Immigration,society and modalities of citizenship in Singapore

In this article, I argue that three modalities of citizenship are at play in Singapore: liberal, communal and social. Using a grounded theoretical approach, I highlight the instances in which these modes of conceptualizing citizenship appear in discourse, practice and policy. While past scholarship has highlighted the contrast between liberal and communal modes of citizenship, the social mode has been largely subsumed and obscured within the rubric of communal (or communitarian) democracy and ethno-nationalist citizenship. The article analyzes the interplay among these three modes of citizenship as they played out in the discourse surrounding the 2011 General Election in Singapore. The tension between citizens and noncitizens has become a central political issue in Singapore. Less recognized, but highlighted in my analysis, liberal and communal senses of citizenship are in tension not only with each other but also with a notion of the social based on relationships of mutual benefit and obligation rather than communal, categorical belonging. Drawing on Robert Esposito's critique of modern ideas of community and (re)theorization of communitas, I argue that in the case of Singapore and elsewhere, reintroducing a notion of the social (as distinct from the communal) holds potential for discourses, practices and policies that can transcend the divisiveness associated with communalism and the socioeconomic inequalities associated with liberalism.     

Melancholic citizenship in the south Tel Aviv protest against global migration

Combining anthropological analysis with the discipline of urban studies and the theory of melancholy, this article offers the concept of ‘melancholic citizenship’ to describe the emotion of sadness aroused among a discriminated group of citizens in light of a process that highlights their social marginality. The case study explored is the struggle of old-time Mizrahi (Jews who immigrated to Israel from Arab countries) residents of the Hatikva neighborhood – a lower income neighborhood of south Tel Aviv – against the inflow of African migration to the area. Based on anthropological field work I conducted in the neighborhood between the years 2010–2013, I argue that the struggle of the longstanding residents aroused melancholic feelings among them when they realized that the global migration is a current indication of their discrimination as lower income Mizrahim who inhabit the city periphery and are located at the margins of Israeli society.     

Debating the ghost of Marshall: a critique of citizenship

Significant changes to societies and the jettisoning of social rights are limiting access to conventional citizenship and fueling a new criterion by which a substantive ‘citizenship’ may now be claimed. Specifically, fame, fortune and a kind of martyrdom are, de facto, the new ways in which an individualistic approach is used to access citizenship, initiating a two-tiered system of inclusion. This article uses a Canadian context to examine the relevance of Marshall's concept of citizenship. The argument will follow in four parts. First, I review Marshall's construct of social rights and take up some of the ‘internal’ critiques of its limits. Second, I examine the gendered limits of social citizenship claims. Third, I explore what amounts to an ‘external’ critique of Marshall, i.e. thinkers like Beck who argue that the debate has moved on from how to do ‘social rights’ to an attack on the very notion of (social) rights. Finally, I propose what a citizenship without social rights concretely amounts to in the modern world.     

Green citizenship and the political critique of injustice

Over recent decades, normative theories of green citizenship have drawn upon observations that a long-prevalent dualistic understanding of society, as completely subjecting nature, is being displaced by growing political and cultural support for a holistic view of society, as participating in nature. Differences between avowedly liberal and civic-republican interpretations of green citizenship notwithstanding, the normative theories share five key social critiques: (1) the need to challenge nature/culture dualism; (2) to dissolve the division between the public and private spheres; (3) to undermine state-territorialism; (4) to eschew social contractualism and (5) to ground justice in awareness of the finiteness and maldistribution of ecological space (ES). This article offers a sympathetic provocation to normative theories of green citizenship. Adopting a critical realist perspective, it describes the partial and problematic realisation of these critiques in the contemporary types of social and political participation, contents of the rights and duties and institutional arrangements of the ‘stakeholder’ citizenship that has become established within the neoliberal or weak eco-modernising, global competition state. This perspective is important because it offers new insights into the discursive framework that encompasses contemporary debates over justice and injustice. In particular, injustice from within the post-industrial ecostate appears to be a diffuse whole-of-society problem, the by-product of unsustainable development that lacks an identifiable class of perpetrators. This makes the progressive task of enunciating claims that injustice is present in some senses difficult, while conservative ideological positions are simplified.     

Liberal Citizenship: Medieval Cities as Model and Metaphor

In a recent article in Space & Polity, Nezar AlSayyad and Ananya Roy draw suggestive analogies between medieval urban forms and troubling contemporary realities, such as gated urban enclaves and impoverished squatter settlements. Invoking the medieval city as an analytical device, they show how several prevalent urban practices of citizenship are in tension with, and sometimes flatly contradict, liberal complacencies and democratic hopes. However, this article suggests that there is another story to be told, using some of the medieval cities they invoke to critical ends. The narrative highlights the ways in which certain medieval spatial and civic forms might enrich liberal and democratic aspirations, helping us to re-imagine at least two core values of liberal democratic citizenship.     

Falling into the justice gap? Between duties of social and global justice

The literature on cosmopolitan justice has yet to address what principles to adopt when duties of global justice and duties of social justice are in conflict. In this paper, I address David Miller’s contention that some may fall into the justice gap since we need to prioritize duties of social justice in cases of conflict. I argue that Miller’s analysis depends on three stipulations: the incommensurability of the values underlying duties of social justice and those of global justice; the need to justify duties of justice to their holders; and the need to consider the necessary institutions to realize and implement justice obligations. I argue against the incommensurability clause by showing that both conceptions of justice pursue moral equality as the underlying and commensurate value. Instead, I propose that the currencies of justice we employ in the two contexts of justice are different. Discussing the justifiability clause I agree with the stipulation that we have to justify decisions that affect the realization of justice to those who have to carry the burden of realizing them. This implies, however, that we may have to accept that some prioritize duties of global justice over duties of social justice. If this is the case, it seems as though the state has little recourse to prioritize duties of social justice. Finally, discussing Miller’s institutional clause I ask why the justice relevant institutions can only be those of the state. It is plausible to say that in our current world, institutions of humanitarian aid are effective means to satisfy duties of global justice.     

Three cheers for liberal modesty

ABSTRACT

Many liberals have been immodest in postulating that their own progressive, secular liberalism is the only one that can be justified in public reason. In Liberalism’s Religion, I articulate a more modest theory of liberalism and religion. While I personally endorse progressive secular liberalism, I argue that it is only one of the reasonable conceptions of liberal justice. This liberal modesty has profound, hitherto unnoticed implications for (i) the role of religious arguments in the public sphere, (ii) the legitimacy of religious establishment, and (iii) the justifiability of religious exemptions. In this article, I defend these three claims by providing replies to my critics.     

Meso‐discourses,state forms and the gendering of liberal‐democratic citizenship

This article builds upon Michel Foucault's fleeting observation that ‘the state consists in the codification of a whole number of power relations’ and that ‘a revolution is a different type of codification of these same relations’ (Held et al., 1983, pp. 312–3). Specifically, the article uses the case of Canada to argue that distinct state forms rest on particular meso‐discourses which inform a logic of governance, historical configurations of the public and private and gendered citizenships. The meso‐discourses of separate spheres, liberal progressivism and performativity (the logics of governance for the laissez‐faire state, the Keynesian welfare state and the neo‐liberal state, respectively) have coded and recoded gendered citizenships, thereby providing women and men with differential access to the public sphere and to citizenship claims. The neo‐liberal state's meso‐discourse of performativity is especially challenging for women and all equity‐seeking groups because it prescribes the ascendency of market relations over political negotiation or ethical considerations, as well as the attrition of social and political citizenship rights. Social citizenship is being eclipsed by market citizenship.     

Citizenship agendas for the abject: the production of distrust in Amsterdam's youth and security domain

In this article I explore the seemingly contradictory notion of citizenship agendas for the abject. While abjection suggests a casting off or expulsion, citizenship implies inclusion. The youth and security policies that I argue can be read as citizenship agendas for the abject evidence this contradiction and the concomitant ambiguity. This article focuses on the workings of the ‘youth and security assemblage’ in the Amsterdam South District. This policy assemblage primarily targets ‘unruly’ young Moroccan-Dutch men from Amsterdam's notorious Diamantbuurt. In Amsterdam and elsewhere in the Netherlands, such young men have been portrayed as the ultimate troublemakers who have made urban lives unsafe and ‘terrorized’ entire neighborhoods. Through an ethnographic analysis of a public event that brought together various members of the youth and security assemblage, this article examines the tensions and organized distrust that these citizenship agendas for the abject carry within them.     

Medieval modernity: On citizenship and urbanism in a global era

This paper examines forms of citizenship associated with contemporary urbanism. Focusing on three paradigmatic spaces: the gated enclave, the regulated squatter settlement and the camp, the authors argue that the landscape of urban citizenship is increasingly fragmented and divided. These geographies are constituted through multiple and competing sovereignties which, when territorially exercised, produce fiefdoms of regulation or zones of ‘no-law’. In order to understand these practices, the authors employ the conceptual framework of the ‘medieval city’. This use of history as theory sheds light on particular types of urban citizenship, such as the ‘free town’ or the ‘ethnic quarter’, that were present at different moments of medievalism and that are congruent with current processes. The ‘medieval’ is invoked not as an historical period, but rather as a transhistorical analytical category that interrogates the modern at this moment of liberal empire.     

Becoming flesh: refugee hunger strike and embodiments of refusal in German necropolitical spaces

The securitization of the EU’s external borders and repressive asylum policies biopolitically control and discipline the bodies of refugees. In Germany, these developments hark back to a longer colonial history of racialization that the state collectively disavows. To approach this continuity of racialized citizenship, I will analyse a series of hunger strikes that were staged by refugees from 2012 till 2014 in Germany. By asking which possibilities lie in staging the hunger strike, I will argue that Germany’s necropolitical geography of detention, asylum, and deportation marks the racialized refugees’ bodies as disposable within the logics of citizenship. I propose that hunger strike is a form of becoming flesh, which makes visible how racialized violence is enacted on the refugees’ bodies. Becoming flesh articulates a politics of refusal that subverts the logics of recognition, empathy and suffering liberal rights discourses rely on and, instead, performs an embrace of the refugees’ abjection.     

Ecomodernist citizenship: rethinking political obligations in a climate-changed world

Green accounts of environmental citizenship typically seek to promote environmental sustainability and justice. However, some green theorists have argued that liberal freedoms are incompatible with preserving a planetary environment capable of meeting basic human needs and must be wound back. More recently, ‘ecomodernists’ have proposed that liberalism might be reconciled with environmental challenges through state-directed innovation focused on the provision of global public goods. Yet, they have not articulated an account of ecomodernist citizenship. This article seeks to advance the normative theory of ecomodernism by specifying an account of ecomodernist citizenship and subjecting the theory’s core claims to sympathetic critique. We argue that state-directed innovation has the potential to reconcile ambitious mitigation with liberal freedoms. However, full implementation of ecomodernist ideals would require widespread embrace of ecophilic values, high-trust societies and acceptance of thick political obligations within both national and global communities. Ecomodernism’s wider commitments to cosmopolitan egalitarianism and separation from nature thus amount to a non-liberal comprehensive public conception of the good. Furthermore, ecomodernism currently lacks an adequate account of how a society that successfully ‘separates’ from nature can nurture green values, or how vulnerable people’s substantive freedoms will be protected during an era of worsening climate harms.     

Democratic justice: the priority of politics and the ideal of citizenship

In his Democratic justice and the social contract, Weale presents a distinctive contingent practice-dependent model of ‘democratic justice’ that relies heavily on a condition of just social and political relations among equals. Several issues arise from this account. Under which conditions might such just social and political relations be realised? What ideal of equality is required for ‘democratic justice’? What are its implications for the political ideal of citizenship? This paper focuses on these questions as a way to critically reconsider Weale’s model. After presenting Weale’s procedural constructivism, I distinguish his model from an institutional practice-dependent model, one salient example of which is Rawls’s political constructivism. This distinction allows for a formulation of the social and political equality required for justice in each case. The contingent model assumes that an equality of ‘status’ will generate just social practices, yet it fails to recognise that an equality of ‘role’ is also important to ensure citizens’ compliance. The paper ultimately seeks to show that the contingent model is insufficient to ensure that just social practices will become stable.     

State,citizenship, and the urban poor

This paper examines the dynamic, moving relationship between three concepts – those of life, law, and exception. Following a brief exposition of these concepts, this paper provides an ethnography of struggles over housing waged by the urban poor in a squatter colony in Noida that adjoins the city of Delhi, India. I argue that each concept in this triad exerts force on the other and is the dynamic relation that creates the conditions of possibility for the emergence of claims over citizenship for the urban poor. In suggesting that citizenship is a claim rather than a status, which one either has or does not have, the article shows the precariousness as well as the promise for the poor of ‘belonging’ to a polity. Joining the discussion on the politics of life, the paper argues that the notion of life allows the mutual absorption of the natural and the social, and thus illuminates aspects of citizenship forged through the struggles waged by the poor for their needs. These are aspects of citizenship which remain obscure if we reduce democratic citizenship to the domain of rational deliberative processes alone.     

Disabled Istanbulites’ everyday life experiences as ‘urban citizens’: accessibility and participation in decision-making

This article assesses whether the everyday experiences of disabled Istanbulites can be considered from an urban citizenship perspective. To this end, Lefebvre’s notion of the ‘right to the city’ and its relationship with the literature on urban citizenship and Disability Studies is discussed, and two broad categories of analysis are presented to elaborate the issue in the case of Istanbul. These are, namely accessibility – to space, but also to education, health, and employment – and participation in decision-making. Interviews show that the limited rights-based discourses, which guided the institutional transformation of the greater and district municipalities in the early 2000s, have had almost no impact on the everyday experience of disabled Istanbulites. Istanbul remains a largely disabling city with major problems of accessibility and no room in decision-making processes for disabled people. Unfortunately, current developments do not point to the possibility of a more powerful practice of urban citizenship.     

Justice in Ideal Theory: A Refutation

In this article I argue that theorizing about justice at the level of ideal theory is inherently flawed and thus has impoverished liberal egalitarianism. Ideal theorists (falsely) assume that a political philosopher can easily determine (or has privileged access to) what constitutes the 'best foreseeable conditions'. Furthermore, by assuming full compliance, ideal theorists violate the constraints of a realistic utopia. More specifically I argue that liberal egalitarians who function at the level of ideal theory adopt a cost-blind approach to rights and a narrow view of possible human misfortune. The former issue leads liberal egalitarians to give priority to a serially ordered principle of equal basic liberties or to treat rights as 'trumps'; and the latter to a stringent prioritarian principle (Rawls' difference principle) or luck egalitarianism. Taken together, the cost-blind approach to rights, coupled with the narrow view of human misfortune, mean the liberal egalitarian theories of justice cannot address the issue of trade-offs that inevitably arises in real non-ideal societies that face the fact of scarcity. This makes liberal egalitarianism an ineffective theory of social justice.     

Rethinking Democratisation and Citizenship: Legal Pluralism and Institutional Reform in Guatemala

The December 1996 peace settlement in Guatemala agreed a series of institutional reforms in order to recognise the rights of the country's indigenous peoples; some 23 different ethno‐linguistic groups which make up 60% of the overall population. This article explores the relationship between pluri‐culturalism, citizenship, democracy and law in the contemporary politics of Guatemala. While territorially autonomous regions or separate legal jurisdictions are often proposed as a means to ensure indigenous rights, I argue that within a framework of post‐conflict reconstruction, integration with a measure of autonomy for democratically organised communities is the ideal. This is linked to development of an integrative form of citizenship which combines both social membership and identity and rights. Finally, I argue that support for pro‐active efforts to challenge the legacies of authoritarianism, militarisation and inequality will be necessary in order to strengthen democracy, build a culture of citizenship and increase justice.     

Comments on Hasenfeld and Gidron: “Understanding multi-purpose hybrid voluntary organizations”

The article develops a theoretical framework to analyse the social construction of citizenship at the local level in Bolivia through the Ley de Participación Popular (LPP). It explains how decentralization at the municipal level and the introduction of participatory mechanisms affect the development of civil society in Bolivia. I argue that decentralization at the city level can provide new formal spaces for the development of civil society in relation with the state, which can in turn foster the social construction of a more inclusive citizenship regime. Many factors, however, determine if such potential is exploited. Drawing from the Bolivian experience, the article elaborates on the socio-political conditions necessary for local governance to have a positive impact on citizenship. It shows that the institutional shortcomings of the LPP, an elite-driven reform adopted in a country with a legacy of weak institutions and civil society, posed fundamental limits for social participation at the municipal level to lead to the social construction of an inclusive citizenship regime.     

Domination,global harms,and the problem of silent citizenship: toward a republican theory of global justice

Many citizens across the globe suffer domination and injustice in silence. It is not a silence of apathy or approval, but is another sort of silent citizenship born of deep inequality. This article attempts to come to terms with the global scope of silent citizenship as a form of domination that has become increasingly common among the worst-off in society. I argue that identifying problems of silent citizenship requires us to give priority to injustice over justice in future efforts to promote global justice. To illustrate how this might be done, I broaden the scope of republican theories of nondomination to consider how they might be applied to silent citizenship from a global perspective.     

Citizenship,justice and indigenous group‐specific rights—citizenship and indigenous Australia

Indigenous Australians and those supporting the cause of Aboriginal justice have used the language of citizenship rights to demand redress for indigenous peoples’ relative disadvantage. In doing so they make an appeal to rights of full participatory citizenship which have their roots in T.H. Marshall's writings. Liberal political theory, however, has resisted conceptions of citizenship which entail rights of assistance from the state: rights to welfare are more readily conceived of as charitable acts towards those members of a society unable to care for themselves. Unless the assumptions implicit in liberal conceptions of citizenship are challenged, demands for positive citizenship rights may re‐enforce stereotypes of Aboriginal inferiority. Drawing on Will Kymlicka's recent work, this article critically examines liberal conceptions of citizenship, welfare and demands for indigenous group‐specific rights as they may apply to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander citizenship.