When States Prefer Non-Citizens Over Citizens: Conflict Over Illegal Immigration into Malaysia

Why would a state encourage illegal immigration over the opposition of its citizens? According to the theories of immigration and citizenship, we should expect exactly the opposite: that states will monitor, control, and restrict illegal immigrants' access to citizenship on behalf of its citizens, as has been the experience of most countries. I use my research on Filipino immigration to Sabah, Malaysia to show how Malaysia utilizes census practices and documentation to incorporate an illegal immigrant population from the Philippines. Illegal immigrants play an electoral role in Sabah because of the loosely institutionalized nature of citizenship, a feature common to many other developing countries. Our examination of Malaysia reveals several elements of illegal immigration and citizenship that are common to migratory flows in other developing countries. I conclude by showing how this case is generalizable and what it tells us about illegal immigrant participation in the international system.     

Transnational citizenship: problems of definition,culture and democracy

There is widespread disagreement over whether transnational citizenship provides defensible extensions of, or meaningful complements to, national citizenship. A significant strand of criticism relies upon empirical arguments about political motivation and the consequences of transnationalism. This paper addresses two questions arising from empirical arguments relating to the nation state and democracy. Do the alleged cultural requirements for effective political action provide an insuperable barrier to transnational citizenship? Does transnational citizenship necessarily require a commitment to transnational democracy? I argue that these largely empirical criticisms do not succeed in casting doubt upon the normative plausibility or practical viability of transnational projects. On the first question, I point to a growing transnational political culture that serves to motivate transnational citizens. On the second question, I argue for a legitimate category of transnational citizenship that, although inspired by cosmopolitan morality, is different from it, and that does not require transnational democracy.     

The Interactions and Experiences of Armenians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire and Republic of Turkey from the Young Turk Revolution of 1908 to the Present

This article will examine the interactions of Armenians and Jews as well as shared and dissimilar experiences in the Ottoman Empire and the Republic of Turkey from the early 20th century to the present to compare how affinities and differences in political outlook have affected their relationship. It has been stated at times in academia, by politicians, and members of the press that the Armenian and Jewish Diasporas have had similar historical experiences mostly through hardships. Despite that being the case, this article will show that throughout their experiences as non-Muslim minorities in the Ottoman Empire and the Republic of Turkey Armenians and Jews have never developed any coordinated collaboration; instead, they have pursued perceived respective ethnic interests, largely influenced by historical memory and geopolitics. At the same time, the Young Turks and later the Turkish state engaged in policies, especially toward non-Muslim minorities, that have been described as contradictory, ambivalent, or both in nature, influenced by changing perceptions of citizenship and identity as well as geopolitics.     

Consociationalism,Clientelism, and Local Politics in Beirut: Between Civic and Sectarian Identities

Both liberal and corporatist consociational systems are often characterized by identity-based networks that rely on clientelism and are difficult to hold accountable. This article uses Beirut's 2015 garbage crisis and 2016 municipal elections to argue that cities can be important sites for building new civic networks because cities often have resources and frames that can be used to mobilize individuals in different ethnosectarian networks. These civic networks, by promoting ideas of citizenship and state accountability, can be a significant factor in increasing liberalism in consociational systems.     

Ethnicity,political survival,and the exchange of nationalist foreign policy

How does leadership’s desire for political survival in ethnically heterogeneous democracies affect the probability of states exchanging nationalist foreign policy? I define nationalist foreign policy as foreign policy that aims to fulfill national self-governance using a civic or ethnic frame. I argue that civic-nationalist policy disputing the territoriality of one’s own state is more likely, while ethno-nationalist policy favoring the leadership’s foreign co-ethnics is less likely, when the size of the leadership’s ethnic group is small and the level of democracy is relatively high. This is because the leadership, under such domestic conditions, has to mobilize support from other ethnic groups in order to stay in power. Civic-nationalist policy allows the leadership to increase domestic solidarity across ethnic lines and mobilize support from other ethnic groups, whereas ethno-nationalist policy would risk other ethnic groups criticizing the leadership of being ethno-centrist. These hypotheses are supported by quantitative analysis using an original dataset.     

Negotiating a Korea – EU free trade agreement: easier said than done

A number of countries have chosen recently to shift away from an exclusive support to trade multilateralism and towards regional or bilateral trade agreements. Being no exceptions in this respect, the Republic of South Korea and the European Union have engaged in a bilateral FTA negotiation in early 2007. The objective of the paper is to account for the unexpected difficulties encountered in the negotiation. The paper starts with a brief overview of the trade and investment relations between the two partners and underlines the complementarity between the two partners, as well as their respective offensive and defensive interests. As a next step, the paper delves into the “politics” of the FTA negotiation with a view to highlighting the motivations and objectives of the various partners involved. It comes to the conclusion that the major reason why the negotiation turned out to be more complex than initially expected relates to the two partners’ diverging views as to what a discriminatory FTA should imply.     

The extra-territorial paradox of voting: the duty to vote in extra-territorial elections

The question of why individuals vote, the so-called “paradox of voting”, has been a crucial debate within political science, conceived deductively as an interaction between costs, benefits, and, as some argue, duties. This article situates the question of why individuals vote within the context of extra-territorial elections, focusing on how and why those who acquire citizenship kin-states participate in kin-state elections following citizenship acquisition, while continuing to reside outside of the kin-state. The article uses the case of newly acquired Romanian citizens in Moldova, who have never resided in nor intend to reside in Romania, to unpack whether, how, and why individuals acquiring Romanian citizenship in Moldova vote in Romanian elections. The article uses an interpretive and inductive approach to explore from the bottom up both the experiences of and motivations for political participation of extra-territorial citizens. The article finds, unexpectedly, how those acquiring Romanian citizenship in Moldova are motivated by a duty to participate. Overall, the article argues for a relational and reciprocal understanding of citizenship and voting, which focuses on the relationship between the kin-state, facilitating citizenship as a right, and the kin-citizen, performing their duty to vote.     

Discourse,genealogy and methods of text selection in international relations

Abstract

Discourse analysis, once the purview of critical theories of international politics, has emerged as a mainstream methodology for understanding international relations. While interest in such perspectives has enriched international relations theory, much about the nature of methods—that is, specific empirical processes for the gathering and analysis of evidence—is left ambiguous in this scholarship. Which texts should discourse analyses focus on? And, more practically, how should those texts be chosen? Building on discussions of case study methodology from both qualitative and interpretive social science, this article contributes to theoretical and empirical projects within discourse theory by suggesting a method for text selection: the random selection of texts. I argue that random selection processes are beneficial for discourse analyses that aim to study broad cultural patterns, such as genealogy. Random selection is not simply a means of choosing texts, but also a more comprehensive logic for thinking about the purpose of texts in discourse analysis.     

Remembering violence: the role of apology and dialogue in Turkey's democratization process

In this article I ask the question: how do citizens use memories of violence in dialogue with a democratizing Turkish state? To address this, I unpack how memories of violence influence solidarity communities in addition to those who are direct descendents of survivors. I also examine how these solidarity communities are widening political space for contemporary dialogue about the Armenian Catastrophe. To demonstrate the connection between memory and political participation, I identify three discursive moments where Turkish and Armenian citizens invoke memory in dialogue with one other and with the state. I use the 2009 online campaign for a Turkish apology to address the Armenian Catastrophe, the aftermath of the murder of Hrant Dink in 2007, and a controversial 2005 academic conference on the events of 1915 as focal points to discuss how memory impacts the way people behave as citizens. My argument is twofold: first, elite-led solidarity networks play an integral role in shaping the discursive space between citizens, the state, and the international community; and second, dialogue about memory can grow space for citizen participation in Turkey.     

Civic Engagement,Pedagogy, and Information Technology on Web Sites for Youth

Scholars of political socialization are paying increasing attention to how the Internet might help cure the civic disengagement of youth. This content analysis of a sample of 73 U.S.-based civic Web sites for youth introduces a framework for evaluating Web sites' strategies for fostering active communication for citizenship. We offer the first systematic assessment of the extent to which a broad range of Web sites aim to develop young people's abilities to use information and communication technology (ICT) as a vehicle for civic participation and to engage with ICT as a policy domain that encompasses issues (such as freedom of speech and intellectual property rights) that shape the conditions for popular sovereignty online. The study finds low levels of interactive features (such as message boards) that allow young people to share editorial control by offering their own content. In addition, few sites employ active pedagogical techniques (such as simulations) that research suggests are most effective at developing civic knowledge, skills, and participation. We also find little attention to ICT policy issues, which could engage budding citizens in debates over the formative conditions for political communication in the information age. We conclude with suggestions for civic Web site designers and hypotheses for user studies to test.     

Issue Ownership,Issue Positions,and Candidate Assessment

I argue that citizens alter their views of candidates’ ideological and issue positions in response to two kinds of information cues: issue ownership and issue position cues. Issue ownership cues associate a candidate with the party that owns the issue discussed by a candidate. Issue position cues associate a candidate with the party that is linked to the position that the candidate discusses. These cues can either lead citizens to view the candidate as more or less extreme—both in terms of ideological and issue position assessments—than that candidate’s party. When both types of cues are present, citizens should ignore the issue ownership cues in favor of the easier-to-process issue position cues. Evidence from a survey experiment embedded in the 2010 Cooperative Congressional Election Study provides strong support for this theory and suggests that issue ownership can convey positional information.     

Civic Mobilization in Divided Societies and the Perils of Political Engagement: Bosnia and Herzegovina's Protest and Plenum Movement

This article explores how civic mobilizations that emerge in deeply divided societies navigate their ethnopolitical frameworks and assesses their capacity to effect civic political change within such contexts. The article examines these questions through the case of a citizens’ protest and direct democracy movement that emerged in the postwar state of Bosnia and Herzegovina in 2014. It concludes that the movement adapted to its ethnicized political environment by adopting an approach of limited political engagement and that, rather than trying to effect short-term political change, it chose to pursue a long-term shift in civic consciousness.     

Ethnos,demos and democratization: A comparison of the Czech Republic,Hungary and Poland

With the collapse of European communism, Western observers and leaders fostered new expectations about the relative likelihood for post‐communist nations to ‘join the West’. The Czech Republic, Poland and Hungary were seen as least problematic candidates, sponsored especially by the German leadership. A troubling issue however is the emerging pattern of ethnos‐politics, identity politics based on blood ties, as opposed to demos‐politics, civic politics based on universal territorial citizenship. In the Czech Republic this ethnos‐politics appears most clearly as anti‐Romany racism and governmental discrimination. In Poland and Hungary, centre‐right parties have developed a politics of ethnic patriotism which labels opponents as traitors and foreign elements. In these nations, political liberalism has been too weak and often too opportunist to offer a viable demos‐politics as a counterweight. Instead, the ex‐communist successor parties in Poland and Hungary have re‐emerged as the mass base for a non‐nationalist demos‐politics. The West has yet to take seriously the new ethnos‐politics, prefering to give priority to economic and foreign‐policy compatibility. The admission of these nations into the European Union or North Atlantic Treaty Organization would give new legitimacy to ethnos within the West, and reinforce the ethnos‐politics of Austria's Haider and France's LePen.     

Canada,the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) and the flexibility of terror identities

ABSTRACT

Security governance practices are contingent on the imagination of future threats. The “war on terror” has produced a very narrow imagination of threats, almost singularly focused on suspect communities that are Arab, Muslim, or perceived to be Middle Eastern. Discussing how immigration practices in Canada have been influenced by counter-terrorism trends, we argue that “terror identities” are mutable and highly racialised imaginaries that cast indelible marks of suspicion on subjects who are deemed as security threats. Examining the case of a journalist deemed inadmissible to Canada because of her “membership” in the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO), we argue that terror identities impose authoritative control over the status and lived experiences of individuals who are cast through these racialised labelling practices. Focussing on the shifting characterisation of the PLO by Canadian officials as both political interlocutor and terrorist organisation, our purpose is to highlight how racialised imaginations of terror identities enact punitive and discriminatory practices.     

Why do some Arab citizens see democracy as unsuitable for their country?

Why do some Arab citizens regard democracy favourably but see it as unsuitable for their country? Modernization theory contends that economic development creates modern citizens who demand democracy. Cultural theories see Islam and democracy as incompatible. Government performance theories argue that citizens who perceive the current authoritarian government as acting in a transparent manner will demand greater democracy. I argue that attitudes toward democracy are shaped by beliefs about its political, economic, and religious consequences, including those related to sectarianism. I test this consequence-based theory using Arab Barometer data from six nations. Sixty percent hold favourable views of democracy generally and for their country, while 7% reject democracy. Twenty-seven percent support democracy generally but see it as unsuitable for their country. Beliefs that democracy will have negative consequences and perceptions of poor government performance are the most important predictors of democracy's unsuitability. Modernization theory receives support, but Islamic identity and beliefs do not consistently predict attitudes in the expected direction. These findings offer a more nuanced understanding of Arab public opinion and suggest that concerns about the consequences of free elections affect support for democracy as much as assessments of the political and economic performance of the current authoritarian regime.     

Mobilizing Information: Local News and the Formation of a Viable Political Community

This article offers a rhetorical understanding of the practices and influences of news media on democratic citizenship during an environmental conflict. I compared two newspapers' ability to foster and suppress the formation and activation potential of citizens to participate in the decision-making process of a solid waste facility siting. One newspaper used language that fostered the formation of community by overcoming apathy and encouraging residents to act collectively. In contrast, the other newspaper's coverage suppressed the formation of community by reinforcing the belief that residents were powerless against the entrenched economic and political power base. This research also establishes a rationale for why it is important to the discipline to expand the definition of mobilizing information in the news media.     

A Review of: “Fred Schreier. WMD Proliferation: Reforming the Security Sector to Meet the Threat.”

ABSTRACT

Previous research has argued that political inequality between ethnic groups increases the likelihood of both nonviolent and violent protest. In this study, I focus on civil resistance campaigns and argue that the probability that these large-scale, organized movements will take violent over nonviolent forms increases with the share of a country’s population that is excluded from political power on the basis of ethnic affiliation. I expect this to be so because ethnically exclusive regimes are more likely to counter political demands with violent repression, which increases the cost and decreases the anticipated success of nonviolent relative to violent resistance. I test this proposition in a global sample of countries for the period 1950–2006 and find, first, that high levels of ethnic exclusion make civil resistance campaigns more likely to occur violently than nonviolently. Next, to assess the mechanism at play, I conduct a mediation analysis and show that almost half of the effect of ethnic exclusion on violent campaign onset is mediated by the latent level of violent repression in a country. This result suggests that political authorities’ repressive strategies are key to explaining why regime opponents do not always opt for nonviolent forms of civil resistance.     

Governing failure: development,aid and audit in Haiti

This paper analyses practices for monitoring, tracking and assessing the international aid and reconstruction efforts in Haiti in an attempt to ‘build back better’ from the devastation of the January 2010 earthquake. We suggest that aid and reconstruction efforts filter through an international network of development organisations. This network also acts as a governing auspice, overseeing the transformation of Haiti from a ‘failed state’ to a strong democratic state. The central governing mechanism in this reconstruction effort involves the embedding of the ideas and practices of audit within Haitian political and civic culture. We reveal how, in Haiti, this culture of audit monitors aid and reconstruction through biopolitical technologies such as benchmarks and performance indicators, and through the constitution of calculable and accountable entities. More than a means of implementing disaster recovery, audit culture is a technique of biopolitical governance that aims to transform Haiti's state, civic institutions and citizens into entities accountable to an international development agenda.     

The ‘new nationalism’ and democracy: A critique of Pro Patria

This article addresses a way of thinking which has entered the current literature on democratization and which I call the new nationalism. The main argument of this approach is that a certain kind of nationalism is essential for the future of democracy. It is conceptualized variously as ‘civic nationalism’, ‘national identity’, ‘esprit general’, ’constitutional patriotism’ or even ‘post‐nationalism’ and is contrasted with conventional forms of nationalism marked by ethnic hatred. The ‘new nationalism’ rejects Marxist internationalism, which it sees as nullifying the importance of the nation‐state for democracy. I shall explore the arguments put forward in this mode by Ignatieff, Kristeva and Habermas; criticize the national chauvinism which continues to run through them; reassess their criticisms of Marxism; and compare them with the more critical approach of Hannah Arendt. I shall, finally, argue that the ‘new nationalism’ is an inadequate framework for theorizing democracy in the modern age.     

Immigrants and undesirables: “terrorism” and the “terrorist” in 1930s France

This article investigates French understandings of the terms “terrorism” and “terrorist” in the period of the late Third Republic when a series of assassinations, murders and bombings suggested that France was dangerously exposed to the threat of terror. The article deconstructs contemporary understandings of the phenomenon, showing that, if a variety of actions were labelled “terrorist”, the term was deployed in particular in relation to matters of foreignness. It was believed that immigrants, refugees and foreign secret agents imported terrorist violence to France. French citizens did not – could not even – perpetrate terrorism. Parallels may be drawn between discussions of citizenship in the wake of twenty-first century acts of terrorism and manifestations of such violence during the 1930s when notions of terrorism, Frenchness and foreignness were intimately connected.