On the durability and the decomposition of citizenship: the social logics of forced return migration in Cape Verde

This article explores the impact of deportation, a state practice increasingly applied by European and North American governments, on notions of sociality in transnational social fields. In particular, it concentrates on the dynamics between formal citizenship on the one hand and the moral economies of belonging and membership on the other. Drawing on anthropological fieldwork in Cape Verde, where deportation is producing a new social minority, this article examines the confluence of social and formal legal practices of exercising membership in transnational fields. After summarising the constitutive features of Cape Verdean transnational social formation, the trajectories and perspectives of deportees are highlighted in relation to their family networks, as well as in their encounters with the wider society and state structures. It is argued that understandings of social inclusion and perceptions of membership are embedded in moral discourses on ‘law’ and ‘justice’ as they circulate within transnational social fields. In the context of forced return migration, citizenship emerges as an arena for claiming legitimacy and integration and likewise becomes a key mode of the formulation of conditionalities for integration and social exclusion.     

Introduction: theorizing different forms of belonging in a cosmopolitan Malaysia

This article introduces this special issue on new ethnoscapes of a cosmopolitan Malaysia. It investigates questions of belonging and analyses the conditions that make possible cosmopolitan solidarity between citizens and sub- and non-citizens in a globalized world. I posit several critical frameworks on cosmopolitanism, citizenship and the public sphere to theorize the relationship between citizens and non-citizens in Malaysia: ‘zones of sovereignty’, the refugee as homo sacer and ‘acts of citizenship’ that constitute rights and subjecthood for non-citizens. In an attempt to outline a more detailed ethnography of everyday ways of belonging, I touch briefly on Conradson's ‘spaces of care’. Lastly, I focus on the public sphere, which can be a barometer for gauging whether cosmopolitan solidarity and transnational crossings can occur.     

Biometric citizenship

The article considers the issue of citizenship in light of the recent developments in biometric identification techniques. It aims to answer the question as to what kind of citizenship is the ‘biometric citizenship’. Drawing on several empirical examples including the Iris Recognition Immigration System scheme, identity cards and current citizenship reform plans in the UK, I argue that biometric citizenship is at once a ‘neoliberal citizenship’ and a ‘biological citizenship’. The neoliberal aspect of biometric citizenship is demonstrated through the rearrangement of the experience of border crossing in terms of the neoliberal ethos of choice, freedom, active entrepreneurialism and transnational expedited mobility. At the same time, these are enacted alongside the exclusionary and violent measures directed at those who are considered as risky categories illustrating the constitutive relationship between the ‘biometric citizen’ and its ‘other’. As regards its biological aspect, biometric citizenship is embedded within rationalities and practices that deploy the body not only as a means of identification but also as a way of sorting through different forms of life according to their degree of utility and legitimacy in relation to market economy. This aspect also carries a racial and national dimension exemplified in both the national identity card scheme and the very technical infrastructure of biometric technology. Overall, what these two features have in common is the reduction of the principle of citizenship to processes of identity management and technical procedures without, however, purging it altogether from its all too familiar national and race-based components.     

Exclusion through citizenship: civic deliberation and its limits in the Peruvian blogosphere

Research on the exclusionary nature of citizenship has concentrated on the state as the agent who defines the limits of citizenship, framing it as a legal status. Exclusionary discourses and practices resulting from everyday notions of ‘good citizenship’ have received less attention. A stronger focus on these can contribute to our understanding of the relationship between citizenship and exclusion by highlighting exclusion through citizenship. In other words, it emphasises the ways in which practices and discourses of ‘good citizenship’ simultaneously produce its limits, consisting of practices and discourses which are considered ‘not civic’. In this sense, exclusion happens because of, rather than in spite of, citizenship. The article examines notions of civic deliberation among Peruvian bloggers, arguing that these included clear limits, which, if violated, allowed for exclusion.     

Citizenship values and asset accumulation: the case of Argentine migrants

Using diverse conceptualisations of citizenship, this article analyses the effect of the accumulation of civic and political assets on the transformation of citizenship values among Argentine migrants to Spain and returnees. Focusing on the transnational spaces, this article analyses important civic and political capabilities accumulated by a group of migrants and explores the impact of the assets accumulated in the transnational context. This research uses data drawn from 19 Argentine immigrants to Barcelona and 30 Argentine returnees from the cities of Madrid, Barcelona and Palma de Mallorca. Findings indicate that the migratory experience generated gains in the civic and political capabilities of this group of migrants and returnees and that living in Spain promoted the development of a more responsible, analytical and, in some cases, active citizenship. As holders of ‘multiple-perspectives’, interviewees were in a privileged position to critically analyse both the sending and receiving societies. Moreover, respondents implemented a number of practices acquired in the host society, in their home society, although this transfer generally remained at an individual level.     

Reframing migrant mothers as citizens

This article suggests reframing the study of migrant women's mothering from a question of integration to an engagement with citizenship. Drawing on research with Polish migrants to the UK, it illustrates how migrant mothers and children construct complex belongings, referencing local, national (UK and Polish), transnational and supra-national levels of belonging. Migrant mothers' sense of ethnic distinctness goes hand in hand with universalistic discourses of belonging. The notion of competent mothering is a key aspect constituting the migrant mothers' narratives of ‘good citizenship’. Their narratives challenge the devaluing of their mothering practices as migrants, negotiating not only national but also class and racialized identities so that the figure of the well-educated Polish child symbolizes legitimate mobility and belonging. The article concludes by developing elements of a research agenda on migrant women's mothering as a citizenship practice.     

Between hearts and pockets: locating the outcomes of transnational homemaking practices among Mexican women in Canada's temporary migration programmes

Temporary migration programmes (TMPs) contain features such as reduced costs and the social legitimation of regularized entry that allow women, including the very poor, to access transnational livelihoods. For mothers, taking up opportunities for employment abroad inevitably involves ‘transnational homemaking’, the set practices involved in caring for family relationships and maintaining household economies across borders. In this article, we examine the transnational homemaking practices undertaken by rural Mexican migrant women employed in highly masculinized TMPs in Canada, tracing how they construct and maintain household economies across borders through a delicate (re)negotiation of reproductive roles and responsibilities with non-migrating kin in Mexico. We find that migration yields material and subjective benefits that enable the expansion of their citizenship across multiple dimensions ranging from the economic to the sexual. At the same time, as racialized, gendered, migrants from the global South, their labour and status in Canada are highly precarious. The advantages derived from transnational migration are thus tenuous, limited, and contradictory.     

Immigrant protests in Toronto: diaspora and Sri Lanka's civil war

As Sri Lanka's civil war escalated in the spring of 2009, protests led by the Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora in Toronto appealed for an immediate ceasefire agreement between the Sri Lankan government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). Held simultaneously in Chennai, London, and Oslo, the protests called for an end to the hostilities in Sri Lanka as well as recognition of the legitimacy of Tamil Eelam, a separate nation state for Tamils in Sri Lanka. Based on interviews and media coverage in Toronto, this article investigates how these ‘immigrant protests’ constituted ‘transnational acts of citizenship’. I examine the Toronto protests through three acts in the protest that challenged the exclusions of national citizenship by moving from Toronto's streets, statist discourses of Canadian citizenship, and the violence of war in Sri Lanka. Although these transnational acts of citizenship were rendered inaudible in public culture, the article concludes by exploring the possibilities of citizenship and belonging in the Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora following the defeat of the LTTE.     

(Dis)qualified bodies: securitization,citizenship and ‘identity management’

This article attempts to think citizenship politics in the international security context of a post‐September 11th world. Considering specifically the introduction of biometric technologies, the article reveals the extent to which contemporary citizenship is securitized as a part of the wider post‐September 11th ‘securitization of the inside’. This securitization contributes directly to the intensification of conventional citizenship practice, as biometric technologies are employed to conceal and advance the heightened exclusionary and restrictive practices of contemporary securitized citizenship. The intensified restriction and preservation of particular rights and entitlements, vis‐à‐vis the application of biometric technologies, serves both private and public concerns over ‘securing identity’. This overall move, and the subsequent challenges to conventional notions of citizenship politics and agency, is referred to here as ‘identity management’. To then ask ‘What's left of citizenship?’ sheds light on these highly political transformations, as the restricted aspects of citizenship—that is, its continued obsession with the preservation and regulation/restriction of specific rights and entitlements—are increased, and the instrument of this escalation, biometrics, dramatically alters existing notions of political agency and ‘citizenship/asylum politics’.     

Immigrant meanings of citizenship: mobility,stability, and recognition

ABSTRACT

Based on interviews with 21 immigrants in Norway, including both naturalized citizens and ‘denizens’, this article addresses immigrant meanings of citizenship and naturalization. The findings show that the interviewees attributed three meanings to citizenship. First, Norwegian citizenship served as a powerful means of spatial mobility, thereby facilitating transnational connections. Second, citizenship signified a legal stability that may guard precarious immigrants against ‘liminal legality’, i.e. enduring legal uncertainty. Third, citizenship was conceptualized as a formal recognition of equality and belonging, although ‘race’ and ethnicity persisted as salient markers of inequality and alienage. The article contributes empirically to the growing literature on the experiencing side of citizenship and naturalization by delineating what citizenship means to different groups, and to whom it matters the most. Theoretically, it contributes by demonstrating that citizenship acquisition may not only be strategic, but also rooted in needs of symbolic sanctioning of equality and belonging, particularly important to individuals debarred from naturalization.     

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.     

Fear and youth citizenship practices: insights from Montreal

This article explores how fear contributes to empowerment and citizenship practices among youth who choose alternative lifestyles. Fear is conceived in a threefold manner: (1) as a manipulated resource in the political process, (2) as energy to be tamed through individual will, and (3) as radiating from actors and flowing through situations of action. Through an examination of how ‘risk-taking’ youths play with fear, the article critically reflects on the modern and advanced modern conceptualizations of the political ‘heroic’ actor and its articulation with an understanding of political action as decentered from human actors. Citizenship practices, it is argued, operate on five distinct levels of political engagement ranging from an awareness of the world outside of oneself to empathy for others and activism. Rather than being state-centered, the article develops an understanding of intersubjective citizenship based on affective memory.     

Citizenship,reproduction and the state: international marriage and human rights

The relationship between citizenship, marriage and family has often been overlooked in the social and political theory of citizenship. Intimate domestic life is associated with the private sphere, partly because reproduction itself is thought to depend on the private choices of individuals. While feminist theory has challenged this division between private and public – ‘the personal is political’ – the absence of any systematic thinking about familial relations, reproduction and citizenship is puzzling. Citizenship is a juridical status that confers political rights such as the right to carry a passport or to vote in elections. However, from a sociological point of view, we need to understand the social foundations and consequences of citizenship – however narrowly defined in legal and political terms. This article starts by noting the obvious point that the majority of us inherit citizenship at birth and in a sense we do not choose to be ‘Vietnamese’ or ‘Malaysian’ or ‘Japanese’ citizens. Although naturalisation is an important aspect of international migration and settlement, the majority of us are, as it were, born into citizenship. Therefore, the family is an important but often implicit facet of political identity and membership. In sociological language, citizenship looks like an ascribed rather than achieved status, and as a result becomes confused and infused with ethnicity. This inheritance of citizenship is odd given the fact that, at least in the West, there is a presumption, following the pronouncements of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, to think of citizenship in universal terms that are ethnically ‘blind’, but it is in fact closely connected with familial or private status. These complex relations within the nation-state are further complicated by the contemporary growth of transnational marriages and this article considers the problems of marriage, reproduction and citizenship in the context of global patterns of migration.     

The Mujahideen in Bosnia: the foreign fighter as cosmopolitan citizen and/or terrorist

This article explores the idea of the Mujahideen in Bosnia as ‘cosmopolitan citizens’. During the Balkan War in the early 1990s, these foreign fighters flocked to Bosnia in order to take up arms alongside those whom they understood to be their besieged Muslim brethren. Although this act of transborder mobilization can be framed as an act of cosmopolitan citizenship, the subsequent ‘problem’ of the Mujahideen in a post-9/11 context destabilized their original cosmopolitan act through a re-enactment of borders and the revocation of their (literal) citizenship. Within the larger post-9/11 narrative, where the Mujahideen must necessarily be understood as terrorists/potential terrorists, they are an interesting point of study in an examination of what can be seen as the sinister side of transnational citizenship, and they expose what Appadurai (A. Appadurai, 2006. Fear of small numbers: an essay on the geography of anger. Durham: Duke University Press.) calls our ‘fear of small numbers’. Particularly compelling is that the post-9/11 Mujahid is an unsympathetic figure, and is always already a questionable candidate for ‘citizenship’ as it is commonly understood. Furthermore, his (sic) original ‘cosmopolitan’ act suggests that, although the ‘cosmopolitan ideal’ is the achievement of a citizenship that transcends or escapes borders, the cosmopolitical must nevertheless be assigned value in order to be ethically intelligible.     

Imagining and practising citizenship in austere times: the work of Citizens Advice

This article explores the significance of citizenship for those working in Citizens Advice, a network of voluntary organisations in the UK that exists to provide peer-to-peer advice and support to those facing problems. Drawing on a recent research study, the article considers the ways in which the ‘citizen in citizens advice’ is imagined and translated into practice. Despite current political and policy moves to shrink citizenship (in terms of eligibility, access and substance), the ‘citizen in citizens advice’ is regularly thought about in expansive ways that draw on other imaginaries of citizenship. We suggest that these everyday discursive practices of citizenship are important both in analytic terms and in reinvigorating a political discussion otherwise focused upon restriction and exclusion.     

Enacting multi-layered citizenship: Turkey’s Armenians’ struggle for justice and equality

Throughout the history of the Turkish Republic, Turkey’s Armenians have been subjected to a trade-off between the limited minority rights granted by the 1923 Lausanne Treaty and equal national citizenship. Traditionally a closed, depoliticized community, the citizenship practices of the Armenian minority have become increasingly differentiated in recent years. Building on a notion of citizenship as multi-layered and constituted through collective practice, this article investigates the implications of the political acts of Turkey’s Armenian minority on sub-national and national citizenship in Turkey. We show that Turkey’s Armenians are coupling rights demands, identification, normative references, and mobilization at the sub-national, national, and transnational levels in innovative ways, and are thereby negotiating different layers of citizenship in Turkey in a way that strengthens equal national citizenship.     

Citizenship in Palestine: a fractured geography

This article deals with the Israeli–Palestinian conflict through an approach based on citizenship. The article considers the whole historical Palestine (Israel and the so-called Occupied Territories) as a unique unit of analysis, and suggests that the dynamics of citizenship in this area should be analysed through the exam of two fundamental dimensions, relating to membership and territory. In general, the example of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict offers the chance to address the conventional meaning of concepts such as ‘state’, ‘democracy’ and ‘citizenship’, underlying the complex dynamics of inclusion/exclusion of individuals and groups within a collective decision-making process. As far as Palestine is concerned, the centre of gravity and the horizons of the conflict are described through the notion of ‘ruptured demos’, suggesting new directions for comparative research and drawing the attention to the progressive demise of the so-called ‘two-state’ solution.     

Mothering as a citizenship practice: an intersectional analysis of ‘carework’ and ‘culturework’ in non-normative mother–child identities

In this article, a comparative analysis is presented of two ethnographic case studies on mothering practices in Belgium. Interviews with, and participant observation among, both undocumented migrant mothers from the South and Belgian white adoptive mothers of black Ethiopian-born children provide an insight into the way in which mothering plays an important role in the pursuit of citizenship. In our analysis, we draw on critical theorizations of citizenship from feminist, multicultural and globalization perspectives, and of care, intimacy and the affective in order to show how mothering can be viewed as a citizenship practice that transcends boundaries of the private, public and the nation. In their ‘carework’ and ‘culturework’, both undocumented migrant and white adoptive mothers negotiate prevalent ideologies of mothering that are often exclusionary of their own and their children's sense of identity and belonging. Their mothering involves building new networks and strengthening their children's identities in culturally creative ways. We argue that although these mothering practices are embedded in a multiplicity of intersecting privileges and inequalities, within restraints imposed by the nation-state context, this carework attests to the agentic capacity of mothering and its potential to affect politics of inclusion, recognition and changing hegemonic understandings of citizenship and belonging.     

Corporate citizenship and social responsibility in a globalized world

This article addresses the rise of corporate citizenship in the context of the changes in the nature of individual citizenship and the emergence of new, non‐territorial forms of national identity that are occurring in the current era of intensifying globalization. It also ponders the power of corporate citizens and the role they play in the prevailing global governance framework, as well as the extent to which they can behave responsibly and pursue sustainable development goals. More generally, the article discusses the limits to corporate social responsibility and the extent to which capitalism can be ‘caring’. The argument advanced is that, by virtue of their very nature, transnational corporations (TNCs) cannot become fully responsible and accountable citizens. Nonetheless, they can be induced to transform themselves in ways that may be compatible with socially and environmentally desirable objectives. Lastly, the article explores paths for action and, in particular, the potential of NGOs and anti‐globalization social movements to become civil regulators able to push for the introduction of binding rules and regulations and the construction a governance framework capable of restraining and harnessing the power of TNCs.