From citizenship to human rights: the stakes for democracy

A review of the literature on citizenship shows a trend away from anchoring citizenship practices to the nation-state and a move towards recasting the concept in universal terms. The paper examines this trend by focusing on the writings of Held, Bohman, and Benhabib. It distinguishes their ‘deliberative’ approach to citizenship, and suggests that this leads them to reformulate citizenship in a way which differs little from human rights. Although the paper shares in the view that a move to a human rights politics would pave the way for a more equitable order, it argues that there is also a risk. By drawing on the agonistic perspective on democratic politics, the paper shows that the risk is that we might undermine democratic politics by reducing it to a single principle.     

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.     

The Partition's long shadow: the ambiguities of citizenship in Assam,India

Citizenship practices in the Indian state of Assam have a serious fault line. The government appears uninterested in policing borders and enforcing the citizen/alien distinction. This has drawn the ire of even the Indian Supreme Court. Certain ambiguities about citizenship in post-Partition India explain these practices. Pragmatic politicians have adapted to the reality of a post-Partition space that does not conform to the idealized notion of a bounded national territory with a clearly defined community of citizens. However, the tensions between ‘the national order of things’ and the reality of a non-national space have consequences: they adversely affect governmental legitimacy. Policies premised on the fiction of hard national borders that are fundamentally at odds with ground realities cannot provide the foundation for a stable legitimate political order.     

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.     

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 unbearable rightfulness of being human: citizenship,displacement, and the right to not have rights

Claims to human rights protection made by displaced persons are displaced from the universe of humanity and rendered ineffective by the geopolitical character of modern international human rights law, in favour of the protection of citizens' rights claims. In response, there is increasing interest in leveraging respect for and protection of the rights of displaced persons through extension of the rights enjoyed and supposedly borne by emplaced citizens. However, it is a mistake to assume that humans as citizens bear human rights or that the freedoms that they may be able to extend beyond state boundaries are universalisable. The extension of the right to citizenship functions to displace questions of human rights themselves. The question of the human in rights is in fact always displaced, as long as the human subject is acted upon as if it could possess rights. In paying attention to the critical perspectives with which displaced persons confront the citizen, she or he may come to appreciate the fact that the universality of human rights is served where one does not claim to have rights but, rather, actively engages, without limits, with others in the struggle for rights and their respect.     

Assessing models of citizenship in the EU: the idea of responsive citizenship

There is an interesting debate about democracy and citizenship in the EU. Views diverge about the features of democratic deficits currently facing the EU and accordingly, about the scope for Union citizenship. The paper suggests an analytical distinction between asymmetric and symmetric normative models of dual – national and Union – citizenship. Moreover, it proposes an alternative model of dual citizenship that puts emphasis on the responsiveness of citizens vis-à-vis phenomena that undermine democratic governance and the claim for equal respect and concern. One of the main ideas of responsive citizenship is that effective democratic control should complement procedural legitimacy in the EU as a means to prevent phenomena of political domination and guardianship. This is possible through the combination of competences ascribed on citizens through national and Community legislation vis-à-vis national and Union executive bodies.     

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.     

The psychiatric power of neo-liberal citizenship: the North Korean human rights crisis,North Korean settlers,and incompetent citizens

This essay discusses how North Korean settlers in South Korea are engaged in the rubric of neo-liberal citizenship to program the idea of an enterprise of free and autonomous selves. I call into question the psychiatric intervention in the North Korean population deprived of psychological capacities to be autonomous and responsible for their social life. My argument is that the psychiatric diagnosis of strange mental properties presents the criteria of successful assimilation as an antidote to the psychological oppression that North Korean settlers must have experienced, encouraging the South Korean public to tolerate the social deviance of these settlers.     

Not life but the world is at stake: Hannah Arendt on citizenship in the age of the social

This article evaluates Hannah Arendt's contribution to ‘thinking citizenship’ in light of her controversial account of the modern rise of ‘the social’. It argues that Arendt's writing on the social is best understood not primarily as analytical and normative but as an historical argument about the effect of capitalism and modern state administration on meaningful citizenship. This short piece analyses one important element of Arendt's story about the historical rise of the social: that it is a peculiar hybrid of polis and oikos, a scaled-up form of housekeeping, and its threat to the public, political world.     

"行乞权"之争的法理误区--兼评"法无明文禁止之处即可作权利的推定"命题

乞讨行为从来都不是一种被社会道德或国家法律所倡导的行为."行乞权"既不是公民的生存权,也不是一项"穷人的道德权利"或具有普遍意义的道德权利.在"行乞权"之争中,暴露出长期以来法理上,以及近些年来人们在人权理念上的种种误区.逻辑上和实践中,从法无明文禁止之处不能必然地推导出权利.人权不是一种排除义务的绝对权利,或可以凌驾于一切社会规范之上不含界限的一种特权.     

政治文明视角下的资产阶级民主

本文从人类政治文明发展的视角审视资产阶级民主,以洛克为主的"天赋人权"和"社会契约"论为出发点,揭示资产阶级民主理论基础的内在逻辑关系以及资产阶级思想家、政治家对资产阶级民主制度设计所做的理性思考.其目的是试图为我国的政治文明建设从资产阶级政治文明中汲取可资借鉴之处.     

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

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

The human rights and 'Asian values' debate in Southeast Asia: Trying to clarify the key issues

This article investigates the validity of the concept of 'Asian values' in Southeast Asia, and attempts to explain and reconcile where possible some of the key differences between the position on human rights of ASEAN, which has remained semi-united despite internal tensions, and 'the West', particularly the US, and the non-governmental organizations' (NGOs) in the ongoing 'Asian values' debate. The article explores differences over the issues of the changeability of values and hence rights as these affect the 'universality' argument, the relevance of timing and sequence, the omission of crime by agencies other than the state as a source of human rights violations, and the controversial issue of the use of conditionality by the West. It is argued that, in fact, the debate principally concerns the question of what constitutes 'good government' and the 'good society', and takes the position that the question of how to achieve these is significantly influenced by the values of a government and a society.     

农地确权:化解人地矛盾的根本途径——兼谈我国农地产权制度改革的路径选择

通过农地确权化解人地矛盾以保证国家稳定,谋取社会发展,促进民生幸福,古今中外的实践验证或体现了这一规律性的认识。据此,我们提出了我国今后农地产权制度改革的路径:界定农地归村民小组集体所有;继续将土地权利"排他性"地界定给农户;鼓励农地权能分离组合,进行规模化经营;试探实行股权农地+保障农地的产权改革。     

电子商务法中删除权的法经济学分析

大数据时代的到来使得企业、团体、个人都可能获取他人信息,而当代互联网的特性——海量的数据信息、快捷的计算速度以及巨大的储存空间使大数据时代的个人信息保护问题尤为重要。国内外关于删除权的相关法律文本和司法实践已经有较多讨论展开,而从大国博弈、消费者选择和厂商行为三个视角对2019年电子商务法中有关删除权的合理性和前沿性做进一步探讨后,可开启另一认知路径。以法经济学理论和经济学原理进行论证分析后发现,我国需要专门的“个人信息保护法”以确立删除权,而鉴于立法成本和紧迫性,可暂通过完善司法的方式,实现保护公民个人信息的目的。     

Anti-capitalism in the name of ethno-nationalism: ideological shifts on the German extreme right

ABSTRACT

Sommer examines the (re-)emergence of anti-capitalist and anti-globalization themes within the ideology and discourses of the German extreme right. He argues that it would be short-sighted to interpret this development simply as another opportunistic attempt by the extreme right to incorporate Zeitgeist issues into its political agenda in order to appeal to a broader spectrum of supporters. An analysis of the latest campaigns of the Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands (NPD)—the most successful extreme-right party in recent years—as well as the activities of groups that exist within the larger German extreme-right milieu, the so-called freie Kameradschaften, reveals that the taking up of social questions as well as anti-capitalist and anti-globalization themes marks a deeper shift within the political agenda of the extreme right in Germany. However, the analysis shows that racist and antisemitic issues do not disappear with this shift, but are linked with and incorporated into anti-capitalist and anti-globalization discourses.     

Export processing zones and corporate environmental performance in emerging economies: The case of the oil,gas, and chemical sectors of Trinidad and Tobago

Export processing zones (EPZs) are increasingly being established to promote economic growth in developing countries. However, they remain controversial and are often criticized for being associated with a “race to the bottom” characterized by the easing of labor and environmental standards. This paper investigates whether the decision to locate facilities inside these zones is associated with higher corporate environmental performance. Findings indicate that facilities operating in Trinidad and Tobago’s EPZs are more likely to show higher corporate environmental performance than those outside. Additionally, firms in state-managed zones appear to show higher corporate environmental performance than those located in privately managed zones. Enhanced institutional pressures from regulators, local communities, and fellow tenant firms may explain these differences. These results suggest that environmental policy makers and environmentalists can take advantage of already established EPZs to promote enclave enhanced institutional pressures associated with superior corporate environmental performance.