Women in the driving seat: Eastern European immigrant women's citizenship,participation and educational inclusion in Portugal

This paper is a case study of Eastern European immigrant women's social inclusion in Portugal through civic participation. An analysis of interviews conducted with women leaders and members of two ethnic associations provides a unique insight into their migrant pathways as highly educated women and the ways in which these women are constructing their citizenship in new contexts in Northern Portugal. These women's accounts of their immigrant experience embrace both the public realm, in using their own education and their children's as a means of integration but also spill over into ‘non-public’ familial relationships at home in contradictory ways. These include the sometimes traditional, gender-defined division of labour within the associations and at home and the new ways that they negotiate their relative autonomies to escape forms of violence and subordination that they face as women and immigrants.     

Mapping silent citizenship: how democratic theory hears citizens' silence and why it matters

Democratic theory hears silent citizenship as disengagement or disempowerment. Normatively, silent citizenship evokes the specter of civic passivity – of democratic citizens variably characterized by apathy, disaffection, selfishness, or a lack of political knowledge. Empirically, silent citizenship is linked to deficits of democracy – including voter turnout rates, the quality of political representation, and overall government responsiveness. One problem with these conclusions, however, is that we lack any systematic conceptualization of the range of different attitudes democratic citizens might hold in silence. This article seeks to fill in this conceptual gap by mapping the range of possible motivations for citizens to remain silent in developed liberal democratic systems. The key to doing so, I argue, is to distinguish between two measures of democratic citizenship: empowerment and communication. Separating these two measures reveals an entire spectrum of motivations for silence, which I organize into five distinct degrees of silent citizenship.     

Morphing the Demos into the right shape. Normative principles for enfranchising resident aliens and expatriate citizens

In this article I criticize, first, democratic inclusion principles that are indeterminate with regard to democratic boundaries and indifferent towards the structural features of polities. I suggest that a democratic stakeholder principle passes these critical tests and can be applied to democratic polities of different kinds. Second, I compare birthright-based and residence-based membership regimes at state and local levels and consider how they can accommodate international migrants. Third, I argue that these two regimes are not freestanding alternatives between which democratic polities have to choose, but are combined in a multilevel architecture of democratic citizenship, in which the inclusion and exclusion dynamics of birthright and residence mutually constrain each other and every individual is included as a citizen in both types of polities.     

Vigilantes,gangsters, and alcohol: clashing citizenship regimes in postwar Guatemala

In this volatile moment in Latin America, when relations between the state and citizens are in flux, people at the margins of society draw on various notions of citizenship in social conflicts over proper behavior and the common good. I examine an intergenerational conflict over the legality of alcohol in an indigenous village in Guatemala to show how its protagonists creatively recombine different aspects of the various citizenship regimes that they have encountered. Elders have formed vigilante justice groups to combat the youth they consider gangsters. While the vigilantes draw upon a discourse of obligation to justify their actions, the generation below them counters with a language of rights. Some argue that citizenship is less meaningful in contexts where state power is ambiguous and extralegal violence is commonplace. I argue that in such contexts, it is not that citizenship does not have meaning, but rather that its meaning is intensely contested.     

Silent citizenship among Asian Americans and Latinos: opting out or left out?

In his classic study, Who Governs?, Robert Dahl interpreted the patterns of political assimilation of ‘white ethnic’ immigrants and their children during the mid-twentieth century as a hopeful sign of the potential of democratic pluralism in the USA. While acknowledging that immigrant groups faced discrimination and structural barriers that might lead them to be silent, Dahl predicted that social mobility and assimilation would eventually erase these deficits in political participation among immigrants. Building from Dahl's analysis, we investigate the extent to which pluralism in the USA can and does work the same way for immigrants who are also racial minorities. We highlight factors that can lead these groups to become silent citizens, including lack of legal status, lower levels of political mobilization by institutions, and discrimination as structural impediments to minority participation. Our findings suggest that both resources as well as structural impediments structure the political behavior of Asian Americans and Latinos, determining whether they are vocal citizens or silent citizens.     

Vernacular rights cultures and the ‘Right to Have Rights’

We use a case study of the Landless Workers Movement (MST) in Brazil and the Via Campesina network of which they are part to develop the concept of ‘vernacular rights cultures’. Vernacular rights cultures calls attention to the way in which demands for the right to have rights call on particular cultures, histories and political contexts in a manner that can transform the rights inscribed in constitutions and political imaginaries. What Ranciere (1999) and Balibar (2002) call the democratisation of democracy, we therefore argue, does not just involve a logic of equality and inclusion through which dispossessed groups demand already existing rights. Rather, it also occurs as mobilisations alter the means through which rights are delivered and transform the content and meaning of the rights demanded.     

毒品公开查缉的程序应用及评测

毒品公开查缉是指执法部门根据查缉毒品的需要,依法采取的以公开方式在边境地区、交通要道、口岸、山间通道、收费站以及飞机场、火车站、长途汽车站、码头、货运物流场所对来往人员、物品、货物、交通工具进行检查、盘查以及现场处置等措施,以期查获毒品、易制毒化学品、毒品原植物、种子及其幼苗的一项专门工作。公开查缉的基本任务是预防、发现、打击毒品违法犯罪活动,将走私渗透入境的毒品堵截查获在辖区内,努力减少毒品内流造成更大的社会危害。同时开展双向查缉,堵截易制毒化学品非法走私外流出境。     

Citizenship in Civil Society?

Abstract

This article seeks to provide a conceptual framework to complement and guide the empirical analysis of civil society. The core argument is that civil society must be understood, not as a category of (post)industrialized society, but as one of individualized society. Civil society is characterized by individualism that is sustained and protected by the civil values of autonomy and emancipation. This, accordingly, implies that empirical data of civil society can be understood most fruitfully within the framework of individualized society. Classical sociology, however, perceives this very individualism and its values as being antagonistic to its own civic vision. Hence, the crucial question is whether there can be any scope for citizenship, classically understood, within civil society. This article begins with the conceptual reconstruction of the social organization of civil society. Thereafter, two distinct civil society perspectives—mediating structures and Tocquevillianism—are explored to see how civil individualism and citizenship relate to each.     

THE ROHINGYA CRISIS: WHY THE WORLD MUST ACT DECISIVELY

The dimensions of the crisis generated by the systematic persecution and expulsion of Rohingyas by the Myanmar authorities have been a sustained subject for global debate in these present times. The refusal of the Myanmar government to heed the world's warnings, its obfuscations in the matter of following through on the recommendations of the Annan Commission, and the dogged reluctance of Aung San Suu Kyi, once an ardent advocate of democracy and human rights in her country, to speak up for the Rohingyas have left the international community deeply disappointed. And disturbing too is a report by UN investigators on human rights abuses in Myanmar's Rakhine state. The problem does not look about to be resolved any time soon, with more than 750,000 Rohingyas taking refuge in neighbouring Bangladesh, pushing social dynamics in an already over-populated country to the edge. The fear is that the crisis could fester before getting dangerously out of hand, unless the global community goes for decisive action.     

Shaping the online fat acceptance movement: talking about body image and beauty standards

Over the past decade, in Canada and the United States, blogs have become a popular and important space for fat women and their allies to create and further develop discursive strategies to contest the gendered anti-fat discourses perpetuated by the media, governments and the field of medicine and institutions of public health (e.g., Elliot, C. (2007). Journal of Canadian Studies, 41, 134–149. Gimlin, D. (2002). Body work: Beauty and self-image in American culture. Berkeley: University of California Press; Herdon, A. M. (2006). Social Semiotics, 15, 127–141. Rice, C. (2007). Women's Studies International Forum, 30, 158–174. Currently, popular discourses pertaining to fat people, particularly women, tend to range from larger bodies implicating a ‘moral deficit’ to a ‘risky behaviour’ to ‘political discrimination’ where elements from each discourse shape how fat women's bodies are read within the broader culture (Fikkan, J. L., & Rothblum, E. D. (2011). Sex Roles, 66, 575–592. Kwan, S. (2009). Sociological Inquiry, 79, 25–50. These messages in positioning the thin body as the ideal body are embedded in neoliberal discourses around citizenship that, in emphasizing personal responsibility, encourage (sometimes) punishing regimens of strict diets and exercise, and perpetuate an image of responsible citizenship as an extension of modern interpretations (Herdon, 2006). Using content and thematic analysis, we systematically analyze how four female self-identified fat acceptance (FA) bloggers discuss beauty standards and body image as a means to challenge these discourses. Findings suggest bloggers import elements from LBGTQ movements to extend dominant discursive strategies, model alternative forms of fat embodiment, and address the economic marginalization of fat women in industry. Moreover, through discussions on beauty and body image, bloggers use online spaces to contest anti-fat discourses and to develop discursive strategies that move beyond the binary of fat as a lifestyle choice, and body size as biologically or genetically determined that dominate the fat acceptance movement.