a mode of rule I call “socialized governance.” Both enabling and constraining, this exists in tension with bureaucratic-rational forms of governance, such as the current Chinese leadership’s objective of “ruling in accordance with law.” While the frameworks for citizenship are set at the national level, its local, cellular character means great variation among places in both form and practice. My model of local citizenship helps explain patterns of economic and social inequality and of contentious politics in contemporary China.
While the unsettling of the congruence between the national and citizenship has been widely noted, this study points to how local, national and global institutionalized dimensions of citizenship have consistently been mediated through or exercised in sub-state entities. The narrative of the nation-state has so dominated the literature on citizenship that it has generally made invisible the actual techniques and processes through which citizenship orders are made, re-made and contested. As a unitary state with a strong national project, the China case provides intriguing material for rethinking how the local shapes citizenship.

This article will challenge the assumption that UK nationals have lost EU citizenship following Brexit because such a loss amounts to an arbitrary withdrawal of citizenship, prohibited by international law. The current public debate, and the Withdrawal Agreement itself, assumes that loss of EU citizenship is the automatic result of Brexit. Currently much of the discussion relies heavily on a narrative informed by the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties and general principles of international institutional law. These sources are quite valid for discussing the membership of a state in an international organization, and correctly apply to the case of the UK leaving the EU, but this narrative overlooks the law on human rights that applies to individuals.

This article firstly draws on prior scholarship to argue that EU citizenship, while not a nationality per se, is protected by international law in the same way as a nationality. This conclusion follows from EU citizenship amounting to a “fundamental status,” being a legal bond with a territorial, political entity. The jurisprudence of the Court of Justice of the EU has adopted this approach.

Secondly, the article argues that this human rights protection requires any withdrawal of EU citizenship to satisfy certain minimum standards. These standards would include the requirement that the withdrawal not be arbitrary, either procedurally or substantively. The CJEU has also applied this standard to prior attempted revocations of EU citizenship.

Lastly, looking at Brexit specifically, this article disagrees that all British citizens should lose EU citizenship. This argument questions whether the UK and/or the EU have this power and whether the Withdrawal Agreement provides for this outcome. It also argues that the attempted revocation of EU citizenship would be arbitrary.

The article concludes that the Treaties on European Union provided for a citizenship, not merely a basket of rights, which is now understood to constitute a fundamental status comparable to a nationality. While the UK is certainly free to leave the Union. Human rights require that EU citizenship must be protected and not revoked arbitrarily.

Introduction to Special issue of Citizenship Studies on ‘Design and Citizenship’ edited by Cynthia Weber; Published as Cynthia Weber (2010) ‘Introduction:  Design and Citizenship’, Citizenship Studies 14(1):1-16.

This article introduces design, citizenship and their relationships by contrasting two very different design projects on citizenship.  The first is the collaborative project Touching the State, which was carried out by the publically-funded UK Design Council in collaboration with the independent think tank the Institute for Public Policy Research in 2004.  The second is artist and designer Robert Ransick’s project Casa Segura/Safe House.  Bearing these two design projects in mind, the article suggests that if we want to better understand citizenship, we need to better understand how citizenship, citizens, and those who are not (fully) counted as citizens are designed, re-designed, or designated as beyond the scope of design by states, professional designers, activists, citizens and citizen groups, and non-citizen and non-citizenship groups, in all the richly varied ways design and citizenship interact.  The urgency in taking design seriously within the realm of citizenship studies is that design offers a new prism through which to address the political.  The article then lays out how the contributions to this special issue examine citizenship in relation to the political through this new prism of design.

Situated at the intersection of media and communication and critical citizenship studies, this article explores how refugees assert themselves as political subjects through communicative acts of citizenship-everyday forms of resistance against the border regime enacted in and through diverse media networks. It discusses how these communicative practices of claims-making are shaped by refugee-volunteer solidarities and the shifting micropolitics of securitized humanitarian care at Europe's border. Finally, it considers the potential that such acts, especially those enacted within digital media spaces, carry for interrupting dominant media and humanitarian discourses. Drawing on 12 weeks of participant observation and 42 interviews with refugees and volunteers conducted on the Greek island of Chios between March 2016 and July 2018, the article concludes that despite their limited effects, taking the mediation of refugees' political agency seriously is methodologically, analytically, and politically imperative to avoid reifying the figure of the mute refugee so deeply embedded in the humanitarian imaginary.

The boundaries of democracy are typically defined by the boundaries of formal status citizenship. Such state-centered theories of democracy leave many migrants without a voice in political decision-making in the areas where they live and work, giving rise to a problem of democratic legitimacy. Drawing on two democratic principles of inclusion, the all affected interests and coercion principles, this article

This article analyzes the ways in which Canadian and Australian immigration policies represent causes and consequences of neoliberal restructuring. Interrogating neoliberalism as a series of political-economic and moral changes derived from the marketization of societal and governmental arrangements, it illustrates how numerically-based ‘points systems’ have been employed as mechanisms for: gauging human capital; establishing indices of risk and undesirability; and promoting the ‘responsibilization’ of incoming migrants. In doing so the points systems' historical trajectory is traced through a variety of administrative reforms characteristic of neoliberal government and flexible accumulation. Ultimately, this article contends that as rational, technical and economically guided systems of enumeration and assessment, both governments' policies mirror, enhance and extend neoliberal arrangements and sensibilities. In providing ostensibly objective techniques of evaluation the points systems have assisted in injecting the ideal neoliberal citizens- who are, above all, flexible, cosmopolitan, entrepreneurial and autonomous- from abroad. Overall this paper contributes to studies of state restructuring by providing new insights into the links between the neglected domain of immigration control and emergent techniques of societal regulation and citizen-making.

This essay seeks to show that liberal law continues to justify and legitimize displacements of minority populations, even in an age of universal human rights. As demonstrated by the Israeli court’s 1988 decision legitimating the deportation of Mubarak Awad, it is citizenship and immigration laws that provide juridical justifications for contemporary ethno-national settler projects. In the aftermath of a territorial conflict that defines or redefines the bounds of the state, native minority populations are vulnerable to being legally recast as “aliens” or “virtual immigrants.” National conflict may thus be transformed by legal formalism into a question of immigration law, allowing the power relations that produce state sovereignty to slip into the background.