The perils of empire: nationhood and citizenship in Portugal

After the demise of the Portuguese empire and even more after joining the European Union, the Portuguese state redefined the borders of national belonging. The shift was one from a multi-continental nation, which included parts of Africa, to a more restricted definition of nationhood, one that stressed Portugal's connection to Europe and thus defined belonging by descent. This article, based on research conducted in Lisbon, Portugal in 2003, discusses the impact of this shift on Portuguese citizens of ethnically diverse backgrounds. The Portuguese state, media, academia, and civil society are all involved in constructing, disseminating, and hence consolidating a notion of nationhood that treats ethnically diverse minorities as foreigners, placing them outside the national community. Not producing or disseminating information on ethnic minorities, the Portuguese academia, media, and the state are all actively involved in reproducing a process that perpetuates exclusion and obstructs the construction of political alliances to confront widespread discrimination.     

Citizenship policies and ideas of nationhood in Scandinavia

This article analyzes the recent changes in naturalization policies in three Nordic countries, Norway, Denmark and Sweden. Considering the homogeneity of the region in terms of culture, social structure and polity, the discrepancy in current citizenship regulation is remarkable. Similar problem definitions have generated diametrical opposite solutions. This is even more striking as the three countries, hailing on perceived ideas of common interests and various experiences of shared rule in different political constellations for the best part of the last 500 years, also cooperated closely in forging their national citizenship legislation from the 1880s up till 1979. The article gives perspective to this novel variation, analyzing the interplay between aims and means in the naturalization policies. Basic questions like citizenship rights, the social and cultural cohesion of the nation state, national ideology and questions of identity will be addressed.     

Gandhi,citizenship and the resilience of Indian nationhood

This article examines Gandhi's legacy in the shaping of citizenship in India and its implications for the resilience of Indian nationhood. I contend that a conception of citizenship that can be extrapolated from Gandhi, and that persisted as a practice, as well as a political language, instilled in the dynamics of Indian citizenship attributes that played an important role in securing the resilience of Indian unity and its democratic viability. The Gandhian conception of citizenship was developed after independence in conjunction with three other primary concomitant notions of citizenship. The ongoing multifaceted interplay between the four competing conceptions of citizenship, and the tensions and shifting balance of power between them became part of the mechanism that enabled the sustainability of some conflicts within the Indian polity to the detriment of other more threatening divisions. In the effect of this process Indian citizenship has been able to inhibit the tensions that had the potential to break the country apart.     

Citizenship,nationhood and the production of political space

The purpose of this essay is to provide a discussion of the way in which citizenship and nationhood are implied in the territorialization of the modem state. Moreover, it attempts a brief exposition of the manner in which a new form of citizenship is involved in the de‐territorialization of political space within the European Union. The main argument is developed as a critical engagement with Rogers Brubaker's study on ‘Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany’. Following a critical evaluation of Brubaker's exceedingly rigid ontological framework, this essay offers an alternative reading of the historical relationship between citizenship, nationhood and political space in France and Germany. With both nation and state stripped of their exclusive status as possible mediations of political organization, a brief sketch is offered in ‘which the European Union Citizenship is evaluated in terms of its contribution to the de‐territorialization of the EU.     

新时代公民教育的困境与突围

中国走向现代化强国,有赖于我国公民整体素质的提升。新时代,公民教育是中国寻求稳定向前发展的重要基石。我国的公民教育亟须根据新时代所处的多元困境进行实践突围,抓住时代洪流的机遇,坚定马克思主义的旗帜不动摇,建立适应新时代的中国特色公民教育模式。     

Universalization of particulars: The civic body and gendered citizenship in Iran*

The logic of nation‐state building in the context of modernity is inextricably bound to the founding of politics—both as conceptual and practical possibility—on the basis of a binary dissociation of the public from the private, of rights from needs, of reason from passion. Thus politics in its modern sense becomes tied to a secularized theological‐political notion of responsibility. Further, such binary concepts are implicated in those temporal and spatial metaphors which naturalize the spheres of family and civil society, and distinguish them from the sphere of politics. These distinct spheres are essential to the construction of modern rational subjectivities and liberal citizenship. This essay, which focuses on the case of Iran, introduces the notion of the ‘civic body’ in an attempt to bring clearly into view the connection between sexed corporeality, cultural nationalism and gendered citizenship. Through a theoretical examination of the ‘civic body’ as both a site of political citizenship and a field of racial and sexual codification and recodification, such historical and discursive constructions as modernity, Westernization. ‘Westoxication’, Orientalism, universalization, particularism, masculinity and femininity will be brought into the nexus of analysis. The purpose of this essay is both to engage with the literature in the field of Iranian and Middle Eastern studies and to intervene critically with respect to citizenship as an analytical category.     

浅析高职院校大学生公民意识的现状及成因

高职学生是当代大学生的重要群体,加强对高职院校学生的公民意识教育对于培养学生的法制意识、独立的主体意识以及权力意识的培养具有重要的意义。目前高职院校学生公民意识普遍缺失,学校应积极开展公民意识教育,主要以思想政治理论课为主要载体,使教学内容与社会实践相结合,通过课堂教学做到以德育人、以法育人。将公民意识纳入到学校德育教育的工作中。     

The transformation of supreme values: Evidence from Poland on salvation through civic engagement

Public Choice - Peter Bernholz has described how ideologies and religions with supreme values have used violence to accomplish their goals. We describe the transformation of supreme values through...     

New social movement politics in France: The rise of civic forms of Mobilisation

The term ‘new social movement’ (NSM) tends to be broadly used by scholars to denote all recently formed non‐traditional types of social movement. Yet, the forms of social movement which have emerged in France over the past decade (anti‐racist movement, solidarity movement, Aids advocacy groups) differ from earlier NSMs in important ways. The most salient feature of these movements is their strong civic dimension. Their principal role is to defend and advance the social and political rights of certain groups in society. This article examines key social movements in contemporary France and suggests that ‘new citizenship ‘ may be a more accurate concept for describing the role which these movements play within the French political system.     

Correction to: The transformation of supreme values: Evidence from Poland on salvation through civic engagement

Public Choice - This article was published in Public Choice 185:1–2 and is part of the “Special Issue of Public Choice in Honor of the 90th Birthday of Peter Bernholz/Edited by Arye L....     

Second thoughts on civil society: The state,civic associations and the antinomies of the public sphere in Africa

ABSTRACT

This article offers a conceptual framework to identify and analyse the contemporary behaviour of the paradoxical government-organized, non-governmental organization (GONGO). We discuss how GONGOs’ activities fit within mainstream civil society theories and traditions. Furthermore, we compare and analyse GONGOs and NGOs in terms of their sources of power, main activities and functions, and dilemmas. Finally, we theorize the effects, and implications, the growth of GONGOs has on state and society relations globally.     

The recovery of natural law: Hochstrasser's history of morality

This book is discussed in the context of the ongoing recovery of a distinctively 'modern' or post-scholastic form of natural law thought. Hochstrasser's contribution to this recovery is to stress the linguistic-conventionalist character of post-metaphysical natural law in the German early Enlightenment. On this basis, he is able to show how Samuel Pufendorf and his followers largely escape the charges of moral arbitrariness and political tyranny levelled at them by such metaphysical rivals as Leibniz. The article concludes by briefly indicating one of the major alternatives to Hochstrasser's interpretation, giving a sense of the ongoing debate surrounding the construction of political legitimacy in post-scholastic natural law.     

John Dewey on experience: a critical resource for the theory and practice of youth civic engagement

Research on youth civic engagement often sees the everyday lives of young people as barriers to civic engagement. Recent qualitative approaches have drawn attention to the civic and political dimensions of young people's everyday lives. This is a crucial insight, but cannot – by itself – answer a key question: just how is it that everyday experience can be transformed into civic engagement? I argue that John Dewey's theory of experience makes two key contributions toward answering this question. First, Dewey's situational understanding of experience directs us to the concrete conditions of everyday life as the necessary groundwork and starting point for civic engagement. Second, his concept of reflective experience helps us understand how taken for granted assumptions about political and social life can be transformed into more active forms of engagement. I illustrate this argument by drawing on selected findings from a qualitative study of young people's experience in Public Achievement, a civic engagement initiative.     

Rhetoric and the recovery of civil society

By privileging the search for an overall order, both in its theorizing and in its aim, modern social theory has paid insufficient attention to the ‘zones’ of activity in between established institutions-called here the realm of civil society. This is an important neglect. For although the activity in such zones appears essentially disorderly, it permits many local and momentary orderings. Indeed, if one can speak of the ‘common sense’ of a social group at all, then it consists not only: 1) in the argumentative contesting of a whole range of not-as-yet wholly formulated visions of future ways of ‘going on’, but also in: 2) the provision of the historically developed socio-ontological resources required for their realization. Civil society thus contains the ‘seeds’ of future possibilities. Taking activity in this realm seriously means that our current task in social studies, is not the scientific one of discoveringan already existing order, but that of enabling the reinstitution of what, traditionally, was the task of rhetoric: to explicate, in a non-eliminative form of competition involving rival formulations, the implications of different accounts of the nature of our social lives together.