Sudan the Unfinished Project - On Identity,Diversity, and Religion

The assumption of this article is that the “second great transformation” proposed by global actors parallels the one advanced by those who resisted laissez‐faire capitalism in the 19th century. Both dispute the unilateral imposition of a new planetary order and endeavor to modify the rhythm and direction of economic processes presented as either fact or fate. In doing so, they effectively place the question of the political institution of this order on the agenda. I look briefly at the familiar underside of globalism and then move on to develop a tentative typology of initiatives that set the tone for a politics of globalization. These include radical and viral direct action, the improvement of the terms of exchange between industrialized and developing countries, the expansion of the public sphere outside national borders through global networks, the accountability of multilateral organizations, and the advancement of democracy at a supranational level. Participants in these initiatives take politics beyond the liberal‐democratic format of elections and partisan competition within the nation‐state. They exercise an informal supranational citizenship that reclaims—and at the same time reformulates—the banners of social justice, solidarity, and internationalism as part of the public agenda.     

Reproducing the ‘national home’: gendering domopolitics

Walters developed the concept of domopolitics to refer to the ways in which the securitisation of migration contributes to the construction of the UK as a ‘national home’. Domopolitical policies and discourses produce the UK as the ‘national home’ of ‘neoliberal citizens’; they thus serve as tools of neoliberal governmentality, disciplining both citizens and migrants into displaying qualities associated with neoliberal citizenship, especially economic productivity. However, the concept of ‘home’ has a particular genealogy within liberal discourses of citizenship. As Pateman contends, the political ‘public’ sphere of liberal citizenship is constructed in opposition to an apolitical ‘private’ sphere. The public sphere has been coded as the domain of men, while women have been relegated to the private ‘home’. Consequently, women have been deemed responsible for the reproduction of both the private, and the ‘national’ home, a construction which has persisted under neoliberalism. While often superficially gender-neutral, domopolitics actually relies upon, and reinforces, these gendered understandings of neoliberal citizenship. Domopolitical policies and discourses construct migrant women’s reproductive practices as a legitimate and necessary site of state intervention, disciplining migrant women to ensure they ‘correctly’ reproduce the neoliberal ‘national home.’     

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.     

Communicating Global Citizenship: Multiple Discourses Beyond the Academy

This article demonstrates that notions of “global citizenship”, as communicated beyond academic debates in political theory and sociology, can be situated within two overarching discourses: a civic republican discourse that emphasizes concepts such as awareness, responsibility, participation and cross-cultural empathy, and a libertarian discourse that emphasizes international mobility and competitiveness. Within each of these discourses, multiple understandings of citizen voice can be identified. Exploring how myriad ways of thinking related to “global citizenship” are springing forth in public debate serves to illustrate new ways in which a wide variety of political, social and economic actors are reflecting upon the meaning of voice and citizenship in the context of increasing public recognition of global interdependence. Not only has “global citizenship” emerged as a variant within the concept of citizenship, but the concept of “global citizenship” contains many variants and sources of internal division. How the concept of “global citizenship” continues to evolve in public discourse, especially in response to watershed events, promises to remain a fruitful line of inquiry for years to come.     

Secular spaces and religious representations: reading the headscarf debate in Turkey as citizenship politics

Although in recent years there has been a relaxing attitude in Turkey towards wearing headscarf in the public sphere, the controversy surrounding the visibility and use of the headscarf has often been read through modernity/tradition dichotomy which sees the use of headscarf by women as a threat to modernity by religious subjectivities. The principal reason for this reading is that the citizenship regime in Turkey has not been simply about defining a framework of membership to a political community but rather has been used to construct modern subjectivity. This article attempts to dislocate the headscarf controversy from this dichotomous reading by moving it into the larger framework of citizenship politics. It argues that instead of interpreting the growing visibility of the headscarf within the public sphere that pits modernity against tradition, we need instead to identify the wearing of the headscarf as a specific ‘act of citizenship’ that challenges dominant citizenship practices.     

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.     

Cultural pluralism,nationalism and federalism: A revision of democratic citizenship in plurinational states

Abstract. This article poses three questions related to the current revision of democratic citizenship in plurinational states. The first question focusses on the analytical limits of the term 'multicultural' and on the question of where nationalist movements stand within cultural pluralism. The second question asks whether it is possible to overcome the inherent difficulties in the traditional concept of liberal–democratic citizenship in plurinational states. Finally, the third question asks whether federalism is an adequate framework to regulate a revised concept of democratic citizenship in plurinational states. These three questions are developed in three sections. In the first I put forward a typology that allows us to identify four kinds of cultural pluralism movements that are present within the current liberal democracies. In the second section I identify some of the shortcomings of the traditional concept of citizenship with respect to the plurinational integration of some democracies, making special reference to the standard liberal version by Rawls. I defend the right of the minority liberal nationalisms to be included in a revision of the concept of democratic citizenship for the next century. Finally, I discuss the role of federalism, paying special attention to the case of Catalonia and Spain within Europe, and to possible 'asymmetrical' reforms to the concept of democratic citizenship.     

Environmental Obligations and the Limits of Transnational Citizenship

Notions of cosmopolitan and environmental citizenship have emerged in response to concerns about environmental sustainability and global inequality. But even if there are obligations of egalitarian justice that extend across state boundaries, or obligations of environmental justice to use resources in a sustainable way that are owed to those beyond our borders, it is far from clear that these are best conceptualised as obligations of global or environmental citizenship. Through identifying a core concept of citizenship, I suggest that citizenship obligations are, by their nature, owed (at least in part) in virtue of other aspects of one's common citizenship, and that obligations of justice, even when they arise as a result of interconnectedness or past interactions, are not best conceived as obligations of citizenship in the absence of some other bond that unites the parties. Without ruling out the possibility of beneficial conceptual change, I argue that Andrew Dobson's model of ecological citizenship is flawed because there is no good reason to regard the obligations of environmental justice which it identifies as obligations of ecological citizenship, and that other models of cosmopolitan or global citizenship face a similar objection.     

Disconnection and resistance: anti-terrorism and citizenship in the UK

The corroding impacts of anti-terrorism measures on citizenship have been much discussed in recent years. Drawing on qualitative research from the UK, this article argues that citizens do indeed frequently feel that aspects of citizenship – such as rights, duties, identity claims and the ability to participate in the public sphere – have been significantly dampened by developments in this policy area. At the same time, however, participants in our research also articulated a number of strategies through which they or others have sought to resist the logics, exercise and impacts of anti-terrorism powers. These included voicing explicit opposition to particular measures, resisting ‘outsider’ or ‘victim’ subject positions, and a refusal to withdraw from established forms of political engagement. Whilst such resistance should not be overstated, we argue that these strategies emphasise the co-constitutive rather than linear relationship between public policy and citizenship. Anti-terrorism powers do indeed impact upon citizenship claims, for instance in the curtailment of formal rights. Equally, the everyday, lived, experiences and practices of citizenship contribute to, and help shape, the perceptions and understandings of anti-terrorism policy from within the citizenry     

Commercialisation or Citizenship?

In a recent pamphlet for the Fabian Society, Colin Crouch criticises the use of commercial techniques such as choice within public services. He does this because he says that commercialisation undermines citizenship. In this article, I question Crouch's claim by arguing that careful use of some commercial methods, in particular choice, might actually promote the sort of participative citizenship that he endorses. This discussion has a bearing on an important set of contemporary policy debates.     

A feminist challenge to the gendered politics of the public/private divide: on due diligence,domestic violence,and citizenship

This article examines the feminist appropriation of the legal principle of due diligence to politicize acts of violence at the hands of private actors within the private sphere. This move expanded traditional notions of state responsibility for violence against women under international human rights law. Using frame analysis, we focus on the institutionalization of this feminist understanding of due diligence through its discursive incorporation in international human rights policy documents and its mobilization in cases of domestic violence litigated within the UN and the Inter-American and European human rights systems. Through this discursive framing work and its institutionalization, feminists have challenged the gendered politics of the public/private divide to change the terms on which differently positioned women can engage with the state and global governance institutions. We argue that this change can potentially reconfigure women's state-bounded and transnational citizenship. The implications of due diligence as a political and sociological concept require more careful consideration by citizenship and human rights scholars.     

Return of the Governors: Citizenship and the New Governance of Neighbourhood Disorder in the UK

Liberal processes of urban governance are based around a concept of the citizen as both governor and governed. This duality suggests a dynamic relationship between the individual citizen, fellow citizens and the state in which responsibility for the governance of public life will oscillate between actors. This paper argues that increasingly the rhetoric and policy of neighbourhood governance in the UK represents a return of the direct role of the state as an 'official' presence in the governance of neighbourhood disorder. Such a return is a consequence of the failure of previous appeals to both 'active citizens' and 'communities' to exert informal social control over their local public spheres. This paper provides a critique of such appeals as a response to the continuing crisis of urban citizenship and 'community' in liberal democracies. The paper analyses the implications for urban citizenship theory of two recent UK policy developments, child safety initiatives (commonly referred to as curfews) and neighbourhood warden schemes and places these initiatives in the context of an increasing role for official housing agencies and private interests in neighbourhood governance. The paper suggests a need for urban policy to reflect the diversity of urban identities and to re-establish the links between civil, political and social rights of citizenship.     

We are all denizens now: on the erosion of citizenship

This article makes a contribution to the general theory of citizenship. It argues that there is a need for a supplementary concept of ‘denizenship’ to illustrate changes to and erosion of postwar social citizenship as famously described by T H Marshall. The first aim is to construct a more theoretically developed idea of what the concept of a ‘denizen’ means in sociological terms. In its conventional meaning, this term describes a group of people permanently resident in a foreign country, but only enjoying limited partial rights of citizenship. I label this Denizenship Type 1. By contrast, Denizenship Type 2 refers to the erosion of social citizenship as citizens begin to resemble denizens or strangers in their own societies. The argument then is that there is a general convergence between citizenship and denizenship. As such, Denizenship Type 2 provides a possible supplement to the various terms that have recently been proposed, such as flexible citizenship, semi-citizenship, or precariat to describe the attenuated social and economic status of citizens under regimes of austerity and diminished rights and opportunities. As the life chances of citizens decline, they come to resemble denizens. One illustration of this basic transition is to be found in the changing nature of taxation. This observation also allows me simply to observe that the political economy of taxation has been somewhat neglected in the recent literature on citizenship where questions about identity and subjectivity have become more dominant. As a result of these socio-economic changes, the modern citizen is increasingly merely a denizen with thin, fragmented, and fragile social bonds to the public world. The corrosion of the social, economic, political, and legal framework of citizenship offers a new slogan: ‘we are all denizens now.’     

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.     

Towards cultural citizenship? Cultural rights and cultural policy in Taiwan

This article reviews existing literature on the construction of cultural citizenship, and argues that cultural citizenship expands the concept of ‘citizenship’, promotes citizens' consciousness and ensures the protection of minority rights. Since the 1990s, three cultural policies have arisen related to cultural citizenship in Taiwan: ‘Community Renaissance’, ‘Multicultural Policy’ and the ‘Announcement of Cultural Citizenship’. ‘Cultural citizenship’ has expanded the concept of citizenship in two ways. First, it has led to the consideration of the minority rights of Taiwanese indigenous peoples, the Hakkas, foreign brides and migrant workers in ‘citizenship’; and second, it has placed emphasis on ‘cultural rights’ in addition to civil rights, political rights and social rights. This article begins by exploring what approach to cultural citizenship is used in cultural policy, and what approach is suitable for practising cultural citizenship in Taiwan. I argue that minority groups practise their cultural rights with the public participation of Community Renaissance. Taiwan's case bears out Stevenson's view: a society of actively engaged citizens requires both the protection offered by rights and opportunities to participate. Finally, this article shows the challenges and contradictions of cultural citizenship in Taiwan: the loss of autonomy and the continuation of cultural inequality.     

Concepts of citizenship underlying EU gender equality policies

This article assesses the framing of gender equality in the EU political discourse from 1995 to 2005 and the conceptualisations of citizenship that emerge from it. To assess the extent to which EU gender equality policies meet the aspirations of the concept of a gender equal citizenship, it develops an analysis of how different feminist approaches to citizenship are related to concepts of rights and responsibilities in EU gender equality policies. The frame analysis of a selection of EU policy documents in the areas of family policies, domestic violence, and gender inequality in politics reflects different configurations of the relation between feminist conceptualisations of citizenship and citizens' distribution of rights and responsibilities. Findings show that both gender-neutral and gender-differentiated conceptualisations of citizenship are present in EU policy documents, while a gender-pluralist approach tends to be absent. They also reveal that, while both men and women are formally treated as right-holders, women are framed as mainly responsible for eradicating the barriers to an equal enjoyment of citizenship rights. Moreover, men and women are constructed as different citizens. The article concludes that EU formal definitions of citizenship based on the concept of equality, while promoting legal gender equality and acknowledging the existence of gender obstacles to the enjoyment of an equal citizenship for women, are not by definition translated into policy initiatives transformative of traditional gender roles. In this respect they could hamper the achievement of a gender equal citizenship in the European Union.     

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.     

Rancière,religion and the political

In the past few decades, the ‘return of the religious’ has been a recurrent theme in popular and academic discourse. From debates regarding the permissibility of religious dress and symbols in the public sphere, to questions of the integration of Muslim immigrants, concerns about the rise of the Christian Right in American politics and the role of Islam in the uprisings of the Arab Spring, a great deal of attention has been accorded to the presence of religion and religious subjects in the public sphere. Such has been the importance attached to accounting for, categorizing and contending with this phenomenon that it has attracted the attention of many of the major figures in contemporary social and political thought. However, the ideas of Jacques Rancière, one of the foremost figures in contemporary political philosophy, are noticeably absent in these discussions. In this article, I take up the task of investigating how Rancière's political philosophy can be brought to bear on debates surrounding the relationship between citizenship, religion and the political. I argue that his reconceptualization of politics, democracy and political subjectivity makes apparent the limitations, and even futility of current debates between advocates of secular universalism and those of religious pluralism, and, through assisting in the critical analysis of the public presence of religion, provide an opening for the potential emergence of alternative forms of community and political subjectivity.     

Spheres of liberty,conflict and power: The public lives of private persons

State‐society relations during the modern period reflect notions of citizenship analogous to Isaiah Berlin's concepts of positive and negative liberty. Positive citizenship, motivated by what Robert O'Brien calls ‘the democratic impulse’, is highly participatory. The politics of seventeenth‐century Protestant social movements constitutes one historical model to which twentieth‐century fundamentalist movements can be compared. Characterized by a shrinkage of the private sphere and an expansion of public life, positive citizenship emphasizes active engagement in establishing and implementing normative standards for individuals and communities, and control of the state for virtuous ends. Negative citizenship concentrates on the protection of individual rights, expanding both the private sphere and a third or meta‐space which evinces qualities of public and private realms simultaneously. The historical model presented is what Jürgen Habermas has called the ‘bourgeois public sphere’, a quasi‐parallel polis from within which critics of state power assert their right to resist and organize their capacity to repel attempts to enforce standards of public virtue however arrived at. These ideal types are compared to different scenarios of state‐society relations to analyze the likely impact on public and private life of rapid globalization.     

Neo(liberal) citizens of Europe: politics,scales, and visibilities of environmental citizenship in contemporary Turkey

The aim of this article is to critically interrogate articulations of environmental citizenship in contemporary Turkey. Specifically, I analyse articulations of environmental citizenship through citizen and activist narratives taken from interviews and focus group discussions. I argue that first, scalar focus on local spaces and individuated responsibility for action that emerge from the narratives are crucial to understand future environmental politics and possibilities in this context. Invoking recent discussions related to the politics and performativities of scale, in particular, allows consideration of the politics of visibility and other consequences of these scalar foci. Second, themes from narrative analysis show key convergences with Europeanization- and neoliberalization-related discourses and shifts. The resonance and overlap between these discourses and practices is significant, particularly as it shows citizen receptivity towards broader ideas related to increased citizen responsibility. As such, the research contributes to efforts to move away from theorization of processes such as neoliberalism as top-down, instead enabling examination of ways that these ideals are taken up, expressed, and refashioned by everyday citizens. The third argument that emerges from the analysis, following from the first two, is the need to theorize power more fully in discussions of environmental citizenship. Bridging with neoliberalism discussions is one possible way to move such a project forward.