The Politics of Multiscalar Citizenship: The Case of Lesbian and Gay Organizing in Canada

Citizenship is increasingly viewed as a multiscalar social practice, constituted and contested at local, urban, national and transnational scales. This paper attempts to bring this insight to bear on the study of queer social movement politics. A multiscalar perspective, we argue, enriches our understanding of contemporary LGBT citizenship struggles. Using qualitative case studies of lesbian and gay organizing at the pan-Canadian and urban levels in Canada, the paper demonstrates the relationships that exist between and among citizenship struggles and practices across scales. Queer political struggles at the urban level diverge widely from those at the pan-Canadian level. By using a multiscalar approach, we are able to demonstrate these critically important political differences. The paper contributes to an understanding of multiscalar citizenship by showing the different forms of politics that are produced at different scales of social movement organizing.     

The Institutional Context of Tolerance for Ethnic Minorities: A Comparative, Multilevel Analysis of Western Europe

Drawing on recent insights in the nationalism and citizenship regime literatures, this article develops a macrotheoretical framework for understanding cross-national variations in tolerance of ethnic minorities. Specifically, it tests the hypothesis that the degree to which the dominant ethnic tradition or culture is institutionalized in the laws and policies of a nation-state affects citizen tolerance of ethnic minorities. Employing a multilevel regression model, it systematically tests the framework, as well as competing individual and country-level explanations, for all member states of the European Union in 1997. Results confirm a strong relationship between the laws governing the acquisition and expression of citizenship, that is, citizenship regime type, and individual tolerance judgments. Moreover, citizenship regime type has a strong mediating effect on three individual-level variables previously shown to predict tolerance: ingroup national identity, political ideology, and satisfaction with democracy.     

Citizenship and the Constitution

The status of “British subjects”, the relationship between the individual and the State, and the concept of “rights” and “liberties” are relevant to the current political debate about “British identity”, citizenship, “multiculturalism”, a “British Bill of Rights”, and whether there is now a need for a written constitution. This article describes the confused contemporary understanding of what is meant by “British” citizenship and analyses the parallel developments of citizenship and our constitutional arrangements. The Human Rights Act, devolution and Gordon Brown's proposed constitutional renewal are important steps in setting out the ideas and principles that bind us together as a nation. Together with a coherent definition of the rights and obligations of British citizenship, constitutional reform would achieve a stronger sense of what it means to be British today.     

Justifications of Violence

The classical and the former Catholic doctrines of tyrannicide remind us that in the Western tradition of citizenship and political thought, tyrannicide is worthy. Recent legislation against the glorification of terrorism is too wide and vague, and denies any link between tyrannicide and liberty. A good production of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar should not make the act of tyrannicide per se problematic, but should seize the dilemma of whether or not Julius Caesar was becoming a tyrant rather than a consul with constitutional powers for war or emergency. Both Hannah Arendt and our contemporary Ted Honderich offer philosophical justifications of violence in defined and not uncommon circumstances. Terrorism is sometimes the only resort of the poor and oppressed.     

Republican Europe and Multicultural Citizenship

This article explores the possibilities for a normative understanding of the politics of EU development from a republican perspective. It draws on current debates on republicanism, which combine republican, liberal and multicultural themes, and defends an approach to European citizenship and the design of European institutions in which the contemporary republican emphasis on freedom as non-domination is complemented with the multiculturalist concern with group rights that cut across national boundaries. It is argued that the combination of republican institutions and multicultural citizenship can provide a model for European construction.     

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.     

Educating for active compliance: discursive constructions in citizenship education

This article examines the discursive construction of ‘active citizenship’ within recent civics curriculum documents across three provinces in Canada. New secondary school civics curricula have emerged across liberal democratic states since the year 2000, presumably in response to the perception of youth as disengaged from political involvement. Many of the new curricula subsequently emphasize ‘active’ engagement within the polity. The central task of this paper is to better understand what such ‘active citizenship’ actually means, via the methodological tool of discourse analysis. Engaging a theoretical frame that incorporates Foucauldian governmentality theory and cultural theories of the role of the state in creating subjectivities, the paper ultimately argues that the ‘active citizen’ of contemporary civics curricula is, in fact, a deeply neoliberal subject. The article then draws on feminist theories of citizenship in order to assess the forms of exclusion that the curriculum documents inadvertently create, arguing that they ultimately participate in a long tradition of devaluing such elements of citizenship as relationality and emotional ties. We conclude that one of the fundamental goals of citizenship education – to expand access to citizenship participation for all – has failed.     

Negotiating the Networks of Space,Time and Substance: A Geographical Perspective on the Sustainable Citizen

This paper provides a critical geographical analysis of the emerging ideals associated with sustainable citizenship. We argue that the principles behind sustainable citizenship force us to think through the full range of geographical factors which frame citizenship and yet which are routinely overlooked in both geographical and non-geographical work on the citizen. We take the sustainable citizen to be both an epistemological challenge to existing paradigms of citizenship and a contemporary national and international policy goal. As an epistemological category we claim that the very notion of a sustainable citizen destabilizes the spatial, temporal and material parameters upon which modern forms of citizenship are based. At the same time, however, we also consider the limitations associated with contemporary national and international attempts to create a more sustainable citizenry, arguing that such initiatives often belie the radical potential of thinking about citizenship in sustainable terms. We take as our empirical focus the recently implemented curriculum for global citizenship and sustainable development being enacted in Welsh schools. Drawing on interviews carried out with education officials, teachers and students, we explore what sustainable citizenship means and the opportunities and challenges it faces as a political project.     

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.     

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.     

Feminism and Contemporary Liberal Citizenship: The Undecidability of 'Women'

Liberal citizenship has been seen as posing a dilemma for feminists. Either women are taken to be equal to men, in which case their specific capacities as women are unrecognised and their citizenship is substantively unequal; or else women are taken to be different, with the consequent risk that the rights citizenship allows and the obligations it imposes will again be substantively unequal. On this view, women cannot simply be included in liberal citizenship because the meaning of the liberal public sphere is constructed in opposition to the private sphere of natural feminine care and women's subordination to male heads of household. Using Derridean deconstruction to examine three significant moments in liberalism, this paper argues that the term 'women' is more productively seen as 'undecidable' in this tradition, working both to construct the binary opposition between public and private on which it depends but also to disrupt it. While the feminist critique of liberalism is important to analysing the logic by which women have been positioned outside full citizenship rights, in practice feminists have made some gains by reconfiguring the terms of liberalism around this undecidability. The aim of the paper is to carry out something like a genealogy of contemporary liberalism in order to discern its multiple origins and contingent development; we will then be in a better position to understand the practical possibilities for women's citizenship in Britain today.     

The Globalization of Rights: From Citizenship to Human Rights

Globalization is shifting the balance away from membership-based citizenship towards universal human rights, thus we ask: how are new human rights generated? We argue that the movement for human rights follows on the heels of the much older and richer tradition of citizenship, as can be seen from the fact that many of the new claims put forward by human rights activists seek to define traditional citizenship rights as universal human rights. Most recently, we witness attempts by NGOs and CSOs to bring health, rights-based development, and identity rights under the umbrella of human rights. We examine the changing but continuous relationship of these two rights traditions, the gains made by human rights activists and the global solidarity and national enforcement capacity needed to underwrite their further progress.     

(Dis)qualified bodies: securitization,citizenship and ‘identity management’

This article attempts to think citizenship politics in the international security context of a post‐September 11th world. Considering specifically the introduction of biometric technologies, the article reveals the extent to which contemporary citizenship is securitized as a part of the wider post‐September 11th ‘securitization of the inside’. This securitization contributes directly to the intensification of conventional citizenship practice, as biometric technologies are employed to conceal and advance the heightened exclusionary and restrictive practices of contemporary securitized citizenship. The intensified restriction and preservation of particular rights and entitlements, vis‐à‐vis the application of biometric technologies, serves both private and public concerns over ‘securing identity’. This overall move, and the subsequent challenges to conventional notions of citizenship politics and agency, is referred to here as ‘identity management’. To then ask ‘What's left of citizenship?’ sheds light on these highly political transformations, as the restricted aspects of citizenship—that is, its continued obsession with the preservation and regulation/restriction of specific rights and entitlements—are increased, and the instrument of this escalation, biometrics, dramatically alters existing notions of political agency and ‘citizenship/asylum politics’.     

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.     

An aesthetics of diasporic citizenship: the example of Lebanese women in the UK

Migration for Lebanese is an ancestral practice that can be traced back to the Phoenicians. This cultural and social heritage has been maintained throughout time and still has an impact on the country to this very day. In the light of the expansion of capitalist mode of production on a global scale and the accentuation of human mobility across borders, the Lebanese migration represents an interesting case. This is not only because of their long tradition of travelling across the world but also, on closer inspection, because Lebanese people seem to have anticipated what has now emerged as a widespread ‘diasporic’ condition. In this regard, aspects such as belonging and participation are crucial. The aim of this work is not only to study a specific migratory experience through a transnational perspective but also to use gender as a fertile analytical category to interrogate all-encompassing issues such as human mobility and citizenship, and to raise more general theoretical questions. Ultimately, this approach will prove useful to critically examine concepts such as citizenship, identity and boundaries produced by contemporary nation states. The objective is to understand what the articulations of belonging and participation across boundaries are and how trajectories affect them. The research has no pretence of exhaustiveness. Nonetheless, as it takes advantage of qualitative methods of analysis, it sheds light on aspects that can prove useful to frame contemporary migration in a novel global perspective.     

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.     

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.     

Imperial subjects,national citizenship,and corporate subjects: cycles of political participation/exclusion in the modern world‐system

This article examines the cycles of political participation/exclusion in modern history. It juxtaposes three cycles of political participation/exclusion—the imperial subject, national citizenship, and corporate subject—with three cycles in the structure of accumulation—the imperialist/colonialist, nationalist, and globalist structures of accumulation. The article argues that the contemporary system of accumulation has dismantled the nation state as the vehicle of economic development and diluted citizenship through neoliberal policies. With eroding state protection, working class people are subordinated to corporations for jobs, consumption, investment, and culture. In order to counter this situation and to achieve emancipation from the capitalist pursuit of profit and rampant consumerism, it is necessary to create alternatives to the contemporary corporate‐dominated system. The article explores sustainable community development as an alternative.     

Full employment

The recent civic revival has been largely carried out in the register of contemporary political philosophy, with its characteristic division between liberal and communitarian visions of a transcendental moral subject. This article argues that such an approach, with its affiliations to Rousseau's pathbreaking recuperation of the classical civic tradition, tends to bypass the question of what concrete attributes have been required of citizens, and how citizens have historically acquired the attributes to function as responsible civic-minded individuals. As a result its demaraction of ‘progressive’ and ‘conservative’ models of historical citizenship is unworldly and unhelpful. I conclude by sketching in a tentative outline of a history of modern citizen self-discipline in the early modern period, when citizen status expanded from the city environment to the populations of the territorial states. And I suggest, following Foucault, that these techniques still form the foundations of modern citize-formation.     

Asylum seekers,citizenship and reality TV in the Netherlands: quizzing refugees in jeopardy

This article interrogates a Dutch jeopardy style TV show, Weg van Nederland, featuring young, well-educated asylum seekers about to be deported. The TV program, devised in collaboration with the advocacy group ‘Defense for Children,’ performed the paradoxes resulting from the ‘inclusive exclusion’ of asylum seekers. Yet, its strategy of inscribing the contestants into the space of citizenship by highlighting their ‘rootedness’ through the quiz format also lent support to the exclusivist, essentialist understanding of national belonging that is produced in contemporary Dutch citizenship and integration law. Moreover, the show's focus on successful, thoroughly integrated and career driven young adults, while pragmatic from the perspective of the show's (limited) political objectives, also reproduced the preferred template of neoliberal citizenship, which drives the European migration regime and its policy of selective in/exclusion. These contradictions expose the possibilities, as well as the limitations, of humanitarian appeals working within the contemporary media regime, including reality TV, which imposes its own generic terms (and ideological inflections) on the justice claims launched within its public arena.