Ethnicity,citizenship and reproduction: Taiwanese wives making citizenship claims in Malaysia

This paper focuses on the experience of one specific group of Taiwanese women married to Chinese Malaysian men to examine the contestational process of bidding for citizenship status in an ethnicized polity. Positioned within a trajectory of transnational linkages between origin and host countries, they achieve success through making use of networking links with co-ethnic Chinese Malaysian women who are well-positioned within government bureaucracy, while forwarding an argument based on familial ideology and the (reproductive) citizenship rights of their Malaysian husbands. As noncitizens, they nevertheless engage in socially contributive ‘acts of citizenship’ that signify their suitability as citizens, nonthreatening to social cohesion. Furthermore, they enhance their strategy by ethnic boundary-making efforts aimed at distancing themselves from People's Republic of China wives who constitute a stereotyped and stigmatized ‘other.’ The discussion makes a contribution to the literature on ethnicity, citizenship, and gender.     

Arabs in the urban social landscapes of Malaysia: historical connections and belonging

The urban landscapes of Malaysia have witnessed a marked increase in the number of non-citizens with the influx of foreign workers to satisfy the needs of a rapidly expanding economy. This paper examines how notions of belonging might have changed through the subsequent interaction between citizens and non-citizens in the Klang Valley, the political and economic centre of the country. It focuses specifically on Arab migrants who find themselves in a region – the Malay world – with which they have had historical connections. Arabs, primarily from the Hadramaut in Yemen, have long formed creole communities in the region. Recent Arab migrants have arrived at a time of two noteworthy developments. First, there is a rediscovery of Arabness underway among creoles. Second, Malaysia's ethnically diverse citizenry has seen renewed and heightened challenges, based on historical arguments, to its sense of belonging. By focusing on novel migrants with historical connections, this paper relates the question of belonging to history and asks a number of questions. How are Arabs shaping the social landscape? How do the historical connections between Arabs and the Malay world matter? What are the implications of the new Arab presence for Malaysian society as a whole?     

Democratic Norms and Means of Communication: Public Sphere,Fourth Estate,Freedom of Communication

Abstract

This article assesses some major democratic norms commonly invoked in relation to means of communication or ‘media’, especially in the context of ‘media policy’. The paper argues that freedom of communication provides the most appropriate normative discourse in which to re-articulate the case for the European policy practice of ‘regulated pluralism’ outside Europe. Recent developments in Australia provide a brief case-study of this thesis.     

Intimate encounters: the ambiguities of belonging in the transnational migration of Indonesian domestic workers to Malaysia

In this article I explore ‘belonging’ both in terms of personal relatedness and national belonging in the context of Indonesian domestic worker migration to Malaysia. Riddled with metaphors of kinship both on the level of diplomatic ties between the two ‘kin states’ of Indonesia and Malaysia as well as on the level of intimate relations between employers and employees, the migration of Indonesian domestic workers to Malaysia allows for a critical analysis of the ways in which boundaries are drawn and redrawn on the political as well as on the intimate level of daily coexistence. The article argues that kinship provides a fruitful avenue from which to consider belonging in context of the specific relations between Indonesia and Malaysia and explores how belonging to the family and the nation is negotiated by Indonesian domestic workers, Malaysian employers and so-called ‘maid agents’.     

Environmentally friendly food initiatives in Iran: between environmental citizenship and pluralizing the public sphere

In this article I analyze acts of citizenship within environmentally friendly food initiatives in Iran. I show that act of environmental citizenship intersects with politics of pluralizing the public sphere within these initiatives. I present original research that shows how these practices are determined by state-society relations. It is shown that the main objective of most of the initiators of these enterprises is to provide a source of information about healthy and environmentally friendly food as well as providing access to such food. In contrast, many consumers also use these initiatives as spaces where they can experience and make a more pluralistic public sphere. This article contributes to a better understanding of the concept of environmental citizenship and demonstrates the relevance of the concept to broader notions of citizenship.     

Creating the Islamic Republic of Iran: wives and daughters of martyrs,and acts of citizenship

This paper develops a notion of citizenship which accounts for interruptions of, and compliances with, routines in governance. It applies the concept beyond a legal status and electoral practice to decipher how everyday encounters with the state can lead to creative institutional reconfigurations. Focusing on the wives and daughters of martyrs from the Iran–Iraq war (1980–1988), this paper poses ideologically committed contestation and collaborations with national structures of power as acts of citizenship. With particular attention to temporality and constructive uses of memory, this discussion introduces a governing technique created and utilized by women to remake the state as they assert a self-determined citizenry status.     

Postcolonial strangers in a cosmopolitan world: hybridity and citizenship in the Franco-Maghrebian borderland

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.     

Speaking through the body: detention and bodily resistance in Italy

This work reflects on the character of the modalities that non-status migrants are deploying in the context of current politics of the camp, with special attention to the Italian context. It will suggest that once the possibilities of dissent through the voice (the political tool par excellence in a liberal democracy, and one associated primarily with rationality and the capacity for reason) are foreclosed, migrants tend to resort to another powerful tool: their own body. Detainees have made their bodies speak by resorting to practices of self-mutilation, hunger strike, suicide attempts, and lips and eyes sewing. Detainees' violent acts of dissent are not dissimilar from the violent modalities used, a few centuries earlier, by some enslaved people who chose liberty through death. The aim is not so much to make comparison between the two figures, but to emphasise the way in which, under conditions of extreme control, subjugation or unfreedom, acts of dissent and resistance – and thus acts of politics, as articulated in Rancière's concept of dissensus – are not necessarily enacted through democratic practices but, on the contrary, through whatever modalities are available to them, including violent (self-harm) modalities.     

Participation,Dialogue, and Civic Engagement: Understanding the Role of Organized Civil Society in Promoting Active Citizenship in the European Union

Abstract

This article looks at current policies concerning the civic and political participation of youths, women, migrants, and minorities in the European Union. It highlights the ways in which active citizenship and civic engagement have become a political priority for European institutions. Representation of local policy actors at the supranational level and strategies for the inclusion of civil society provide a platform for evaluating the impact of Europeanization at the national and subnational level. The article focuses on key discourses and narratives associated with specific policy frames (e.g. European citizenship, European social policies, and the European public sphere (EPS)). Some of the key questions addressed by the article are: What are the strategies that are employed, both by the European institutions in Brussels and organized civil society (OCS), to enhance participation and reciprocal communication? What vision of governance do practices such as active engagement and civil dialogue represent? Drawing on current theories of governance, our article contributes to the debate about the EPS by evaluating the role of OCS in bridging the gap between European institutions and national polities. Equally, our focus on traditionally marginal groups provides a platform for assessing the institutionalization of the ‘European social dimension’.     

African international students in Klang Valley: colonial legacies,postcolonial racialization,and sub-citizenship

This article examines the experiences of African international students attending universities around the Malaysian capital, Kuala Lumpur. I draw upon participant-observations, interviews, and discussions with international students from several African nations and Malaysian citizens of various ethnicities. Malaysian educational programs are actively marketed in Africa, where many students and their families are motivated to pursue an affordable English-language education in an Asian nation. However, African students face an unfriendly and racist reception in the greater Klang Valley area. Persisting colonial legacies of white supremacy, global flows of negative images of Blacks, and newly emergent meta-cultural circulation of representations of Africans-cum-‘Nig(g)erians’ as predatory males shape their experiences of exclusion from cosmopolitan citizenship. I argue that African international students are cast into a low grade of cultural citizenship that cuts across zones of graduated sovereignty. African students adapt to this urban context, perform acts of citizenship, and attempt to foster cosmopolitan relations among themselves and in the broader society. Moments of critical cosmopolitanism from Malaysians are rare and need to be expanded.     

For ‘common struggles of migrants and locals’. Migrant activism and squatting in Athens

ABSTRACT

This article analysis the socio-political form of the migrant squats, and the socio-spatial interactions they foster and generate. Drawing on empirical research, it focuses on the Athenian context where, since September 2015, political groups belonging to the anti-authoritarian and Left-libertarian movement, occupied some empty buildings to host migrants in transit through the country. From a political perspective, the squats are interpreted here as strategies of struggle to gain access to the space of the city and they also constitute instances of migrant activism and resistance to the European border regime. Moreover, migrant occupations represent practices and sites for contesting citizenship, intended as a category of political status; as such, they exceed the limits of this category and move beyond the boundaries of the nation-state, originating practices of citizenship ‘from below’, while at the same time they produce subjectivities that choose to ‘opt out’ of citizenship as a legal status. This article is situated within the contextualisation of space and autonomy. Migrant squats are looked at from the angle of the ‘gaze of autonomy’, since they are aimed both at contesting citizenship as an exclusionary feature, and at revindicating the activists’ (both migrants and non) presence in the space of city.     

The cost of belonging: exploring class and citizenship in Soweto's water war

More than a decade since the dawn of democracy, South Africa remains one of the most unequal societies in the world. Civil and political citizenship may have – rhetorically at least – reduced the stark racial inequality in the relationship between citizen and state evident under apartheid. Some authors suggest a positive correlation between social citizenship and social equality. However, in post-apartheid South Africa, deep socio-economic inequalities continue to mar the democratic content of society. Although rights to welfare and social services are nominally in place and are enshrined in the constitution, scores of poor, black South Africans are unable to claim social citizenship, precisely as a result of their class position. Using, as a lens, community struggles in Soweto against the commodification of water, this article seeks to explore the relationship between citizenship and class. It does this by addressing the relationship between the state and its citizens within the context of service delivery, paying particular attention to the impact of prepaid water meters and to the strategies that were employed by community movements in Soweto's ‘water war’. The key argument is that under the system of capitalism, class inequality will persist regardless of the extent of citizenship.     

Claiming rights in exile: women’s insurgent citizenship practices in the Thai-Myanmar borderlands

ABSTRACT

This paper examines insurgent citizenship practices employed by activists in the exiled Burmese women’s movement from the 1990s and onwards. Consisting of political exiles, refugees and ethnic insurgents, this movement has successfully used the transnational, transitory space of the borderlands to constitute its participants as political subjects with legitimate claims to rights, citizenship and leadership. Drawing on interviews, this analysis interrogates women’s activism through the lens of insurgent citizenship practices. Thus, how have Burmese women’s activists claimed rights and lived citizenship in exile? Three main strategies are examined: firstly, women activists have positioned themselves as political actors and authorities through involvement in governance and humanitarian aid delivery in refugee camps. Secondly, they have claimed rights and political subjectivity through engagement with international norms, networks and arenas. Thirdly, they have claimed citizenship and political influence in oppositional nation-making projects through engaging with and negotiating ethno-nationalist armed struggles. The analysis highlights the multifaceted nature of women’s insurgent citizenship practices, showing how they navigate multiple marginalized subject positions, direct their rights claims towards multiple governing authorities, and enact multiple political communities.     

Contesting belonging and social citizenship: the case of refugee housing in Armenia

Using the example of the right to housing, this article addresses the ways in which the practice of social citizenship, including popular claims and expectations and actual state provisions, has changed in post-Soviet Armenia. It examines the claims of Armenian refugees from Azerbaijan to state-provided permanent housing, which they consider the key condition for becoming ‘citizens’ and ‘locals’ in Armenia, and the Armenian state's solutions to the housing issue following the collapse of the Soviet Union. It demonstrates how the Soviet-era housing policy has left its mark on current notions and practices of social citizenship in Armenia. Even though social rights in general have decreased, notions of social citizenship are still present not only in the expectations and claims of needy refugees and citizens without housing but also in the state's acknowledgement of responsibility for its citizens' welfare (though currently providing only for those in extreme need), and in the equalising effect, the state housing programme has had for the majority of refugees who participated in it.     

The Dismissal of Prime Ministers in the Asian Commonwealth: Comparing Democratic Deconsolidation in Malaysia and Sri Lanka

This article comparatively analyses processes of democratic deconsolidation in the Asian Commonwealth states of Malaysia and Sri Lanka by examining two recent constitutional crises in which the head of state dismissed, or attempted to dismiss, the serving prime minister during a parliamentary term. These episodes brought to a close fledgling reform movements that had obtained historic electoral mandates in both countries. The article discusses the Westminster-derived constitutional provisions concerning government formation as well as the distinctive features of political culture that animate those formal frameworks in the two countries. It is argued that while Malaysia and Sri Lanka possess the formal institutions of liberal democracy that notionally enable both pluralistic democracy and greater democratisation, their political cultures still have sufficient potency to be a counteracting force against the deeper consolidation of constitutional democracy. Democratisation therefore remains a work in progress in both countries.     

Conceptualizing Islamic banking and finance: a comparison of its development and governance in Malaysia and Singapore

In response to the limited engagement with critical social science concerning the governance of Islamic banking and finance (IBF), this paper compares and conceptualizes the development and governance of IBF in Malaysia and Singapore. We argue that IBF governance in Malaysia and Singapore can be distinguished on the basis of ethnic politics, moral suasion, product demand, product innovation, and the character of state practices. Concerning the latter, we contend that the political economy of both countries can be characterized as broadly involving a ‘neoliberal-developmentalism’, but we nuance this by positing a transition in Malaysia from a ‘semi-developmentalism’ in the 1980s to what we call an ‘Islamic and internationalising ordoliberalism’ beginning in the 2000s. In turn, the governance of IBF in Singapore involves a combination of neoliberal developmentalism, which nonetheless also entails some form of Islamic ordoliberalism.     

Citizenship rights in Malaysia: the experience of social and institutional discrimination among ethnic minorities

This article examines the experience of political, social and cultural rights for Malaysia's ethnic minorities. Using a survey method, our research finds that while Malaysia has made substantial economic progress, lack of attention to political, social and cultural rights for ethnic minorities in Malaysia has meant that ethnic minorities have become increasingly dissatisfied with their experience of citizenship. Experiences of institutional and social discrimination within Malaysia's ethnically differentiated model of citizenship are common. Such experiences can lead to low levels of confidence in Malaysia's national institutions and have the capacity to undermine the kind of political support that is necessary for good governance and national stability.     

Introduction: the body as a site for politics: citizenship and practices of contemporary slavery

This special issue of Citizenship Studies brings the meaning of citizenship into dialogue with recent work on the body and with practices of contemporary slavery. In bringing the concepts of citizenship, bodies and slavery into collision, we highlight the need to couple slavery with possibilities of citizenship as an alternative to the way in which, as Paddy McQueen below puts it, ‘citizenship and slavery are mutually exclusive: one can be either a citizen or a slave, not both’. Recent ideas about the body as a site for politics, where the body is understood in terms of embodied relationality in a situation – a necessarily social category – are a means for bringing about a richer encounter between the concepts of citizenship understood as political subjectivity (as developed in the work of Engin Isin), bodies and slavery. Practices of slavery deny relationality, based instead on a binary master/slave logic of power relations. This introduction connects citizenship with slavery, by identifying citizenship as embodied political subjectivity and slavery as one of the conditions in which the very possibility of this is denied. Taking embodied relationality into account, recognising the necessarily social embodiment of concepts and abjuring an abstract, disembodied sphere of concepts, thus disrupts the standard understanding of slavery as rights violations.     

United States democracy assistance in Malaysia: the nature and impact of concurrent strategy

This exploratory article seeks to analyze the nature and impact of one of the main democracy promoters in Malaysia i.e. the United States (US). The US is a promoter that is often being alleged with interfering with Malaysian domestic affairs, especially since the sacking of former Deputy Prime Minister, Anwar Ibrahim in 1998. This article argues that the US democracy promotion in Malaysia can be conceptualized under the framework of a concurrent democracy assistance strategy. This is due to the fact that while the US is supporting the non-regime compatible program, it is also concurrently channeling bigger aid for regime-compatible program to Malaysia from 1999–2015. The improvement of diplomatic ties between both countries since post-Mahathir era and the prioritization of security issues have led to a more engaging conduct of democracy promotion. Despite the US continuous funding of non-regime-compatible programs through non-state actors, this approach was nevertheless balanced by cordial relations at the state level. Nevertheless, the effect of US democracy assistance and promotion on Malaysia’s democratic development has been minimal, reinforcing the views on the difficulty to promote democracy in a semi-authoritarian regime.     

Food for Thought: Reflections on a Counter-hegemonic Food-related Intervention in a South African University

Currently the Academy operates primarily as a space that helps to create and cement neoliberal hegemony in the Gramscian sense. However, since hegemony is never complete, universities are a site of struggle and the opportunity exists to engage in a “war of position” within them. This must necessarily involve allowing space for counter-hegemonic discourses to emerge through critical reflection on “common sense” discourses, as well as the deliberate inclusion of counter-hegemonic thinking and theory from below. This article reflects on an attempt to do this in a South African university, the University of KwaZulu-Natal, in relation to the issue of food. The Food Festival was an attempt to subvert interlocking hegemonic discourses, including that of food security, by “reading the world” (à la Freire) in order to understand the actual nature of existing food systems as inherently oppressive, and “inserting” the concept of food sovereignty as developed by the global peasants’ movement La Via Campesina. After considering the counter-hegemonic intentions of the Festival, the article reflects on its uneven success.