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.     

Korea's technological development

Abstract

Indigenous peoples’ rights, including the right to self-determination, are increasingly codified in international law and policy and disseminated globally by international organizations. These norms mark a profound change in the ideals of citizenship promoted by the international community, away from linguistically and institutionally homogenous citizenship in centralized states to group-differentiated citizenship in decentralized, multi-level and multi-lingual states that use local and regional autonomy for the accommodation of indigenous peoples. Essential to realizing these norms is the devolution of some degree of autonomy to sub-central state units substantially controlled by indigenous communities. Because the transfer of powers to indigenous peoples is crucial to their accommodation, protection and participation in modern states, and because decentralization programs are an important component of reform agendas in most developing countries, it is important to understand how these emerging norms are integrated into real-world decentralization processes.

This article analyzes the application of the World Bank's safeguards policy for indigenous peoples within the institution's support to decentralization reform in Cambodia. The analysis demonstrates that under certain circumstances, the policy not only fails to translate into effective protection but leads to outcomes diametrically opposed to its objectives. In its current design, Bank support to decentralization contributes to the marginalization of indigenous peoples in Cambodia and undermines the institutional, cultural and natural resources upon which their empowerment and participation depends. In environments in which full compliance might be unrealistic to accomplish by individual projects, safeguard obligations lead to a strategy on the part of Bank projects of avoiding geographical and policy areas that are likely to trigger the safeguards policy, in order to reduce projects’ vulnerability to non-compliance claims. The article discusses how more effective application of the safeguards policy might be achieved and how strategies for the empowerment of indigenous peoples can more effectively draw on decentralization frameworks.     

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.     

A comparative view of indigenous citizenship issues

Following the Wik decision it is being suggested that Australia ought now to revisit the translation of special legal norms formulated in international law with respect to the human rights of indigenous citizens. These have previously underpinned developments in both Australia and Scandinavia with respect to indigenous people. Recent Australian developments, particularly the struggle over indigenous property rights, exemplify the argument of O'Neill (1997) in the first volume of Citizenship Studies, which points to the absorption of civic autonomy by market sovereignty. O'Neill is correct to suggest that the dominance of market sovereignty reduces the political participation of those incapable of the competitive struggle for private affluence and that this has a squalid dimension. Central to this is the denial of the notion of community and dominance of the market. This dominance has obscured the significance of the Australian High Court's recognition of aboriginal land rights in Mabo. The decision put the incorrect application of terra nullius—or no man's land—to Australia to rights. It made it possible for the nation to contemplate indigenous sovereignty consequent upon the recognition of native title property rights. Australia's translation of those rights with the Native Title Act 1993 (Cth) looked to international law for its rationale. The rights of the Sami people have been developed in Scandinavia largely with reference to the evolution of international law on indigenous peoples. As we approach 2000, Australia cannot continue to ignore the special legal norms in international law relating to citizenship of indigenous peoples. International law informs attempts by indigenous people in modern times to regain some of what they lost in the past.     

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.     

Who is this we that gives the gift? Native American Political Theory and The Western Tradition

Abstract

The allocation of self-determination rights to minority groups is a highly charged issue around the world, but the difficulties are particularly acute in the case of indigenous peoples within the white settler states. While liberal multiculturalism offers a ‘solution’ to this ‘problem of diversity’ through a system of differentiated citizenship rights, this comes only at the expense of excluding dissenting voices from the intercultural dialogue. Through an engagement with the multi-faceted critique of liberal multiculturalism advanced by Native American political theory, the limits of the recognition paradigm are identified, and the possibilities offered by a reconstructed Proudhonian federalism are described.     

Naked protest: the maternal politics of citizenship and revolt

This article explores immigrant protest, citizenship and their relationship, through an account of a ‘naked protest’ by a group of mothers, refused asylum seekers and ‘illegal immigrants’ at Yarl's Wood immigration removal centre in England and ends with an account of the use of the ‘naked curse’ in a protest by an indigenous group of mothers against global oil corporations in the Niger Delta. Woven together from activist materials, news reports, interviews, documentaries and historical data, I recount and mobilise these protests to think about ‘the scaling of bodies’ (Marion-Young 1990) and citizenship under neoliberalism, and the routes through which motherhood is mobilised as a site of political agency and resistance to processes of disenfranchisement. I argue that these maternal protests challenge the ‘catastrophic functionalism’ of Agamben-inspired accounts of ‘bare life’, and offer an alternative lens through which to perceive the ethical and political claims made by abject populations (Papadopoulos et al. 2008, p. 198). In thinking through and with these naked protests, this article reframes the sexual politics of citizenship and brings questions of maternity and natality to bear on citizenship studies.     

(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’.     

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.     

Hard times for citizenship: Women's movements in Chile and Mexico

This article comparatively analyses the cases of Mexico and Chile to understand how women's movements contest the meaning of citizenship in various national contexts. We also assess the consequences that different movement strategies, such as ‘autonomy’ versus ‘double militancy’, have for movements' citizenship goals. To explain the different outcomes in the two cases, we focus on the nature of the democratic transition, the internal coherence of women's movements, the nature of alliances with other civil society actors, the ideological orientation of the newly democratized state, the form of women's agency within the state, and the nature of the neoliberal economic reforms. We argue that a serious problem for women in both Chile and Mexico is the fact that governments themselves are deploying the concept of citizenship as a way to legitimate their social and economic policies. While women's movements seek to broaden the meaning of citizenship to include social rights, neoliberal governments employ the rhetoric of citizen activism to encourage society to provide its own solutions to economic hardship and poverty. While this trend is occurring in both Chile and Mexico, there are some features of the political opportunity structure in Chile that enable organized women to contest the state's more narrow vision of democratic citizenship. In Mexico, on the other hand, the neoliberal economic discourse of the current government is matched by a profoundly conservative ideological rhetoric, thereby reducing the political opportunities for women to forward a gender equality agenda.     

Reconciling cultural diversity with a democratic community: Mestizaje as opposed to the usual suspects

A fascinating development within the liberal‐communitarian debate is how to deal with cultural diversity in increasingly heterogeneous democracies. Particularly noteworthy are Will Kymlicka's recasting of liberalism to deal with cultural minorities, especially the indigenous peoples of Canada and Charles Taylor's and Michael Walzer's articulation of a ‘deep diversity’ with regard to the federal relationship of Quebec to Canada as a whole. Both approaches, though, insufficiently address how combinations of cultures have been underway in the Americas for the past 500 years. Instead, I contend that mestizaje, the combination of cultures which has ensued in Mexico and the United States Southwest, articulates a ‘unity in diversity’ in which cultures transform each other without culminating in assimilation. To bolster my exegesis of mestizaje from the works of the Virgil Elizondo and Gloria Anzaldua, I accent how Jeremy Waldron's cosmopolitanism, Iris Marion Young's relational group theory, and Homi Bhabha's hybridity similarly illustrate how proposals such as Kymlicka's or Taylor/Walzer's insufficiently incorporate how integral heterogeneity is to cultural identity. In view of how ‘the border’ between the United States and Mexico exemplifies the growing intersection of diverse cultures from the developed and developing world, mestizaje offers that the intersection of multiple cultures in collaborative—not hegemonic—relations is intrinsic to realizing democratic citizenship.     

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.     

Campzenship: reimagining the camp as a social and political space

This article engages with current debates on the sociology of camps and camp-like institutions in contemporary society. Drawing on ethnographic material collected in Italy in ‘nomad camps’ where forcibly displaced Roma from former Yugoslavia were sheltered in the 1990s and 2000s, it argues that Agamben's conceptualisation of the camp as a space of exception, by constructing the camp as other to an idealised notion of citizenship and the rule of law, offers limited purchase for a sociological investigation of the complexity and ambivalence of social relations in and around camps as well as residents' everyday practices and experiences of political membership. Focusing on the resources, entitlements and ‘rights’ of camp residents and their interactions with state, regional and local authorities and non-governmental actors, this article invites to de-exceptionalise the camp and the experiences of its residents, and proposes the concept of ‘campzenship’ to capture the specific and situated form of political membership produced in and by the camp. Getting closer to the camp and its inhabitants through the adoption of an ethnographic gaze reveals the camp space as paradigmatic of the stratification and diversification of political membership in contemporary society, a social and political terrain where rights, entitlements and obligations are reshaped, bended, adjusted, neglected and activated by and through everyday interactions.     

Chinese traditional world citizenship thoughts and its impact on the cultivation of Chinese world citizenship awareness

To better cultivate their world citizenship awareness better in the future, the Chinese citizens today need to inherit the fine Chinese traditional world citizenship thoughts. The Chinese traditional world citizenship thoughts, with ideas such as ‘Datong shijie’ (‘a world of grand unity’), ‘Tianren heyi’ (‘unity of heaven and human’), ‘Rendao zhuyi’ (humanitarianism), and ‘Heping zhuyi’ (pacifism), contained the seeds of a concept of world citizenship. In comparison with the Western counterpart, the citizen consciousness in China's traditional society was very weak, China's traditional minzhong (people) concepts were based on its state concept of ‘Tian Xia’ (All-under-Heaven), and a sense of citizenship in the late Qing was built by using the cultural resources of both Confucianism and Western philosophy. For the transcendence of Chinese citizenship toward world citizenship, the first thing to do is to foster a civil spirit in China, the second, to promote the growth of China's civil society, the third, to encourage Chinese citizens to actively take part in global governance and bear international responsibilities, and the fourth, to pay more attention to the role of Chinese universities, which serve as the fundamental basis, support, channel, and venue for fostering world citizenship awareness.     

Making space for space

This article explores the effectiveness of appeals to ‘active citizenship’ as an answer to the ‘neoliberal’ political vocabulary of consumer choice and market freedom. It does so through a case study on recent reforms to post-compulsory education in Australia. A common response to education and social welfare policy is to expect government to accord with ideals of citizenship such as self-determination, participation and equality. However, the case study suggests that the governmental rationalities of modern mass-education systems are irreducible to these abstractions. Reference to the social rights of citizens is embedded in the rationales of social and education policy. Nevertheless, this should not be construed as the recognition or misrecognition of an absolute ideal or principle. Instead, the negotiation of social rights can be seen as the product of the mass school system's own capacity to apply common norms to a population and to use these norms in maintaining the settlements negotiated within expanding social welfare systems.     

Making claims for migrant workers: human rights and citizenship

Migrant workers claims for greater protection in a globalized world are typically expressed either in the idiom of international human rights or citizenship. Instead of contrasting these two normative frames, the paper explores the extent to which human rights and citizenship discourses intersect when it comes to claims by migrant workers. An analysis of the international human and labour rights instruments that are specifically designed for migrant workers reveals how neither discourse questions the assumption of territorial state sovereignty. Drawing upon sociological and political approaches to human rights claims, I evaluate the Arendtian-inspired critique of international human rights, which is that they ignore the very basis ‘right to have rights’. In doing so, I discuss the different dimensions of citizenship and conclude that international rights can be used by migrant workers to assert right claims that reinforce a conception of citizenship that, although different from national citizenship, has the potential to address their distinctive social location.     

Official apologies,reconciliation, and settler colonialism: Australian indigenous alterity and political agency

The burgeoning literature on transitional justice, truth commissions, reconciliation and official apologies tends to ignore the conditions of settler states in which ‘reconciliation’ needs to take account of indigenous minorities. The settler colonialism literature is worth including in the general discussion because it is exceptionally reflective about political theory (the constitutional recognition of indigenous rights) and ethnogenesis (the origin and viability of both settler and indigenous identities), challenging mainstream liberalism, in particular, to account for difference beyond platitudes about multiculturalism. This article highlights the postcolonial critiques of the Australian governments' apology to the indigenous peoples of the country. The authors of these critiques seek to protect indigenous alterity from the Australian state, which they regard as irredeemably colonialist, especially in its liberal and progressive mode. The article suggests that Indigenous political agency transcends the resistance/co-option dichotomy presented in much of the apology's commentary.     

Terror,territoriality and the struggle for indigeneity and citizenship in northern Nigeria

The struggle of the minority ethnic groups against the majority Hausa-Fulani ethnic-amalgam in the north of Nigeria has persisted. As a result of the twentieth-century jihad and politico-cultural and economic factors, Fulani (Muslims) are found in many parts of the minority areas of the geographical north. Many of the minority ethnic groups often claim to be ‘indigenous’ to the areas and regard the Fulani – and Hausa – as ‘settlers’. The struggle for political, economic and social values and rights in these communities often produce violent clashes between these indigenous groups and the settler Hausa-Fulani. This paper uses the territorial claims and counter-claims over indigeneity in the Yelwa area between the Tarok/other ethnic (Christian) groups and the Fulani/other ethnic (Muslim) groups which degenerated into serial blood-letting in 2004 to interrogate the citizen-deficit in Nigeria, and the contradictions of reconciling indigenous rights with citizenship rights in a typical multi-ethnic postcolonial state.     

Economic cooperation in Northeast Asia: The proposed Tumen River scheme

Abstract

This paper examines a relatively unexplored aspect of the Russo-Japanese territorial dispute: the involvement of subnational actors. It focuses in particular on the sustained campaign of domestic lobbying and paradiplomacy by elites from the Far East region of Sakhalin aimed at preventing the Russian central government from transferring the South Kuril Islands/Northern Territories to Japan during the 1990s. It explores the various responses to the ‘Sakhalin factor’ from federal authorities in Russia, as well as private and public bodies in Japan, highlighting the subsequent localization and pluralization of diplomatic channels. The paper also considers why the ‘Sakhalin factor’ became so prominent, pointing to a synergy of factors that include the high-profile anti-concessionary campaigns of the Sakhalin political elite, the fallout from Russia's troubled attempts at state building and a possible convergence of interests between Boris Yeltsin and regional authorities. The paper concludes with an analysis of how Vladimir Putin's federal reforms, launched in 2000, have diminished Sakhalin's authority over the South Kuril Islands.     

Reconfiguring citizenship and nationality: dual citizenship of Taiwanese migrants in China

Many researchers have redefined citizenship to better understand the membership status aspired and demanded by contemporary migrants. As a result, the concept of ‘membership’ as opposed to citizenship was proposed in delineating the decoupling between citizenship and nationality; immigrant demands for rights and state policies in response can thereby be interpreted without considering the political meanings of citizenship. However, the decoupling of citizenship and national identity can be challenged when it comes to dual citizenship, especially when the homeland and host states are engaged in political tensions. This article examines the shifting policies of China (the People's Republic of China, or PRC) and Taiwan (the Republic of China, or ROC) towards the citizenship conferred to Taiwanese migrants in China. The findings of this research suggest that political dimension (including political rights and obligations) should be regarded as an integral part of citizenship (i.e. national membership) especially in the rival-state context. The Taiwan–China case can contribute to our understanding of citizenship policy changes under the double pressure of inter-state rivalry and globalization. The globalizing forces help create conditions for ‘flexible citizenship’ in the ‘zones of hypergrowth’, while in the case of Taiwan–China inter-state competition draws governments and people back to zones of loyalty, the nationally defined memberships.