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.     

Exporting ‘active citizenship’: foreign support for citizenship education in the Arab world

What explains the rise in support for active citizenship programs in the Arab region? How has active citizenship been envisioned and taught with support by foreign states? How do participants understand the usefulness and impact of such programs? In this paper, we examine the contexts in which citizenship programs that embody the political aspirations of foreign states, are implemented. Embedded in local political realities, participants in these programs routinely question the ef?cacy and applicability of training modules focused on active citizenship and civic engagement. We argue that the proliferation of active citizenship programs for civil society organizations in practice serves to both bolster state legitimacy and discourage community leaders and activists from expressing political dissent. By submerging con?icting values, practices, and perspectives while encouraging civic participation based on conformity rather than dissent, active citizenship programs risk fostering a depoliticized civil society that is detached from the local political context.     

Campzenship: reimagining the camp as a social and political space

This article engages with current debates on the sociology of camps and camp-like institutions in contemporary society. Drawing on ethnographic material collected in Italy in ‘nomad camps’ where forcibly displaced Roma from former Yugoslavia were sheltered in the 1990s and 2000s, it argues that Agamben's conceptualisation of the camp as a space of exception, by constructing the camp as other to an idealised notion of citizenship and the rule of law, offers limited purchase for a sociological investigation of the complexity and ambivalence of social relations in and around camps as well as residents' everyday practices and experiences of political membership. Focusing on the resources, entitlements and ‘rights’ of camp residents and their interactions with state, regional and local authorities and non-governmental actors, this article invites to de-exceptionalise the camp and the experiences of its residents, and proposes the concept of ‘campzenship’ to capture the specific and situated form of political membership produced in and by the camp. Getting closer to the camp and its inhabitants through the adoption of an ethnographic gaze reveals the camp space as paradigmatic of the stratification and diversification of political membership in contemporary society, a social and political terrain where rights, entitlements and obligations are reshaped, bended, adjusted, neglected and activated by and through everyday interactions.     

Political involvement among Toung women: a qualitative analysis

The depoliticization and non‐participation of young people in city life is often a topic of discussion. Given this context, how and why do young people then become activist? This is the main question addressed by a sociological research project on the way young women in Quebec practise political involvement and on the meaning that involvement has for them. The question of why young women get involved has to do with their biographical history, their life trajectories, and the influence of family and friends. How they get involved has to do with what involvement and activism mean to them. One of the principal findings is that the young female activists who participated in this study all have an active conception of citizenship that is not restricted to political involvement. Some of our respondents said that involvement is a way of being, a lifestyle that requires them to act consistently in all aspects of daily life and thus implies living in accordance with one's ideals. In other words, the involvement practised and conceptualized by these young activists corresponds to what can be called a ‘search for ethical consistency’, which aims ‘to give meaning to the values we hold as individuals and as a collectivity’.     

Birthplace,bloodline and beyond: how ‘Liberian citizenship’ is currently constructed in Liberia and abroad

As a twenty-first century post-war, emigrant-sending country, Liberia reflects global citizenship norms while simultaneously departing from them, and this unique positioning offers new opportunities to theorise citizenship across spatial and temporal landscapes. In this article, I examine ‘Liberian citizenship’ construction through a historical prism, arguing that as Liberia transformed from a country of immigration to one of emigration, so too did conceptualisations of citizenship – moving from passive, identity-based citizenship emphasising rights and entitlements to more active, practice-based citizenship privileging duties and responsibilities. Given the dynamic trends in citizenship configuration across the globe and particularly in Africa, this article fills gaps in the growing body of literature on citizenship and participation in emigrant-sending countries by contributing to wider debates about how identities, practices and relations between people transform in the aftermath of violent conflict. Empirical evidence presented is based on multi-sited fieldwork conducted in 2012 and 2013 with 202 Liberians in urban centres in West Africa, North America and Europe.     

Differential inclusion of non-citizens in a universalistic welfare state

The regulation of legal statuses and differentiation of non-citizens’ rights within the states has become a significant site in the management of migration, yet the actual operations of differential inclusion remain an underexamined issue in the migration research. This article provides an empirically grounded analysis of the differential inclusion of non-citizens and demonstrates the legal hierarchies between non-citizens’ entitlements using Finland as a case study. I argue that in addition to the regulation of residence and the access to labour markets, the unequal access to the welfare system represents a significant sphere of differentiation in the immigration process. Non-citizens’ social entitlements differ depending on the nationality, the type of legal status and the form of employment, affecting their position in the labour markets and in the society. The article highlights the role of immigration law in manipulating the residence status of non-citizens, consequently invalidating the universalism of rights and a residence-based welfare system. Immigration controls, rather than representing a neutral framework of regulation of immigration, function as an institution, which produces conditional subjects and asymmetrical social relations in the sphere of universal citizenship.     

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.     

(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’.     

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.     

Citizenship as a gift: how Syrian refugees in Belgium make sense of their social rights

While citizenship scholars have documented the increasing moralisation of immigration and integration policies, relatively few have explored how immigrants themselves make sense of their (partial) membership of European welfare states. Drawing on semi-structured interviews and participant observation with Syrian refugees, this article documents how they interpret and act upon the partial and limited citizenship status they are given in Belgium. We focus on one dimension of their experiences: their stigmatic dependency upon the Belgian welfare state. While their accounts can be partly understood as reproducing neoliberal discourses, we argue that they are also a strategic reaction against the dependency that is inadvertently created by European welfare states. From our respondents’ perspectives, their social rights thus appear not so much as entitlements to be claimed, but as a continuation of the humanitarian logic of the (unreciprocated) gift.     

Models of citizenship: Defining European identity and citizenship

Citizenship implies membership of a political community and is internally defined by rights, duties, participation, and identity. It has traditionally been subordinate to nationality, which defines the territorial limits of citizenship. In order to theorize forms of citizenship that go beyond the spatial domain of nationality, citizenship must be seen as multilayered, operating on the regional, national and supranational levels. European citizenship as postnational citizenship is compatible with other forms of citizenship and could become an important dimension to the integration of European society in the twenty first century. At the moment, however, the tendency is to define European citizenship in terms of, on the one hand, a formal and derivative citizenship based on rights and which is mostly supplementary to national citizenship and, on the other hand, a European supranationality defined by reference to an exclusivist conception of European cultural identity. This conception of European identity and citizenship neglects other possibilities which European integration offers.     

The Politics of Citizenship Formation: Homeowners’ Collective Action in Urban Beijing

Conventional discourse in citizenship studies tend to assume that individuals are clearly aware of their rights and this rights-consciousness drives them to participate actively. This assumption, however, neglects the cases of interest-driven participation before the advent of rights-consciousness of the participants. By studying the homeowners’ collective action in Beijing, this study finds that the most direct incentive motivating the homeowners to participate in the first place is self-interest rather than strong rights-consciousness. Homeowners become actively involved in the process of democratic participation well before they have acquired a clear and strong sense of rights-consciousness. Nevertheless, despite starting off as interest-oriented, homeowners’ democratic practices have awakened their rights-consciousness and further cultivated a sense of citizenship identity. This interest-driven participation has paradoxically helped to create the democratic ethic of Chinese urban citizens. It has important implications for understanding political participation as well as citizenship formation in China.     

Immigration and Citizenship in Germany: Contemporary Dilemmas

The paper starts from a paradox of contemporary German politics: after the unification of the two Germanies the ethnocultural grounding of German citizenship has lost its historical meaning; at the same time violent conflicts and heated debate over the rights to full membership for immigrants in the German state have developed. After a theoretical discussion of the notions of nation state, citizenship, and immigration, the development of the contemporary paradox of citizenship is sketched historically using two pairs of distinctions: nationhood v. statehood and political v. social (state-mediated) inclusion. The paradox of 'ethnicized' conflicts over Germans v. foreigners is interpreted as a discrepancy between membership in the state on the one hand and membership in the welfare state system on the other—a discrepancy which currently is 'overdetermined' by the socio-economic consequences of unification.     

The Politics of Dual Citizenship in Hungary

The study reviews the politics underlying the 2004 referendum in Hungary on whether the country should offer extraterritorial, non-resident citizenship to ethnic Hungarians living in the neighboring states of Romania, Slovakia, Serbia-Montenegro and the Ukraine. The study argues that the issue of dual citizenship for ethnic minorities and kin-states in Central and Eastern Europe is quite distinct from the issue of dual citizenship in West European immigration countries. Transborder ethnic relatives make up large proportions of some of the contiguous countries with whom Hungary has a long history of border disputes which is why the Hungarian reform initiative touched upon sensitive issues connected to the sovereignty of these states. In addition, the large size of the non-resident Hungarian population means that their potential Hungarian citizenship would have serious consequences for the Hungarian welfare state, and the determination of the political future of Hungary, where even much smaller numbers of voting non-residents might swing the vote. The article outlines the arguments that were made in favor of the reform by the political right and those against the reform by the left. It examines the initiative from the European Union's perspective and compares the Hungarian case to cases of dual citizenship in other countries of Europe. The article also raises questions about the long-term implications of this form of dual citizenship for the “re-ethnicization” of citizenship.     

Two hypotheses about the emergence of a post-national European model of citizenship

Citizenship is not just a status (defined by a set of rights and obligations), it is also an identity that expresses membership in a political community. It also has a substantive political dimension of active participation in the public sphere. Traditionally, collective identity and the membership dimensions of citizenship have been seen as intrinsic to the nation-state. The processes of globalization that have undermined the sovereignty of the nation-state make it necessary to reconceptualize citizenship in light of a ‘post-national’ framework. At the same time, however, the ‘culturalization’ of the social and the ‘multiculturalization’ of societies are putting into question the homogeneity of a collective identity. According to a recent hypothesis, a new post-national model of citizenship is emerging, one of European construction. In seeking to explore this position, the paper advances two additional hypotheses: (i) EU policy-making and governance are likely to foster a post-national European civil society with multi-level citizenship participation; and (ii) European anti-discrimination regulations are likely to accelerate the emergence of an alternative model to multiculturalism that can address differences within a universal framework of rights.     

Globalization and citizenship: an Australian dilemma

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

Better than Nothing: How Policies Influence Political Participation in Low‐Capacity Democracies

A growing body of policy feedback work demonstrates that citizens' experiences with public policy influence the way they participate in politics. Most of this work takes place in advanced industrial democracies, but the nuances of policy design influencing participation in advanced democracies are often irrelevant for those in low‐capacity democracies. This study extends the policy feedback framework to address how policies might “feed back” differently in low‐capacity countries with uneven basic service delivery. In low‐capacity democracies, the most salient distinction is between those who have access to basic state‐provided services and those who do not. Using original data collected in Zambia, it demonstrates that those who have even marginal access to state services have higher levels of political engagement and political participation than those without access, indicating that imperfect extension of services may help boost democratic citizenship in developing countries.     

The Fate of Citizenship in Post-Westphalia

The article discusses the meaning of citizenship in a situation where the nations-state as we know it, i.e. the Westphalian form of state, is being eroded, thereby losing some of its essential functions. Since, as the argument goes, citizenship is embodied in civil society, and civil society needs a protective shelter in the form of a political authority structure, the decline of the nation-state implies a serious dilemma as far as the maintenance of principles of citizenship and human rights are concerned. The author outlines possible post-Westphalian scenarios, focussing on globalism versus regionalism, and finally argues in favour of what is called 'regional multilateralism' a regionalized world order, facilitating a regional civil society.     

Political and social rights for second country nationals: freedom of movement and citizenship in Australasia

Agreements allowing regional freedom of movement inevitably raise questions about the citizenship status and rights of those who exercise regional mobility. In the case of the European Union, such questions have received considerable academic attention, particularly since the creation of European citizenship in 1992. Little attention has been paid to Australasia, where a long-standing freedom of movement agreement, the trans-Tasman Travel Arrangement (TTTA), permits New Zealanders and Australians to live and work indefinitely in each others' country. As the two countries pursue a single economic market, the TTTA has played a central role in facilitating the creation of a regional labour market. Changes to Australian social security and citizenship legislation, however, have meant that many New Zealanders permanently resident in Australia have limited social and political rights, and no access to citizenship. This article extends debates about whether the political and social rights of citizenship ought to be granted to second-country nationals into the Australasian context. It examines a range of arrangements by which citizenship could be protected during the current period of intense economic integration in Australasia, asking which provides the best fit with existing constitutional and political arrangements.     

The Active Child Citizen: Lessons from Canadian Policy and the Children's Movement

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child has advanced a model of active citizenry for children, which is difficult to reconcile with the still dominant Western notions of childhood that fetishize innocence and attribute passivity and incompetence to children. This article explores the manner in which state policy, Canadian courts, and children's politics in Canada have responded to the imaginary of the active child citizen. The Canadian government has provided limited political space to young people and has narrowly construed children's participation rights as limited to family law and juvenile justice. The reluctance of adult decision-makers to open up policy-making to the contributions of children has been further hindered by the current anti-democratic cast of neo-liberal governance. This article examines how quasi-judicial tribunals and the Canadian courts have invoked the Convention in their dealings with child asylum seekers, only to construct childhood participation and childhood protection as mutually exclusive. The article concludes with a brief exploration of the alternative model of children's citizenship revealed by the children's movement organization, Free the Children. In contrast to the relative failure of adult decision-makers to implement the participation rights of children, the contemporary children's movement advances a view of children as empowered, knowledgeable, compassionate and global citizens, who are nonetheless, like other marginalized groups, in need of special, group-differentiated protections.