The grey area between nationality and citizenship: an analysis of external citizenship policies in Latin America and the Caribbean

Literature on diaspora engagement policies, transnational and extra-territorial citizenship has painted the increasing recognition of dual nationality and the extension of state policies to the diaspora as a signal of states leaving behind the paradigms of exclusive nationality and residence as conditions to exercise citizenship. In doing this, this literature tends to treat citizenship and nationality as synonyms. By analysing the citizenship policies of 22 Latin American and Caribbean states towards their nationals who reside abroad and/or acquire another nationality, we add key nuances to such consideration: nationality and citizenship may relate to different legal statuses – with important consequences for migrants – and there might be differences also between the citizen rights of nationals by origin and of nationals by naturalization. In particular, we show that citizenship and nationality interact in different ways when it comes to the preservation of rights for emigrants: the distinctions allow restricting the portability of citizenship rights for nationals by birth, and other groups of nationals, depending on the exclusivity, and origin, of their national belonging. These distinctions tell a potentially different story of how citizenship is conceived of by states as they approach the challenges of membership and participation posed by emigration, and paint a less rosy picture with regard to the demise of exclusive nationality.     

Second-class citizens? Gender in African citizenship law

In recent publications, Manby (2009, 2010) has pointed out serious inequities in African citizenship laws. As women are one of the largest groups at risk of unequal treatment, we systematically examine sub-Saharan African citizenship laws for discriminatory provisions and language. We find that for laws currently in force, legal treatment of women is uneven, both across the continent and within countries. We consider the role gender plays in transmitting citizenship to children, as well as differences between the genders in citizenship transmitted through marriage. Some countries are gender neutral in most or all aspects of the law, others are gender neutral with respect to parents and children but favor men in transmitting citizenship to their wives, and others still discount the role of women in both respects. We employ quantitative methods to understand the background conditions that influence citizenship law, finding that temporal and demographic factors have some systematic influence. To understand when and how citizenship laws may change, we examine case study evidence of women's movements as a means for bringing about gender equality, finding that targeted legal action or major constitutional overhauls can help render citizenship laws more gender neutral.     

Citizenship on paper or at heart? a closer look into the dual citizenship debate in Europe

This article seeks to promote an integrated approach to the study of citizenship policies, which pays due attention to their potential impact on migrants whose self-recognition are formally delimited by legal definitions. Through a novel approach that makes use of naturalisation processes as an empirical entry point into the narratives of citizenship embraced by Turkish migrants, this article investigates the role of dual citizenship policies in three European countries: Spain, the Netherlands and the UK. The evidence from the sample group displays a process of ‘self-bargaining’ prior to the naturalisation decision, which calls into question the link established between legal and emotional bonds of citizenship. The Dutch example demonstrates how Turkish migrants cope with the ban on dual citizenship by downplaying the identity-conferring role of citizenship status. This leads to a decoupling of legal and emotional aspects of citizenship and thereby to the adoption of a thin sense of citizenship. While Spain represents an in-between case that has a tolerant implementation despite a de jure ban, the British example shows how the process of ‘self-bargaining’ can result in the widening of emotional landscape, when dual citizenship is allowed. A thick sense of citizenship is therefore not only preserved but it can also be extended to the citizenship of the country of residence.     

Nationality swapping in the Olympic field: towards the marketization of citizenship?

Nationality swapping in sports is commonly assumed to be a rapidly expanding practice that is indicative of the marketization of citizenship. Sports are said to have become wholesale markets in which talent is being traded for citizenship. In this article, we seek to empirically explore such claims by analysing 167 athletes who have competed for two different countries in the Summer Olympic Games. It seems that most switches occurred after the 1990s. Then, following a citizenship as a claims-making approach, we introduce the work of Bourdieu so as to connect citizenship as both legal status and practice with normative claims. The analysis reveals that the practice of nationality switching is shaped by structural conditions of the Olympic field. First, a complex realm of citizenship laws and regulations produces conditions under which athletes make legitimate claims to citizenship. Second, through a mechanism of reverberative causation, prior migrations are often echoed in contemporary nationality swapping . Only a limited number of athletes acquired citizenship via the explicit market principle we call jus talenti. Claiming that instrumental nationality swapping is indicative of the marketization of citizenship obscures the complex interplay between structures of and practices within the Olympic field.     

Designing safe citizens

Modern liberal citizenship is a failing design, and this is nowhere more apparent than in the contemporary US. Currently there is a frenzy around US citizenship – who has it but shouldn't have it, who should have it but doesn't have it, who had it but renounced it. The sheer volume of ideas, images, and events and their mass circulation makes it almost impossible not to notice how unsettled and unsettling contemporary US citizenship has become. If, as designer Bruce Mau suggests, the success of a design is its invisibility, then it seems that the design of contemporary US citizenship is anything but a success. Taking seriously the claim that modern liberal citizenship is a failing design, this article focuses on how citizenship is designed and redesigned through history. Its central research question is: what are the design principles of modern liberal citizenship, and how are they experienced in the contemporary US? Noting that modern liberal citizenship emerged from state security debates and that security concerns preoccupy those in the contemporary US, this article investigates not only how citizenship is designed but how safe citizenship is designed. As such, it is less concerned with the legal definition of citizenship than with the practical packaging of citizenship as part of a design for safe living.     

Concepts of citizenship underlying EU gender equality policies

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

Of “Doubtful Nationality”: Political Manipulation of Citizenship in the D. R. Congo

Politically fomented restrictions on citizenship eligibility are on the rise in Africa. This has proven particularly so in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where, over more than 40 years since independence, the citizenship of the “Rwandophone” minority (peoples of Rwandan/Burundese heritage, including the much-discussed “Banyamulenge”), has been switched on and off as expediency dictated, a key element in the divide-and-rule strategies of political elites, and in the outbreak of two recent wars. Recognizing this, in 2004, the post-war Transition Government promulgated a new law on nationality. But it is far from clear that this will resolve the core problem. First, at the level of legal principle, this law does not seem likely to eliminate the many ambiguities concerning the national status of Rwandophones. Second, citizenship in the DRC has as much to do with the politics of implementing the law on the ground as with the law itself. Third, does the political relationship between the individual and the state really encompass everything that it means to be a full “citizen”? There are two important dimensions of full citizenship in Africa which continue to be denied to Rwandophones: local rights and obligations between the individual and customary authority, with implications for land allocation and other vital entitlements; and the ethically vital, lived sense of belonging and existential security for the individual within society as a whole. Without addressing these other dimensions, the question of Rwandophone citizenship remains open to further manipulation—an injustice and a potential cause for conflict to resume.     

Women's interpretations of the right to legal abortion in Mexico City: citizenship,experience and clientelism

In April 2007, after a period of intense social debate, the Mexico City Legal Assembly legalized abortion during the first 12 weeks of pregnancy, which was an unprecedented development in women's rights in Mexico. Within the context of a proliferation of public discourses about women's citizenship rights changes in women's social status in Mexico, this article explores the extent to which the newly legalized character of abortion is interpreted by women as a right. Drawing on 24 interviews with women who had a legal termination of pregnancy between 2008 and 2009, this research shows that legalization opens up new and complex relationships between women as subjects of rights and the state. Such relationships are expressed as three discursive figures: legal abortion (1) as a concession from the government, (2) as ‘excessive’ tolerance by the state, and (3) as a right to be protected and guaranteed. The analysis shows that women's interpretations of the right to legal abortion are mediated by profound transformations, which Mexican society is currently undergoing. These include changes related to a shift from a clientist political culture to one more framed in terms of citizenship, the subjective effects of family planning policies, and their ambivalent relationships with Catholic notions of women and motherhood, and the effects of feminist discourses of women's citizenship, abortion, and reproductive rights.     

The politics of affective citizenship: from Blair to Obama

Politicians have long mobilised emotion in order to gain voters' support. However, this article argues that the politics of affect is also implicated in how citizens' identities, rights and entitlements are constructed. Examples are drawn from the positions of UK, US, Canadian and Australian politicians, including Tony Blair, David Cameron, Kevin Rudd and Barack Obama. Emotions analysed include love, fear, anxiety, empathy and hope. The article argues for the importance of a concept of ‘affective citizenship’ which explores (a) which intimate emotional relationships between citizens are endorsed and recognised by governments in personal life and (b) how citizens are also encouraged to feel about others and themselves in broader, more public domains. It focuses on issues of sexuality, gender, race and religion, and argues that the politics of affect has major implications for determining who has full citizenship rights. The Global Financial Crisis has also seen the development of an ‘emotional regime’ in which issues of economic security are increasingly influencing constructions of citizenship.     

Citizenship,reproduction and the state: international marriage and human rights

The relationship between citizenship, marriage and family has often been overlooked in the social and political theory of citizenship. Intimate domestic life is associated with the private sphere, partly because reproduction itself is thought to depend on the private choices of individuals. While feminist theory has challenged this division between private and public – ‘the personal is political’ – the absence of any systematic thinking about familial relations, reproduction and citizenship is puzzling. Citizenship is a juridical status that confers political rights such as the right to carry a passport or to vote in elections. However, from a sociological point of view, we need to understand the social foundations and consequences of citizenship – however narrowly defined in legal and political terms. This article starts by noting the obvious point that the majority of us inherit citizenship at birth and in a sense we do not choose to be ‘Vietnamese’ or ‘Malaysian’ or ‘Japanese’ citizens. Although naturalisation is an important aspect of international migration and settlement, the majority of us are, as it were, born into citizenship. Therefore, the family is an important but often implicit facet of political identity and membership. In sociological language, citizenship looks like an ascribed rather than achieved status, and as a result becomes confused and infused with ethnicity. This inheritance of citizenship is odd given the fact that, at least in the West, there is a presumption, following the pronouncements of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, to think of citizenship in universal terms that are ethnically ‘blind’, but it is in fact closely connected with familial or private status. These complex relations within the nation-state are further complicated by the contemporary growth of transnational marriages and this article considers the problems of marriage, reproduction and citizenship in the context of global patterns of migration.     

Voices from the Margins: Sadomasochism and Sexual Citizenship

Practitioners of sadomasochism (SM) are currently excluded from full citizenship in the UK. However, in recent years we have seen a growth in stories of sadomasochism and with this a challenge to this exclusion from some within SM communities. Over the last ten years or so we also have witnessed the emergence of feminist, sexual and queer citizens providing radical challenges to mainstream approaches to citizenship. This article explores how SM provides boundary tests for notions of citizenship and how it also occupies a particularly complex position with regard to the relationship between citizenship and transgression and the intersection of gender, sexuality and citizenship. In the light of this, it is argued that it is necessary to engage dialectically with citizenship and transgression as a way of meeting the different needs of community members while continuing to work to transform the sexual citizen.     

Citizenship practices of non-citizens in Slovenia: ‘you cannot fight the system alone’

In the period of state formation (1991–1992), the Slovene Ministry of the Interior erased, that is, excluded from legal status, those immigrants from other parts of the former Yugoslavia who did not become Slovene citizens when citizenship was available under initial simplified criteria. Compared with the processes of independence in Estonia and elsewhere, exclusion in the form of erasure from the register of permanent residents in Slovenia extended beyond the creation of foreigners within the country (i.e. foreign citizens with the right to remain and support themselves); this exclusion created outlaws, legal freaks (Arendt) or homines sacres (Agamben) – bare human beings who were expunged from society and deprived of all former rights and roles. This article discusses the citizenship practices of the victims of the erasure and interprets these practices as emancipation processes: the erased used grass roots and legal means to attempt to obtain the right to dignity, the right to stay and the right to compensation for their ‘lost years’. The effects of their struggle went beyond matters of mere utility: by publicly defining themselves as ‘the erased’ and acting upon injustice; the erased challenged the boundaries of citizenship in terms of membership and content.     

Immigrant meanings of citizenship: mobility,stability, and recognition

ABSTRACT

Based on interviews with 21 immigrants in Norway, including both naturalized citizens and ‘denizens’, this article addresses immigrant meanings of citizenship and naturalization. The findings show that the interviewees attributed three meanings to citizenship. First, Norwegian citizenship served as a powerful means of spatial mobility, thereby facilitating transnational connections. Second, citizenship signified a legal stability that may guard precarious immigrants against ‘liminal legality’, i.e. enduring legal uncertainty. Third, citizenship was conceptualized as a formal recognition of equality and belonging, although ‘race’ and ethnicity persisted as salient markers of inequality and alienage. The article contributes empirically to the growing literature on the experiencing side of citizenship and naturalization by delineating what citizenship means to different groups, and to whom it matters the most. Theoretically, it contributes by demonstrating that citizenship acquisition may not only be strategic, but also rooted in needs of symbolic sanctioning of equality and belonging, particularly important to individuals debarred from naturalization.     

‘But this is a park’! The paradox of public space in a Buenos Aires ‘no man's land’

Drawing upon qualitative fieldwork, this paper analyzes the occupation of an abandoned park in the south of Buenos Aires by the city's urban poor, delineating the implications of this incident for notions of citizenship in the context of deeply fragmented social rights. While public space has historically been understood as an expression of the universality of rights bearing membership in a political community, I show how this universalism became the object of struggle during a conflict over the park between the local middle class and squatters, many of which were of immigrant origin. The discourses mobilized by various social groups blurred the distinction between citizenship as a set of legal–formal rights versus a project of normative inclusion. While public space is juridically constructed as universal, particularistic claims to these spaces are imbued with increased legitimacy in a context in which social rights – conceived as a set of provisions guaranteed by the state under a regime of liberal citizenship – are unrealizable. By claiming this space for particularistic uses, squatters drew attention to the contradictions embedded in public space's democratic pretensions in a setting in which putatively universal rights are ignored by the state.     

Gender,Citizenship, and Constitutionalism in Zimbabwe: The Fight Against Amendment 14

This article examines the nexus between gender, citizenship and constitutionalism. By using the case study of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution of Zimbabwe, I seek to illustrate how the rights of women with respect to citizenship are manipulated by the state, with this discrimination often couched under African 'culture' or 'tradition'. The article also interrogates the limitations of utilizing the courts in the struggle for gender equality, because of the patriarchal values which are upheld and promoted, often erroneously. In describing the surprising victory by civil society groups and activists in challenging both the courts and the state nationally, this piece concludes with some thoughts on how a broader struggle for gender equality is necessary in the pursuit of social justice.     

The Politicization of Marriage in Contemporary American Public Policy: The Defense of Marriage Act and the Personal Responsibility Act

The sexuality politics terrain in the United States is currently marked by a complex and contradictory set of developments‐non-traditional family structures are becoming more common, popular opinion is moving in a more tolerant direction, and the lesbian and gay rights movement has enjoyed some victories, but conservative family values and patriarchal heterosexual marriage have been vigorously promoted by influential right-wing social movements and more deeply institutionalized through important public policy initiatives and court decisions. This article considers the theoretical implications of these developments with respect to the conceptual approaches to citizenship and sexuality. It then analyses two major pieces of federal legislation in depth: the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) and the Personal Responsibility Act (PRA). DOMA effectively encourages the states to ban same-sex marriages. The PRA is generally considered as a welfare 'reform' law that imposes compulsory 'workfare' schemes and time limits for benefit recipients. It nevertheless has a significant sexual regulation dimension. Both the religious right's campaign against same-sex marriage and the welfare reformers' attack on the rights of single mothers contribute to a reactionary politicization of marriage. In conclusion, the article contends that it is only insofar as lesbian and gay rights issues are understood more broadly as but one aspect of sexual regulation and citizenship rights struggles that we can develop more effective ways of advancing the sexual liberation movement as a whole.     

The Redefinition of the Concept of Nationality in the UK: Between Historical Responsibility and Normative Challenges

This article analyses the extent to which UK membership in the European Economic Community (EEC) has influenced the redefinition of the concept of nationality in the United Kingdom and the retreat from historical responsibility with respect to citizens of Commonwealth countries. After first describing the rights that have most defined nationality in the United Kingdom prior to its membership to the EEC, it is argued that the EEC has only indirectly influenced the redefinition of UK nationality in three main respects: (a) from the early 1970s, the issue of nationality has been a frequent subject of discussion in parliament; (b) at the same time, there was the need to define nationality for EEC law purposes; and (c) the establishment of European citizenship reinforced nationality not only because nationality represented a means by which to benefit from additional rights, but also because it became a foundation for the construction of subsequent immigration policy. The article suggests that the indirect effect of the EEC on the redefinition of nationality has also provided a legitimate means by which to reconsider the idea of citizenship first in terms of exclusion and inclusion and secondly in terms of detachment from historical responsibility.     

A history of sex and the state in Southeast Asia: class,intimacy and invisibility

This essay offers a history of international marriages that questions the definition of marriage and what it meant to belong, as a legal subject or citizen, to a colonial state in Southeast Asia. European imperial states deployed monogamous marriage alongside other weapons of empire as a justification for intervention into Southeast Asian societies. With monogamous marriage came also European notions of belonging that traced surnames and legal subject status (later citizenship) via husbands and fathers. The ramifications for individuals in international marriages between Asian women and European men are well known. However, the vast majority of ‘international marriages’ were not those between colonial Europeans and Southeast Asian women, but between Southeast Asian women and lower class Asian men from India and China. Colonial states ignored or failed to register these lower class intra-Asian intimacies because their unions did not threaten colonial rule so long as they ensured a continuous pool of labor and promoted the colonial economy. Unlike recent theories which argue for an omniscient state that penetrates into the personal lives of its populations, this essay maintains that states intensely regulated marriage and belonging for some subjects but not for others. This longstanding unevenness in the management of intimate unions provides a historical context for understanding shifts in the marital regimes of contemporary postcolonial states. Taking a long-term view, the essay asks if recent increases in international marriages might be better understood as spikes rather than as absolute increases resulting from ‘globalization’. A historical framework ties the rise and fall of international marriage to early modern trade patterns, imperialism's labor requirements, war, and the recent demand for labor that has arisen from low birth rates and economic changes. Each of these ‘events’ entailed a large-scale movement of populations which resulted in the development of intimate unions.     

Conceptualizing lived religious citizenship: a case-study of Christian and Muslim women in Norway and the United Kingdom

The concept of ‘religious citizenship’ is increasingly being used by scholars, but there are few attempts at defining it. This article argues that rights-based definitions giving primacy to status and rights are too narrow, and that feminist approaches to citizenship foregrounding identity, belonging and participation, as well as an ethic of care, provide a more comprehensive understanding of how religious women understand and experience their own ‘religious citizenship’. Findings from interviews with Christian and Muslim women in Oslo and Leicester suggest a close relationship between religious women's faith and practice (‘lived religion’) and their ‘lived citizenship’. However, gender inequalities and status differences between majority and minority religions produce challenges to rights-based approaches to religious citizenship.