Theorising noncitizenship: concepts,debates and challenges

Abstract

Existing political theory, particularly which deals with justice and/or rights, has long assumed citizenship as a core concept. Noncitizenship, if it is considered at all, is generally defined merely as the negation or deprivation of citizenship. As such, it is difficult to examine successfully the status of noncitizens, obligations towards them, and the nature of their role in political systems. This article addresses this critical gap by defining the theoretical problem that noncitizenship presents and demonstrating why it is an urgent concern. It surveys the contributions to the special issue for which the article is an introduction, drawing on cross-cutting themes and debates to highlight the importance of theorising noncitizenship due to both the problematic gap that exists in the theoretical literature, and the real world problems created as a result of noncitizenship which are not currently successfully addressed. Finally, the article discusses key future directions for the theorisation of noncitizenship.     

Unequal access to human rights: the categories of noncitizenship

Abstract

International human rights law consists of a body of basic rights and principles that States are to enforce with respect to every person within their borders. The unfortunate reality, however, is that many States are incapable of ensuring the rights of everyone, and in some instances simply do not wish to do so. Accordingly, citizenship serves as an acknowledgment by a State that the status holder is entitled to a higher degree of protection. Conversely, noncitizens may enjoy less rights than citizens, and certain categories of noncitizens frequently find themselves outside of the State’s protection entirely. This article outlines many of the rights that international law directs should be enjoyed by every human being, the factors that contribute to unequal enjoyment of these rights, and the categories of noncitizen associated with the mediated allocation of basic human rights.     

These fine lines: locating noncitizenship in political protest in Europe

Abstract

Since 2012, refugee protest camps and occupations have been established throughout Europe that contest the exclusion of refugees and asylum seekers, but that also make concrete demands for better living conditions and basic rights. It is a movement that is led by migrants as noncitizens, and so reveals new ways of thinking of the political agency and status of noncitizenship not as simply reactive to an absence of citizenship, but as a powerful and transgressive subjectivity in its own right. This paper argues that we should resist collapsing analysis back into the frameworks of citizenship, and instead be attentive to the politics of presence and solidarity manifest in these protest camps as a way of understanding, and engaging, noncitizen activism.     

Contractualization,depoliticization and the limits of solidarity: noncitizens in contemporary Australia

Abstract

This paper seeks to analyze a particular form of noncitizenship – arising from legal long-term temporary migration – that is increasingly significant to the contemporary Australian context and to understand some of its consequences. It argues that traditional pathways of permanent settlement and full citizenship are being disrupted by new temporary migration schemes that create ‘middling’ noncitizen subjects who experience ‘patchwork’ rights and statuses across complex and diverse migration pathways. Through a close analysis of policy narratives and discourses, as well as of the existing literature on the social conditions and emerging solidarities of these noncitizens, the paper shows the various ways that noncitizenship is depoliticized and citizenship contractualized in Australia. These entwined processes of depoliticization and contractualization have intimate effects on the lives of noncitizens, and also limit and constrain the emerging solidarities that seek to challenge their exclusion. The analysis has a number of implications for the ongoing study of contemporary transformations in citizenship in other ‘immigrant democracies’ globally.     

联合国国际人权两公约之背景,内容与意义

联合国国际人权两以约是国际社会在人权保护方面最重要的两个公约。两公约诉产生过程,内容和执行体系,都表明国际社会在人权保护领域既普遍的共识,也有尖锐的分歧。两公约本身即是求同存异的产物,它是尽可能地融合了东西方国家对人权的不同理解,充实和发展了《联合国宪章》中关于基本人权的内容和为人权领域的国际合作提供了国际法依据。但是,人权进行国际法领域,并不意味着可以把人权作为攻击或干涉他国内政的工具,借口不人     

Assembling noncitizenship through the work of conditionality

Abstract

We develop a framework for understanding noncitizenship that combines attention to systemic processes with interest in contingency and indeterminacy in the production and substantive practices associated with noncitizen legal status categories and trajectories. We argue that noncitizenship is a dynamic, multi-scalar assemblage that brings together disparate elements in patterned and changing ways. Individuals and institutions generate the formal and substantive systems that confer or deny noncitizens the formal and substantive right to be present in a country and/or to access entitlements. Noncitizens exercise agency in choosing to make claims (or choosing to not make claims) to substantive rights, and the individuals and institutions with which they interact may facilitate or hinder such claims-making. In this process, social actors are enacting conditionality; they are working to meet the conditions required to maintain presence and access. Discretion, migrant agency, unequal social interactions, and social learning unfold over time and can generate a range of experiences of noncitizenship and legal status trajectories. These do not necessarily conform to expected pathways and timelines, and may combine access to various resources and public goods in variable and contingent ways. We illustrate the framework with data from research conducted in Toronto.     

The effectiveness of the telecommunications regulatory regime: the case of Sri Lanka telecom

This article examines the telecommunications industry in Sri Lanka and assesses the effectiveness of regulatory arrangements associated with the liberalisation of the telecommunications industry, from a management point of view. The review focuses on the scope of services, price and the quality of services available to customers after the liberalisation. This study finds that, despite the early establishment of the Telecommunications Regulatory Commission (TRC) to monitor the telecommunications industry, its interventions have been only partially successful in making it conducive to service providers and customers. While liberalisation of the telecommunications industry has been favoured, the role of the regulator has been controversial with regard to its independence, impartiality, capability, transparency and accountability. We argue that the current model has failed to create favourable market conditions under the circumstances prevailing in the country, and hence a more appropriate model is yet to be developed. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Review of Victoria's Guardianship Legislation: State Policy Development in an Age of Human Rights

This article considers the Victorian government's decision to review the state's guardianship legislation and notes the significant place international human rights developments are playing in that review. The article recognises the opportunities these developments present for reworking the guardianship legislation to increase the autonomy and decision-making power of people with disabilities, but also considers the challenge these developments present to ensuring that society continues to protect its most vulnerable citizens.     

Justified state partiality and the vulnerable subject in migration

According to David Miller, there exists a special relationship between migrants at the border and members of a political community that the migrant hopes to join. It is the task of a political philosophy of migration to define a state’s obligations toward individuals who are vulnerable to the state’s actions without being members of the political community. I define the vulnerability in question as lacking capacity to be autonomous for lack of options to realize one’s plan of life. I then discuss Miller’s claim that what matters is sufficiency of generic options rather than access to all options. Miller wants to say that sufficiency can be achieved by assuring the protection of human rights. This claim neglects the source of the individual migrant’s vulnerability. I therefore argue that Miller neglects the specific relationship he has identified between potential host state and hopeful migrant, and advocate instead that the potential host state has to consider the vulnerability that is due to its own policies, such as migration regimes. This grounds a causal responsibility to protect the basic interest in leading autonomous lives for the migrant at the border.     

What comes first,democracy or human rights?

Minimalists about human rights hold that a state can have political legitimacy if it protects a basic list of rights and democratic rights do not have to be on that list. In this paper, I consider two arguments from Benhabib against the minimalist view. The first is that a political community cannot be said to have self-determination, which minimalists take to be the value at the heart of legitimacy, without democracy. The second is that even the human rights protections minimalists take to legitimize institutions cannot be had without democracy. These rights can only be adequately interpreted and specified for any social context if the interpretations and specifications result from democratic processes. Here, I bring out some important problems with these arguments and so conclude that they do not represent a robust case for rejecting minimalism.     

Rooted displacement: the paradox of belonging among stateless people

Abstract

Stateless people are noncitizens everywhere. Yet, unlike many noncitizens, they are not border crossers. Despite the majority’s physical rootedness in the countries of their birth, the stateless are nonetheless forcibly displaced. Their peculiar form of noncitizenship displaces them in situ as they lack the right to choose to belong to the specific communities within which they were born and raised. Using The Bahamas and the Dominican Republic as case studies, this article illustrates how the stateless are either forcibly cast into liminality or made to take on the nationality of a country with which they do not identify when the State can no longer tolerate their noncitizen status.     

Citizenship and inclusion: rethinking the analytical category of noncitizenship

The paper problematises the category of noncitizenship. It traces its trajectory in accounts of inclusive citizenship and argues that it is difficult to theorise it as a distinct theoretical category outside of citizenship. To support this argument, the paper distinguishes between a pluralist, political and democratic variant of accounts of inclusive citizenship and it shows how they all end up reducing noncitizenship to a journey to citizenship. To overcome this limit, the paper develops the idea of subversive politicisation and suggests that injustices and inequalities can be challenged without falling back on the vocabulary of citizenship.     

"行乞权"之争的法理误区--兼评"法无明文禁止之处即可作权利的推定"命题

乞讨行为从来都不是一种被社会道德或国家法律所倡导的行为."行乞权"既不是公民的生存权,也不是一项"穷人的道德权利"或具有普遍意义的道德权利.在"行乞权"之争中,暴露出长期以来法理上,以及近些年来人们在人权理念上的种种误区.逻辑上和实践中,从法无明文禁止之处不能必然地推导出权利.人权不是一种排除义务的绝对权利,或可以凌驾于一切社会规范之上不含界限的一种特权.     

How much is citizenship worth? The case of Kyrgyzstani migrants in Kazakhstan and Russia

In the past few decades, political membership has become more complex, for example, through the proliferation of dual and multiple citizenships. Some scholars argue that, as a result, state membership may have become less relevant to individuals. In the same vein, our article argues that Kyrgyzstani migrants working in Russia and Kazakhstan have developed a pragmatic approach to citizenship. This case study, which builds upon in-depth interviews conducted in April and May 2008, is pertinent for several reasons. Labor migration from Kyrgyzstan has surged in recent years and is radically affecting the country's economy, society, and polity. Besides, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, and Russia have been separate political units for less than two decades; transnational practices and attitudes are thus not new. Our results show that for Kyrgyzstani migrants in Russia and Kazakhstan, citizenship is mainly defined in terms of concrete, short-term benefits. They have difficulties formulating what it means to be a citizen beyond the expression of a vague patriotic support. Those who have naturalized, mostly in Russia, do it for convenience purposes without attaching much affective meaning to it. Most see their stay as temporary (particularly in Kazakhstan), are not engaged in diasporic organizations or activities, and are estranged from the politics of both their home and host country.     

The New China: Dynamism and vulnerability

Abstract

From 1998 to 2003, the Solomon Islands found itself in the grip of ‘the Tensions’, a violent civil conflict that left some 200 people dead, more than 20,000 displaced, and countless others subjected to torture, rape, fear and intimidation. In the aftermath of the conflict, two dominant approaches to post-conflict justice emerged. The first, implemented by the Regional Assistance Mission to the Solomon Islands (RAMSI), favoured a ‘rule of law’ approach according to which large numbers of militants on both sides were arrested and processed through the criminal justice system resulting, in many cases, in the imposition of lengthy period of imprisonment. The second, ‘reconciliation’ approach, favoured local, grassroots, traditional and indigenous justice processes and were routinely implements by community groups, women's organisations and the churches. This article demonstrates that in the absence of a formally planned transitional justice process, these two approaches to post-conflict justice have come into serious tension with proponents of each accusing the other of hampering their justice efforts. It examines those tensions and analyses the extent to which the Solomon Islands’ Truth and Reconciliation Commission, designed in part to provide a bridge between the rule of law and reconciliation approaches, has been able to quell this new set of tensions.     

Rethinking Human Rights in York as a Human Rights City

Human rights is in crisis in the UK. It lacks significant political backing and public support. This ‘insider account’ of York becoming a human rights city suggests that there is a need to rethink approaches to human rights. The article looks at the strategies adopted in the city; the annual city‐based indicator report which provides the key reference point for all local activities; and the declaration of York as a ‘human rights city’ in 2017 alongside its subsequent impact. The discussion is linked to two debates within human rights: how to define and build a culture of human rights, and what it means for human rights to be truly relevant at a local level. The new approach advocated can be summarised as participatory, locally informed, and related to everyday concerns.     

Urban commons and freedom of movement The housing struggles of recently arrived migrants in Rome

ABSTRACT

The arrival of migrants on Italian coasts following the so-called Arab Spring in 2011 has led to a multiplication of housing struggles. These struggles are widespread across the country and focus on the occupation of abandoned buildings and their transformation into collective housing spaces to provide an alternative to the formal reception system. This article will focus on the housing struggles in Rome, as the place with the highest number of occupations and the longest tradition of campaigns for the right to housing of migrants in the country. These struggles are the outcome of the encounter of recently arrived migrants with local solidarity movements and build on existing occupation movements and housing struggles. The article explores how the mobilizations over the right to housing intersect with issues such as the social appropriation of urban commons, the regeneration from below of unused areas, freedom of movement, and the contestation of Italian government policies on the relocation of migrants and refugees. The paper argues that housing struggles not only appropriate and regenerate urban commons, but also challenge the reception governance of migration and the policies of border control.     

We are all denizens now: on the erosion of citizenship

This article makes a contribution to the general theory of citizenship. It argues that there is a need for a supplementary concept of ‘denizenship’ to illustrate changes to and erosion of postwar social citizenship as famously described by T H Marshall. The first aim is to construct a more theoretically developed idea of what the concept of a ‘denizen’ means in sociological terms. In its conventional meaning, this term describes a group of people permanently resident in a foreign country, but only enjoying limited partial rights of citizenship. I label this Denizenship Type 1. By contrast, Denizenship Type 2 refers to the erosion of social citizenship as citizens begin to resemble denizens or strangers in their own societies. The argument then is that there is a general convergence between citizenship and denizenship. As such, Denizenship Type 2 provides a possible supplement to the various terms that have recently been proposed, such as flexible citizenship, semi-citizenship, or precariat to describe the attenuated social and economic status of citizens under regimes of austerity and diminished rights and opportunities. As the life chances of citizens decline, they come to resemble denizens. One illustration of this basic transition is to be found in the changing nature of taxation. This observation also allows me simply to observe that the political economy of taxation has been somewhat neglected in the recent literature on citizenship where questions about identity and subjectivity have become more dominant. As a result of these socio-economic changes, the modern citizen is increasingly merely a denizen with thin, fragmented, and fragile social bonds to the public world. The corrosion of the social, economic, political, and legal framework of citizenship offers a new slogan: ‘we are all denizens now.’     

Bridging the Gap: The Relationship between INGO Activism and Human Rights Indicators

This article explores the tension between the production of “naming and shaming” reports as tools of activism by international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs) and the usage of these reports as cross-national indicators of human rights violations. Because INGOs are strategic actors, their reports are not a reflection of the “true” levels of abuse. Although existing scholarship has raised this issue in relation to bias in cross-national indicators, it has yet to explain the process by which NGOs produce reports. This article exploits subnational variation across domestic and international NGOs within India, showing how the divergence in their reports can be explained by these groups’ organizational structures, probability of success in their chosen issue areas, and target audiences. By explaining how human rights NGOs produce reports, this article concludes with suggestions to ensure that the biases prevalent in a single source of data do not drive the results of future scholarship.     

The unbearable rightfulness of being human: citizenship,displacement, and the right to not have rights

Claims to human rights protection made by displaced persons are displaced from the universe of humanity and rendered ineffective by the geopolitical character of modern international human rights law, in favour of the protection of citizens' rights claims. In response, there is increasing interest in leveraging respect for and protection of the rights of displaced persons through extension of the rights enjoyed and supposedly borne by emplaced citizens. However, it is a mistake to assume that humans as citizens bear human rights or that the freedoms that they may be able to extend beyond state boundaries are universalisable. The extension of the right to citizenship functions to displace questions of human rights themselves. The question of the human in rights is in fact always displaced, as long as the human subject is acted upon as if it could possess rights. In paying attention to the critical perspectives with which displaced persons confront the citizen, she or he may come to appreciate the fact that the universality of human rights is served where one does not claim to have rights but, rather, actively engages, without limits, with others in the struggle for rights and their respect.