Sovereigns and citizens? The contested status of American Indian tribal nations and their members

American Indian tribal members are citizens of both tribal nations and the larger national body. Tribal nations' contemporary resurgence has made tribal citizenship politically visible, materially significant, and politically contested. Conflicts about tribal members' status are not merely racial or ethnic in character, but reflect fundamental tensions between settler societies and indigenous survivors who challenge national narratives and demand collective rights. Tribal members' dual citizenships and the conflict about them are the result of discordant federal policy legacies, tenacious tribal survival, and the erosion of racial barriers to citizenship. Differences between ethnonational tribal citizenship and republican-based US citizenship fuel public criticism in the context of widespread ignorance about treaties and tribal rights. Crucially, while legal and political dimensions of citizenship have been partly extended to tribal members, they remain excluded from the national identity.     

Immigration,society and modalities of citizenship in Singapore

In this article, I argue that three modalities of citizenship are at play in Singapore: liberal, communal and social. Using a grounded theoretical approach, I highlight the instances in which these modes of conceptualizing citizenship appear in discourse, practice and policy. While past scholarship has highlighted the contrast between liberal and communal modes of citizenship, the social mode has been largely subsumed and obscured within the rubric of communal (or communitarian) democracy and ethno-nationalist citizenship. The article analyzes the interplay among these three modes of citizenship as they played out in the discourse surrounding the 2011 General Election in Singapore. The tension between citizens and noncitizens has become a central political issue in Singapore. Less recognized, but highlighted in my analysis, liberal and communal senses of citizenship are in tension not only with each other but also with a notion of the social based on relationships of mutual benefit and obligation rather than communal, categorical belonging. Drawing on Robert Esposito's critique of modern ideas of community and (re)theorization of communitas, I argue that in the case of Singapore and elsewhere, reintroducing a notion of the social (as distinct from the communal) holds potential for discourses, practices and policies that can transcend the divisiveness associated with communalism and the socioeconomic inequalities associated with liberalism.     

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.     

‘Men are not born fit for citizenship,but must be made so’: Spinoza and citizenship

The modern conception of citizenship contains often unacknowledged key background assumptions – about the role of rights in citizenship, about the citizen modelled on a liberal autonomous and rational individual, and about the equality of citizens within a democratic state. Spinoza's political works give us a useful perspective on the historicity of these assumptions. Whereas the modern conception is abstract, universalist, and depoliticised, Spinoza's sense of the citizen's belonging is adamantly specific, particularist, and political, and offers a way forward for rethinking citizenship. The key concepts of freedom and republicanism are analysed, and a political reading is developed of Spinoza's view of citizenship in terms of a way of conducting politics.     

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.     

Testing the liberal subject: (in)security,responsibility and ‘self-improvement’ in the UK citizenship test

The recent debate over the changes to the ‘Life in the UK’ citizenship test offers another opportunity to reflect on the testing of would-be citizens in liberal democracies. The citizenship test has often been understood as part of the ‘strengthening’ of national borders: set within a discourse of fears over high levels of migration and the risk to cultural homogeneity. Furthermore, it has been viewed as an illustration of the death of multiculturalism and presented as an illiberal strategy of cultural assimilation. I propose that whilst the notion of ‘testing’ is built out of fears regarding ‘threatening’ difference and ‘community cohesion’, what the UK testing process presents is an explicitly liberal strategy of governing. Drawing on the history of the test, I suggest that it is not purely a mechanism of restriction but that it also relies on strategies of responsibility, empowerment and ‘self-improvement’. The citizenship test, alongside other recent border strategies, may be better understood as representing a fascinating nexus between advanced liberal ideas of governing and concerns regarding (in)security. I argue that studying the test in this way offers up vital questions about how community and political membership continues to be shaped in late modernity.     

Urban citizenship of rural migrants in reform-era China

One paradoxical reality of today's China is that urban citizenship does not necessarily go to those who have already moved to the city. Rural migrants are now allowed to work in cities but are deprived of a wide range of entitlements. Taking Shanghai, the most populous city in the world's most populous country, as a case study, this article establishes significant empirical content to elucidate how the notion of urban citizenship is interpreted in China, what criteria are applied for granting the urban citizenship, to what extent the entitlements of migrants in cities are comparable to those of the bona fide urban residents, and whether the lack of urban citizenship influences migrants' integration into host cities. Empirical investigation shows that granting of the urban hukou (household registration) is based largely on migrants' contribution to, rather than simply on their presence in, the host city. In the context of reform-era China, urban citizenship is used by city government not only to exclude some members of society from accessing urban welfare but also to make the urban economy more competitive by grabbing capital and human resources possessed by migrants.     

Let's go outside: bodies,prostitutes, slaves and worker citizens

In liberal thought, slavery is imagined as reducing the human being to nothing but a body, while the free and equal political subjects of modern liberal democracies are held to be abstract, universal and disembodied individuals. In theory, bodies are also unimportant in the wage labour exchange. Though traditional models of worker citizenship insist on state and employers' duty to protect the human worth of worker citizens, they also assume the disembodied, thing-like nature of commodified labour power. Because bodies are so obviously important in the exchange between prostitute and customer, sex work is difficult to reconcile with liberal fictions of disembodiment, and one strand of feminist debate on prostitution is preoccupied by the question of whether prostitutes are like slaves or wage labourers. Protagonists on both sides of this debate often reproduce liberal understandings of labour power as a ‘thing’ that can be detached from the person. And yet labour power is also a contested commodity, and wage labour has historically been likened to slavery by activists struggling against the commodification of labour power. This article argues that stepping outside liberal fictions of disembodiment and recognising the parallels between prostitution, wage labour and slavery would allow greater scope for establishing a common political subjectivity amongst prostitutes, other wage workers and all those who have an interest in halting and reversing the current global trend towards the commodification of everything. In this way, common political ground between prostitutes and other wage workers is more visible when we step outside liberal assumptions about embodiment, slavery, work and citizenship.     

‘I am an American’: protesting advertised ‘Americanness’

How are citizenships and nationalisms constructed, connected, and contested in the post-9/11 USA – performatively, affectively, and visually – and how do their relationships figure ‘Americanness’? This article takes up this question (1) by tracking how Americanness was advertised in the American Ad Council's ‘I am an American’ campaign and (2) by introducing the multimedia project ‘I am an American’: Video Portraits of Unsafe US Citizens, which engages the Ad Council's campaign as a practice-based protest of the Ad Council's advertised ‘Americanness’. The article traces how the Ad Council's campaign advertises what Evelyn Alsultany calls ‘diversity patriotism’. It also constructs a complex, mobile system of differentiation that marks some citizens as ‘safe’ and others as ‘unsafe’, which runs counter to the idealized notion of a unified ‘Americanness’ that it advertises. The article then examines how the practice-based protest project ‘I am an American’ takes these ‘unsafe citizens’ – US citizens who either will not or cannot make their differences normatively conform to the national ideal of the ‘One’ composed of the ‘Many’ propagated by the Ad Council's campaign – as its point of departure to reflect upon how citizenship protests function for and against citizenship, nationalisms, and various figurations of Americanness.     

Mechanisms for popular participation and discursive constructions of citizenship

In the past decade, Latin America has witnessed the emergence of a political discourse that links popular participation to citizenship accompanied by an explosion of participatory mechanisms. Yet there is little qualitative research that looks at how participatory experiences affect people's perceptions of their role as citizens or to what extent the discourse transmitted through these institutions encourages participation or compliance. This article examines conceptions of citizenship among individuals who engage in participatory mechanisms in Venezuela, Ecuador and Chile. Using discourse analysis, it finds that participants in Venezuela and Ecuador have developed a ‘radical’ conception of active citizenship that differs from the liberal interpretation in Chile. Regardless of the preferred model, however, state discourse establishes parameters around citizenship. Furthermore, the discursive repertoires of citizen participants align with those produced by state institutions, suggesting that participatory mechanisms act to socialize people into participating in ‘legitimate’ and acceptable ways.     

Islamophobia and postcolonialism: continuity,Orientalism and Muslim consciousness

ABSTRACT

In this article, Meer tentatively delineates three ways in which he understands that the concept of Islamophobia is being informed by postcolonial scholarship. The first functions as continuity, in so far as it is claimed that historical colonial dynamics are reproduced in contemporary postcolonial environments, broadly conceived. The second involves translation. This is related to the first but different in that it focuses in particular on the utility of Orientalist critique for the concept of Islamophobia. The third concerns an account of Muslim consciousness, in so far as it is argued that ‘the making of Muslims’ is signalled by the emergence of the concept of Islamophobia, part, as one view has it, of a wider ‘decentring’ of the West. Meer argues that this third framing rests on terrain that is also populated by scholarship beyond the postcolonial tradition. This is because it expresses a story of how Muslims have contested and sought revisions to existing citizenship settlements, not least the ways in which approaches to anti-discrimination are configured. This is a story that is observable within imperfect liberal democratic frameworks that contain some institutional levers through which to challenge Islamophobia.     

Emile Durkheim revisited: Les corps intermediaires

The article discusses the relevance of Emile Durkheim for contemporary debates about citizenship and democracy. If the concepts of social bonds and solidarity which have existed from the classical period of the welfare state until today are under revision the question is whether the thoughts of Durkheim have lost relevance too? Parsons's interpretation of Durkheim as a theorist of social order is criticized. He did not look for a functional order of the Parsonian type. More likely Durkheim was preoccupied with the paradoxes and problems of the liberal state, that is the search for a type of authority compatible with modern individual rights. Durkheim's focal interest in intermediary institutions is analysed and related to the neoliberal view of the welfare state as having too much influence over the individual. It tends to forget les corps intermédiaires as important preconditions for the construction of citizenship and modern democracies. The communitarian vision of modern intermediary bodies in the 1990s is criticized for being too local in its perspective.     

Representations of reproductive citizenship and vulnerability in media reports of offshore surrogacy

In his elaboration of the concept of ‘reproductive citizenship’, Turner (Turner B.S., 2001. The erosion of citizenship. The British journal of sociology, 52 (2), 189–209) suggested something of a homogeneous accumulation of cultural capital to those who make a reproductive contribution to contemporary western societies. The present article takes up this suggestion and proposes that whilst reproduction is indeed a hallmark of contemporary citizenship, the cultural capital arising from this is still differentiated by mode of reproduction, with reproductive heterosex remaining the norm against which other modes are compared. This norm, it is suggested, produces what is termed here ‘reproductive vulnerability’, namely vulnerability arising from being located outside of the norm. Through an analysis of media representations of Australian people who have undertaken offshore surrogacy arrangements in India, this article demonstrates how reproductive vulnerability is highlighted only to be dismissed through recourse to the construction of those who undertake reproductive travel as agentic citizens. The article concludes by considering what it would take for an ethics of reproductive travel to exist; one in which multiple, incommensurable vulnerabilities are taken into account, and the representation of which encourages, rather than inhibits, careful thought about the reproductive desires of all people.     

Liberal Nationalism and Responsible Citizenship in South Korea

This essay explores how South Koreans have creatively acculturated the meaning of citizenship using Confucianism-originated familial affectionate sentiments (ch?ng), while resisting a liberal individualistic conception of citizenship, by investigating contemporary nationalist politics in South Korea. Its central claim is that the ch?ng-induced politico-cultural practice of collective moral responsibility (uri-responsibility), which transcends the binary of individualism and collectivism and of liberalism and nationalism, represents the essence of Korean national citizenship. In other words, this essay attempts to make a Korean case of “liberal nationalism” in its post-Confucian context.     

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.     

The evolution of Israeli citizenship: an overview

Israel's citizenship discourse has consisted of three different layers, superimposed on one another: An ethno-nationalist discourse of inclusion and exclusion, a republican discourse of community goals and civic virtue, and a liberal discourse of civil, political, and social rights. The liberal discourse has served as the public face of Israeli citizenship and functioned to separate Israel's Jewish and Palestinians citizens from the non-citizen Palestinians in the occupied territories. The ethno-nationalist discourse has been invoked to discriminate between Jewish and Palestinian citizens within the sovereign State of Israel. Last, the republican discourse has been used to legitimate the different positions occupied by the major Jewish social groups: ashkenazim vs. mizrachim, males vs. females, secular vs. religiously orthodox. Until the mid-1980s the republican discourse, based on a corporatist economy centered on the umbrella labor organization – the Histadrut – mediated between the contradictory dictates of the liberal and the ethno-nationalist discourses. Since then, the liberalization of the Israeli economy has weakened the republican discourse, causing the liberal and ethno-nationalist ones to confront each other directly. Since the failure of the Oslo peace process in 2000, these two discourses have each gained the upper hand in one policy area – the liberal one in economic policy and the ethno-national one in policy towards the Palestinians and the Arabs in general. This division of labor is the reason why on the eve of its 60th anniversary as a state Israel is experiencing its worst crisis of governability ever. While Israel's economy is booming and the country's international standing remains high, due to the global ‘war on terror,’ public trust in state institutions and leaders is at an all-time low, so that the government cannot tend to the country's pressing business.     

The citizen of empire

In this paper, the authors imagine a Citizen of Empire. This is a conceptualization of global citizenship as it might appear in Hardt and Negri's global social order of Empire. The article draws on Hardt and Negri's Empire as the model of global society to imagine what citizenship might look like on a global scale. Hardt and Negri's conceptualization of Empire offers a palette of new and emerging social relationships from which a vibrant conceptualization of citizen and citizenship can be imagined and new democratic politics practiced. First, the authors examine the concept of Empire to unearth foundational concepts upon which a notion of Citizen of Empire can be built. Second, the authors imagine a citizen who ‘calls Empire into being' rather than participating in the ready-made political, cultural, and economic institutions of the nation-state. Without institutional support, citizenship in Empire must be highly generative and creative, and it will operate on a virtual and poetic terrain by enacting mechanisms of deterritorialization, networking, and communication.     

‘I have so many successful stories’: framing social citizenship for refugees

The current US refugee resettlement system reflects the US government's agenda of having refugees acquire quick employment with low state welfare dependence and minimal fiscal and cultural disruption to the receiving communities. The non-governmental organizations (NGOs) assisting refugees hold broader goals for refugees, including feeling a sense of belonging in the USA. These goals represent a framing of social citizenship rights for refugees, and how NGOs frame social citizenship varies depending upon the NGOs contractual relationship with the US welfare state. Using data from 57 in-depth interviews, I describe how resettlement and assistance NGOs currently frame social citizenship for refugees in relation to market citizenship, and how their relationship with the federal government shapes this framing. Findings illustrate the role of NGOs in creating a discursive space for expanding the social citizenship rights of refugees and the ways such framing is highly constrained by the definitions of belonging that emerge from market citizenship.     

From New Labour to New Conservatism: the changing dynamics of citizenship as self-government

This article examines the shift in discourses of citizenship from Britain from notions of entitlement and obligation to those of self-government, and the reciprocity between the responsibilisation of individual and collective citizen-subjectivities. Against the backdrop of debates about society as the telos of government, this article will interrogate the claim that New Conservatism's ‘Big Society’ represents a unique rationality of government and an alternative formula of advanced liberal rule. By doing so, the article will extend our understanding of ‘post-welfare regimes of the social’ and illustrate precisely how they operate in contemporary Britain.