The rule of law and citizenship in central India: post-colonial dilemmas

This article argues that the ‘rule of law’ has become a central goal in popular struggles the world over, and it is citizenship struggles which infuse the rule of law with substantive, as against a thin procedural, meaning. This is especially true in post-colonial societies like India, with a tradition of inherited colonial law designed for subject-hood rather than citizenship, growing inequality which affects both the enactment and interpretation of law, and the violation of law by those who are meant to protect it. Demanding implementation of existing laws, breaking laws that are patently unjust whether through armed struggle or non-violent social movements, or seeking to change laws in favour of new and more democratic laws, are all major avenues by means of which people express their aspirations as citizens. However, law's mutually constitutive relation with social practice means that people enter into political and legal negotiations already constituted as certain kinds of legal subjects, which constrains their imagination in certain ways.     

Crafting radical opposition or reproducing homonormativity? Consociationalism and LGBT rights activism in Lebanon

There is little research on the struggles surrounding gay rights in divided societies emerging from intrastate conflict and characterized by consociational power sharing, which allocates rights to the main ethnic groups. While consociational arrangements – predicated on a minority rights regime – theoretically open up constitutional space for LGBT rights, they often negate such possibilities by empowering ethnic hardliners opposed to sexual minorities. This article explores how Lebanese LGBT activists conceptualize rights and craft mobilization tactics and strategies. I focus on an “identity dilemma” faced by Lebanese activists: to create a public identity for rights demands or to elide such a process. While the former strategy seeks openings in the power sharing structure, the latter aims for a radical form of resistance against the sectarianism of consociationalism. Activists pursuing the latter strategy, moreover, see consociationalism as encouraging an LGBT mobilization that reproduces the sectarian system and is complicit with homonormativity.     

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.     

Activist knowledges in queer politics1

Abstract

This paper examines the politics of knowledge production in the field of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) activism. It situates the development of LGBT activist research capacity within a broader shift towards evidence-based policy-making. The paper presents case studies of LGBT organizing from the US and Canada to demonstrate how LGBT activists utilize established social science methodologies such as statistics to claim legitimacy and render queer worlds visible in the policy process. The paper argues that this development in LGBT advocacy is marked by struggles over the kinds of queer realities that may be enacted through social scientific inquiry. The paper also explores the deployment of auditing and benchmarking in LGBT activist knowledge production. It demonstrates the way in which LGBT activists are using these privileged modes of knowledge production to produce truths regarding the nature, extent and effect of homophobia and heterosexism. The relationship between such calculative technologies and the emergence of LGBT active citizenship practices is considered. The paper concludes by emphasizing the decidedly mixed political implications of the increasing reliance on social science and calculative practices in queer activism.     

Constructions of migrant rights in Canada: is subnational citizenship possible?

Devolutionary trends in immigration and social welfare policy have enabled different levels of government to define membership and confer rights to people residing within the political boundary of a province or municipality in ways that may contradict federal legal status. Drawing upon theories of postnational and deterritorialized citizenship, we examined the legal construction of social rights within federal, provincial, and municipal law in Toronto, Ontario. The study of these different policy arenas focuses on rights related to education, access to safety and police protection, and income assistance. Our analysis suggests that the interplay of intra-governmental laws produces an uneven terrain of social rights for people with precarious status. We argue that while provincial and municipal governments may rhetorically seek to advance the social rights of all people living within their territorial boundaries, program and funding guidelines ensure that national practices of market citizenship and the policing of non-citizen subjects are reproduced at local levels.     

The Making of Mexican Illegality: Immigration Exclusions Based on Race,Class Status,and Gender

This article examines the history of US citizenship and deportation policies that have always been based on race, class status, and gender, as well as the effects of such policies on the making of Mexican illegality. Mexicans have been constructed as unassimilable and a threat to the US national polity. They are also viewed as working class likely to become a public charge. Mexican women have been imagined as extremely fertile and while their production has been desired, their reproduction has been feared. These social, political, and legal constructions resulted in the creation of Mexican illegality despite time of residence in the United States, ties to US citizens, or birthright citizenship. While scholars have documented immigration laws that have expatriated US citizen women (mainly of European racial backgrounds), policies that allowed for the deportation of “public charge” cases, and the racialization of Mexicans, who were once considered legally white for naturalization processes; the three identity-based exclusions have not been examined together to understand Mexican experiences in the United States. This article utilizes a racial, class, and gendered analysis to understand the making of Mexican illegality that began with the 1790 citizenship statue in which the United States Congress limited US citizenship rights to “free ‘white people’ and women’s citizenship was determined by their fathers or husbands.” The making of Mexican illegality continues with today’s immigration restrictions that perceive Mexicans as a threat to: national security, the white racial makeup of the country, and the stability of the economy.     

Muslim sound,public space,and citizenship agendas in an American City

Based on fieldwork in a small Michigan city, this study examines a contestation over the right for Muslims to broadcast the Islamic call to prayer, or adhan, into the streets. At stake in such contestations over public space is a struggle over conflicting citizenship agendas, or ideological formations seeking to advance particular models for good citizenship and the acceptable integration of minorities. Some Hamtramck citizens who identified themselves as interfaith actors advocated a citizenship agenda to support the call to prayer based on a material and spatial conception of shared civic culture that challenged assumptions about political differences between religious communities. To forward these aims, interfaith actors organized public ritual events that offered opportunities for visceral and experiential investments into the sights, sounds, and ceremonies of Hamtramck's religiously diverse public arena. This strategy encouraged people to a cross boundaries into previously exclusive religious spaces and presented opportunities to expand the cultural boundaries of municipal belonging.     

Lived citizenship as the locus of political agency in participatory policy

Participatory policies seeking to foster active citizenship continue to be dominated by a territorial imagination. Yet, the world where people identify and perform as citizens is spatially multifarious. This article engages with the tension between territorially grounded perceptions and relational modes of practicing political agency. Studying empirically the Finnish child and youth policies, we address jointly the participatory obligations that municipalities strive to fulfill, and the spatial attachments that children and young people establish in their lived worlds. To this end, we introduce the concept of lived citizenship as an interface where the territorially-bound public administration and the plurality of spatial attachments characteristic to transnational living may meet. We conclude by proposing a re-grounding of lived citizenship in both topological and topographical terms as an improvement in theoretical understanding of mundane political agency and as a step towards more proficient participatory policies.     

Contesting the ‘Active’ in active citizenship: youth activism in Cape Town,South Africa

ABSTRACT

In post-apartheid South Africa, efforts to encourage practices of citizenship and new citizens who will act in ways that support communities and the nation are promoted by government policies and networks of international organizations, civil society groups, and NGOs. In this paper, we analyse the pedagogy of citizenship that is common in these efforts and the role of ‘active citizenship’ within it. Relying on interviews with leaders of NGOs and activist groups and on participatory research with six organizations, we examine the ways in which different meanings and aspects of active citizenship are mobilized. Active citizenship is often dismissed depoliticizing citizenship and dampening dissent. The activists we interviewed and with whom we worked, however, challenge that critique. A central issue in our analysis are competing views as to whether active citizenship should be evaluated in terms of ‘effectiveness’ or ‘disruption.’ While some agents might incline toward effective and incremental change, many youth activists understand active citizenship as a tool that enables radical, disruptive acts capable of decolonizing South African society. Their use of active citizenship points to the need to avoid conflating citizenship with particular political goals and to not assume that active citizenship is necessarily and unequivocally enrolled in post-political consensus.     

Sexing Citizenship,Privatizing Sex

This paper explores different stories of sexual citizenship found in gay and lesbian rights struggles. It uses two recent cultural productions, Kissing Jessica Stein and Queer as Folk , to analyze the stories of sexual citizenship found in two Supreme Court decisions, M. v. H. , and Little Sisters. The paper deploys these contrasting stories of sexual citizenship, of sameness and difference, assimilation and subversion, to animate a complex reading of the sexing of citizenship and the privatizing of sex. It argues that the modality of sexual citizenship produced by rights struggles has been one in which sexual subjects are privatized, de-eroticized and depoliticized. At the same time, it argues for a more disruptive reading, which unearths the public, the erotic and the politicized subject, as well as the normalizing effect of this more subversive subject.     

Techniques of Citizenship: Health and Subjectivity in a New and Predominantly Inuit Territory

The lives and citizenship struggles of migrant workers, Indigenous peoples, immigrants, and others shape current thinking about citizenship, suggesting that it is an ongoing process of engagement. These struggles are often framed in citizenship terms because they are struggles for particular kinds of membership and participation within and beyond nation-states. They are, however, collective struggles for new space and suggest that treating citizenship simply as membership is inadequate. They demand, rather, recognition of both individual and collective subjectivities that emerge through efforts to shape and govern their own communities. This paper explores the relationship between the Inuit of the Central and Eastern Arctic and mechanisms of Canadian citizenship—those of national and territorial health institutions and discourse. In April 1999, the establishment of the new Canadian territory of Nunavut, with a population that is 85% Inuit, marked an important moment in both Inuit and Canadian histories. Through a qualitative exploration of the unfolding of health governance in this new territory, the paper examines how Nunavummiut (people of Nunavut) take up and challenge notions of health, governance, Canadian, Inuit, and Nunavummiut. It considers two discourses of health through which Nunavummiut, and others, employ “techniques of citizenship”, shaping both hybrid subjectivity and conceptions of health, giving rise to both constraint and resistance as Inuit Nunavummiut envision their engagement in health governance and in the collective Inuit struggle for self-determination.     

Hong Kong as the ‘Neoliberal Exception’ of China: Transformation of Hong Kong Citizenship Before and After the Transfer of Sovereignty

The formation of Hong Kong citizenship was under tensions and struggles after the change of sovereignty in 1997. In spite of the limited political and social rights, many incidents showed that the promised civil rights were declining. More importantly, subject to the intensified transborder population mobility of Chinese citizens, there were public discourses addressing that the social rights of Hong Kong citizens were threatened. Protests in response to the intensified transborder population mobility were found, with the rightist public discourses advocating to conserve the essences of Hong Kong citizenship. Being the neoliberal exception of China, Hong Kong is positioned to contribute for China by its market economy, as well as the relatively well-established socio-economic institution. However, as this article argues, in spite of the logic of exception, i.e. the zoning technology that the state deploys, the intensified transborder population mobility and economic activities between the neoliberal exception and the sovereign state can lead to the struggles and contentions concerning the citizenship of the former.     

‘The sleep has been rubbed from their eyes’: social citizenship and the reproduction of local hierarchies in rural Hungary and Romania

In this paper, we make three interrelated points. First, while much of the recent literature on new forms of citizenship has focused on the diversity of large cities and new forms of migration, we seek to establish rural sites as important arenas for negotiating citizenship. We stress that far from being homogeneous, villages in their struggles over belonging are affected by long-standing diversity as well as global discourses. Second, we seek to complicate the interpretation of the demise of socialism as a radical break manifested in a diminished role of the state. We show that if the central state retreats, local state actors may gain in importance for local negotiations of citizenship. Third, we explore how the local state actors sometimes use their new powers over social rights to recreate boundaries of belonging through public performances tied to the administration of these rights. We go on to explore the normative basis for these performances and indicate that membership is still based on a contribution of work to the common good. This can best be conceptualised as a shifting continuity rather than a sharp break after 1989.     

Institutionalizing precarious migratory status in Canada

This paper analyzes the institutionalized production of precarious migration status in Canada. Building on recent work on the legal production of illegality and non-dichotomous approaches to migratory status, we review Canadian immigration and refugee policy, and analyze pathways to loss of migratory status and the implications of less than full status for access to social services. In Canada, policies provide various avenues of authorized entry, but some entrants lose work and/or residence authorization and end up with variable forms of less-than-full immigration status. We argue that binary conceptions of migration status (legal/illegal) do not reflect this context, and advocate the use of ‘precarious status’ to capture variable forms of irregular status and illegality, including documented illegality. We find that elements of Canadian policy routinely generate pathways to multiple forms of precarious status, which is accompanied by precarious access to public services. Our analysis of the production of precarious status in Canada is consistent with approaches that frame citizenship and illegality as historically produced and changeable. Considering variable pathways to and forms of precarious status supports theorizing citizenship and illegality as having blurred rather than bright boundaries. Identifying differences between Canada and the US challenges binary and tripartite models of illegality, and supports conducting contextually specific and comparative work.     

Citizenship Institutions in Chinese Peasant-Workers’ Everyday Life: Toward a Theory of Citizenship Practice

Because of the close relationship between the existence of Chinese peasant workers and state policies, Chinese peasant workers’ citizenship has long been a central problem in the research on this group of people. In previous research, institutional analyses didn’t empirically examine the operation of citizenship, while the empirical investigation of citizen resistance failed to examine the influence of citizenship institutions on peasant workers’ everyday practice. Data from in-depth interviews indicate that relevant citizenship institutions and their changes constitute a part of the peasant-worker labor regime in China, which means that their citizenship has contributed to the long-term existence and the increasing number of this group of workers. First, the citizenship institutions related to peasant workers include differential citizenship, partial citizenship, passive citizenship, and segmented citizenship. Second, these citizenship institutions have shaped their double identities of rural residents and urban guests, which have influenced their motivations and attitudes toward their peasant-worker lifestyle. Finally, the effects of citizenship institutions on peasant workers’ identity, motivation and attitudes are a product of the market logic, which has made them commodify their citizenship. These findings imply a theory of citizenship practice and contribute to the understanding of the phenomenon of Chinese peasant workers.     

North American first peoples: slipping up into market citizenship?

This article explores the nature of Aboriginal demands for a citizenship regime grounded in a substantive recognition of cultural difference and inherent rights in Mexico and Canada. It provides an overview of the different evolution of Aboriginal citizenship in each country but focuses on two recent development projects, the Puebla Panama Plan in Mexico and the Mackenzie Valley pipeline in Canada. These cases demonstrate the ways in which neo‐liberal globalism is reshaping the substantive recognition of Aboriginal cultural difference and inherent rights. While contemporary neo‐liberal rhetoric recognizes cultural difference, the models of development employed effectively separate territory from the ideas of self‐government, culture and identity. The article concludes that the neo‐liberal turn in the construction of Aboriginal citizenship undercuts potentially much richer conceptions of Indigenous citizenship offered by the First Peoples of North America.     

For ‘common struggles of migrants and locals’. Migrant activism and squatting in Athens

ABSTRACT

This article analysis the socio-political form of the migrant squats, and the socio-spatial interactions they foster and generate. Drawing on empirical research, it focuses on the Athenian context where, since September 2015, political groups belonging to the anti-authoritarian and Left-libertarian movement, occupied some empty buildings to host migrants in transit through the country. From a political perspective, the squats are interpreted here as strategies of struggle to gain access to the space of the city and they also constitute instances of migrant activism and resistance to the European border regime. Moreover, migrant occupations represent practices and sites for contesting citizenship, intended as a category of political status; as such, they exceed the limits of this category and move beyond the boundaries of the nation-state, originating practices of citizenship ‘from below’, while at the same time they produce subjectivities that choose to ‘opt out’ of citizenship as a legal status. This article is situated within the contextualisation of space and autonomy. Migrant squats are looked at from the angle of the ‘gaze of autonomy’, since they are aimed both at contesting citizenship as an exclusionary feature, and at revindicating the activists’ (both migrants and non) presence in the space of city.     

Intersectional citizenship,violence, and lesbian resistance in South Africa

Abstract

There is a growing body of literature on intersectionality and citizenship, with scholars positing a need to analyze multiple identities simultaneously in order to understand both the legal incorporation and embodied experience of citizenship for marginalized groups. Building upon this central insight, I contribute to this literature by articulating the components of an intersectional citizenship framework to better understand the way multiple identities mediate citizenship, with particular reference to black lesbians in South Africa. Based on in-depth interviews with eighteen members of the black lesbian organization Free Gender, in Khayelitsha, Cape Town, I argue that Free Gender’s organizational goals can usefully be understood as asserting the commensurability of the identity “black lesbian” with “community member,” “African,” and “woman.” In applying a theoretical framework of intersectional citizenship to South Africa, it becomes clear that Free Gender’s activism reveals differential access to identities necessary to be seen as citizens entitled to rights. More than just extending juridical citizenship, black lesbians must have socially and politically legitimate access to multiple identity categories simultaneously in order to live free of violence.     

On the promise and perils of citizenship: heuristic concepts,Zimbabwean example

Increasingly, struggles in the name of citizenship inspire and catch the imagination and support of individuals and groups found in a variety of locales within a nation as well as transnational spaces. At the same time, their consequences may be quite different from the assumptions and dreams of those involved in perpetuating and imagining these struggles. To analyse how new social citizenship claims can embolden and channel struggles in particular directions with varied results – the promise and perils of citizenship more broadly – I suggest that one should pay attention to the promulgators of such visions of citizenship, the techniques of promoting their claims and the cultural politics and political economies of belonging in the locales of mobilization. Drawing on an ethnographic example of a farm labour struggle in the late 1990s in Zimbabwe, I explore the importance of attending to wider shifts in the political importance of citizenship as well as its entanglement in particular localities. Through examining how farm workers are situated through such struggles, I show the promise and limits of citizenship in addressing social justice concerns of a group historically marginalized through racialized, classed and gendered processes.