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.     

Multileveled citizenship and citizenship education: experiences of students in China's Beijing

With reference to three secondary schools in Beijing, this study investigates students' perceptions of multiple identities at four levels – self, local, national, and global – and the ways in which students form multiple identities. The study uses a mixed methodology of questionnaires and interview surveys to collect data, and identifies four patterns of Beijing students' multiple identities: a high value on self-identity, a strong affective orientation toward local and national identity, minimal distinction between local and national identities, and an imagined global identity. This study provides empirical data that both supplements and challenges the existing literature on citizenship and citizenship education in the context of globalization.     

How citizenship matters: narratives of stateless and citizenship choice in Estonia

The phenomenon of statelessness is most often studied as an issue of international and human-rights law. In contrast, this paper examines narratives of citizenship choice among initially stateless Russian-speaking residents of Estonia in order to explore the practical meanings of (non)citizenship in a context where the available options include both national citizenship and statelessness. While legal aspects of citizenship do explain many of the perceived benefits and disadvantages of various citizenship options, we find that deliberations about citizenship choice also reflect extra-legal normative and affective dimensions of civic belonging. The resulting multidimensional model of citizenship helps account for courses of action that would appear anomalous if citizenship choice were merely an instrumental matter of weighing the costs and benefits of different options. It also points to a growing disjuncture among citizenship as a source of legal rights and obligations, as a normative framework, and as a site of attachment and identification.     

Statelessness,identity cards and citizenship as status in the case of the Nubians of Kenya

Statelessness as a legal and political problem has attracted increasing attention from scholars and international advocacy organisations in recent years. This attention has predominantly focussed on the legal aspects of statelessness, and has generally held the acquisition of citizenship documentation as the primary goal in remedying citizenship deprivation. This article explores the merits of this focus through a case study of the Nubians of Kenya, widely considered stateless until recently. The article connects the focus on citizenship as documented status to a liberal conception of citizenship. The article identifies the ways in which this approach is helpful, that is, as a means of pursuing legal status and possession of individual rights. It then goes on to identify more important ways in which a liberal conception of citizenship falls short of accounting for the Nubians' citizenship problems by neglecting the more collective dimensions of citizenship practice and recognition.     

Introduction: claiming social citizenship

Social citizenship in the classical sense of T.H. Marshall has been declared to be eroded and to have lost its significance. The introduction to this special issue challenges this assumption and argues that recent anthropological work on social citizenship in post-colonial, post Cold War and post-socialist states have shown that social citizenship is relevant and is being claimed by citizens of these states. Historical notions of citizenship as well as claiming rights to state support in return for having worked for the state are at work here. Furthermore the contributions to this issue illustrate how notions and practices of social citizenship compete and sometimes replace other practices of claiming citizenship on the basis of ethnicity, nationality or cultural ties.     

Globalization and citizenship: an Australian dilemma

Democratic citizenship, as it exists in countries like Australia, is premised on a nation-state that has sovereignty over a specific territory demarcated by internationally agreed boundaries. According to this model, citizens are supposed to control the state through democratic processes, and the state is supposed to control what happens on its territory and to decide who or what may cross its boundaries. But today globalization is eroding the capacity of the nation-state to control cross-border flows of finance, commodities, people, ideas and pollution. Powerful pressures are reducing state autonomy with regard to economic affairs, welfare rights and national culture. This leads to important questions: Does the quality of democratic citizenship remain unchanged? Are citizens still the source of political legitimacy? Do we need to rethink the meaning and mechanisms of citizenship to find new ways of maintaining popular sovereignty? How can citizens influence decisions made by global markets, transnational corporations and international organizations? These are problems that all democratic polities face, and Australia is no exception. Political and legal institutions derived from the Anglo-American democratic heritage have worked well for a century and more, but they may need to change significantly if they are to master the new realities. The central question in Castles's article is thus: What can we do to maintain and enhance democratic citizenship for Australians in the context of a globalizing world? To answer this question, he examines some of the inherent contradictions of nation-state citizenship, discusses the meaning of globalization and how it affects citizenship and looks at the effects of globalization and regional integration on Australia. He concludes that it is important to improve the quality of Australian citizenship by various measures: recognizing the special position of indigenous Australians and action to combat racism; combatting social exclusion; reforming the constitution to inscribe rights of active citizenship in a bill of rights; and reasserting the model of multicultural citizenship.     

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.     

Transgendering Mother's Day: blogging as citizens' media,reproductive rights and intimate citizenship

Citizenship is fast emerging as a central concern for transgender politics. This article approaches the topic of transgender citizenship by investigating empirically how the practice of blogging has served as a way of claiming, or practicing, intimate citizenship for transgendered people. Theorization of intimate citizenship helps us to further our understanding of the ways in which our most private decisions and practices are inextricably linked with public institutions, law and state policies. Significantly, this development is also tied up with other characteristically late modern technological advancements, ranging from new reproductive technologies to new Information and Communication Technologies. In the case of transgender politics, such interlacings become particularly perspicacious, not only due to modern discourses concerning diagnosis and treatment, but also because the presence of social media resources affords new possibilities for the sharing of personal and political narratives about ‘being transgendered’. In this article, I investigate an event in the Swedish blogosphere, namely the way in which the national celebration of Swedish Mother's Day became a site for the contestation of the current limitations of the reproductive legal rights for transgendered people, providing an opening for a more general debate on transgender reproductive rights.     

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.     

On citizenship and citizenship education: a Levantine approach and reimagining Israel/Palestine

This article argues in favor of a Levantine approach to citizenship and citizenship education. A Levantine approach calls for some sort of Mediterranean regionalism, which accommodates and promotes overlapping and shared sovereignties and jurisdiction, multiple loyalties, and regional integration. It transcends the paradigmatic statist model of citizenship by recasting the relationship between territoriality, national identity, sovereignty, and citizenship in complex, multilayered and disaggregated constellations. As the case of Israel/Palestine demonstrates, this new approach goes beyond multicultural accommodation and territorial partition. It proposes, among other things, extending the political and territorial boundaries of citizenship to take all the territory between the Mediterranean Sea and Jordan River as one unit of analysis belonging to a larger region.     

Deconstructing naturalization ceremonies as public spectacles of citizenship

ABSTRACT

Naturalizations, unlike inaugurations and national party conventions, are one of the few daily repeated political theatre experiences, replete with monologs, dialogues, costumes, props, actors, stage managers, plural audiences, and staged practices. They serve as a public ritual to render foreigners into members. In so doing, they generate a citizen identity, reinforce the power of the state and confirm a relationship between new citizens, current citizens, and the state. In this article, through an interpretive process including participant-observation and grounded theory approaches, I question the presence, interaction, and roles of the multiple publics (immigrants, observers, civil servants, judges and non-governmental groups) in a naturalization ceremony. I present field notes and reflections from a ‘typical’ US naturalization ceremony. I deconstruct the choreography and structure of the public ritual to show what the public performance of naturalization tells us about what it means to be an American citizen. I explore what messages the state is trying to convey to naturalizing immigrants (and others) through the ritual of the naturalization ceremony. The locus of inquiry is New York City where 70,000 of the 680,000 naturalizations take place every year.     

Dual citizenship and theories of democracy

Dual/multiple citizenship has become a widespread phenomenon in many parts of the world. This acceptance or tolerance of overlapping memberships in political communities represents an important element in the ongoing readjustment of the relationship between citizens and political communities in democratic systems. This article has two goals and parts. First, it evaluates dual citizenship from the perspective of five normative theories of democracy. Liberal and republican as well as multicultural and deliberative understandings of democracy deliver a broad spectrum of arguments in favour of dual citizenship. Only communitarians fear that dual citizenship endangers national democracies. Nevertheless, empirical evidence and national policies largely contradict these fears. The second part of the article reverses the perspective and shows that most theories of democracy do not only legitimate and facilitate the acceptance of dual citizenship – the phenomenon of multiple citizenships induces innovation in democratic theory in turn. A second look at the relationship between dual citizenship and theories of democracy reveals that dual citizenship stimulates refinements, expansions and reconceptualisations of these theories for a transnationalising world.     

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.     

Green citizenship and the political critique of injustice

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

Caught between two worlds: mainland Chinese return migration,hukou considerations and the citizenship dilemma

Issues about migrant rights and protection are raised in cases of return migration when the country that migrants return to prohibits dual citizenship although the migrant has naturalised elsewhere. This article explores the politics of membership and rights faced by former citizens returning to reside in the society they had left. Returning Mainland Chinese migrants with Canadian citizenship status have to navigate China's dual citizenship restriction and the impacts on their Chinese hukou status that confers residency, employment and social rights. This analysis also keeps in view their relationship with the country in which they have naturalised and left, namely Canada. Migrants shuttling between the two countries face a citizenship dilemma as they have limited rights in China whereas their status as Canadian citizens living abroad simultaneously removes them from some rights provided by the Canadian state. This paper thus introduces new and pressing questions about citizenship in the light of return migration trends.     

Within and beyond citizenship: alternative educational initiatives in the Arab society in Israel

In recent years, Arab-Palestinian citizens in Israel are in search of ‘a new vocabulary of citizenship’, among other ways, by resorting to ‘alternative educational initiatives’. We investigate and compare three alternative schools, each challenging the contested conception of Israeli citizenship. Our findings reveal different educational strategies to become ‘claimants of rights’, yet all initiatives demonstrate the constraints Arab citizens face while trying to become ‘activist citizens’ (E.F. Isin, 2009. Citizenship in flux: the figure of the activist citizen. Subjectivity, 29 (1), 367–388.).     

Sudan and South Sudan: identity,citizenship, and democracy in plural societies

This article discusses the institutional legacy of colonialism and how that has affected citizenship in Sudan and South Sudan. It argues that the colonial project made a legal distinction, especially in how citizenship was defined. It outlines problems facing Sudan and South Sudan and the challenges in managing a diverse population. It argues that a failure to build a democratic polity by resorting to ethnic federalism will divide the country along ethnic lines and prevent the emergence of a truly inclusive nation. Finally, the article discusses an alternative solution to the political crisis facing both Sudan and South Sudan, namely citizenship and the establishment of an inclusive framework to manage diverse populations within a unified nation. The article concludes with a discussion of the New Sudan Framework by situating it within the larger debate on democratic nation-building while also discussing its alignment with regional and international law.     

State,citizenship, and the urban poor

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

Diasporic citizenship and militarization: Punjabi soldiers in the world wars

This article delves into the uses of history and examines how the enlisting of Indian soldiers – particularly from Punjab – into the British Indian Army during the First and Second World Wars has been memorialized and remembered in contemporary Britain. This issue has become particularly salient in the light of the politics of the so-called ‘war on terror’ or ‘new imperialism’, which Paul Gilroy and Vron Ware argue has heightened tendencies towards militarism in British society. Using examples from the public sphere – remembrance day events, TV documentaries and army recruitment fairs – as well as interview material, I argue that Britain's Punjabi communities have been organizing in order to weave themselves into the national tapestry by memorializing role played by Punjabis in the First and Second World Wars – iconic to the national fantasy, using this forgotten history to demand recognition from the state and stake a claim for citizenship. In the ‘new imperialism’, however, it is not equally possible for Sikh and Muslim Punjabis to argue for their inclusion on the terms of militarized citizenship, and the various chords within the diaspora seem to be increasingly disharmonious, effacing their composite and shared colonial history.     

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.