Nationality swapping in the Olympic field: towards the marketization of citizenship?

Nationality swapping in sports is commonly assumed to be a rapidly expanding practice that is indicative of the marketization of citizenship. Sports are said to have become wholesale markets in which talent is being traded for citizenship. In this article, we seek to empirically explore such claims by analysing 167 athletes who have competed for two different countries in the Summer Olympic Games. It seems that most switches occurred after the 1990s. Then, following a citizenship as a claims-making approach, we introduce the work of Bourdieu so as to connect citizenship as both legal status and practice with normative claims. The analysis reveals that the practice of nationality switching is shaped by structural conditions of the Olympic field. First, a complex realm of citizenship laws and regulations produces conditions under which athletes make legitimate claims to citizenship. Second, through a mechanism of reverberative causation, prior migrations are often echoed in contemporary nationality swapping . Only a limited number of athletes acquired citizenship via the explicit market principle we call jus talenti. Claiming that instrumental nationality swapping is indicative of the marketization of citizenship obscures the complex interplay between structures of and practices within the Olympic field.     

Grassroots practices of citizenship and politicization in the urban: the case of right to the city initiatives in Barcelona

This article aims to produce an analysis of the politicization of the citizens after Spain’s Indignados movement from a citizenship framework. The article suggests that claiming the right to the city involves more than issues of access to urban amenities: it is also about claiming the right to participate in the formation and transformation of the city and the right to appropriate the city center. This positions these rights within the larger issue of citizenship by defining it as a collective practice rather than a state-sanctioned status. Our analysis is based on the empirical evidence derived from the semi-structured interviews, politicians’ speeches, information based on media resources and official websites, and participant observation during three months of fieldwork in Barcelona in 2016.     

Modern post-colonial approaches to citizenship: Kwame Nkrumah’s political thought on Pan-Africanism

This project of critical citizenship studies and comparative political theory utilizes a framework of multiple modernities in order to deeply explore the ontological foundations and complexities of a non-Western conception of citizenship and nationhood: political pan-Africanism. It does so through a study of the political thought of Kwame Nkrumah, a deeply influential political theorist and actor, in the context of the Gold Coast’s struggle for independence and in the initial years of Ghanaian post-colonialism. How did Nkrumah conceive of Pan-Africanist citizenship and nationhood in political and ontological terms? How does this relate to both modern conceptions of citizenship as tied to the nation-state and traditional Ghanaian conceptions of citizenship and belonging? After considering these questions, this paper explores how Nkrumah’s vision of Pan-Africanism was influenced by, yet contradicted central tenets of, Western political thought and modernity. It explores the theoretical and practical tensions inherent between this non-Western conception of the nation and the dominance of aspects of ‘Western’ modernity. Exploring these questions through the lens of Nkrumah’s political thought offers an Afrocentric study in an effort to strengthen African historical agency and to deparochialize citizenship studies and political theory.     

Foreign,criminal: a doubly damned modern British folk-devil

An association of strangers with danger and criminality is one of the most enduring social myths. However, in the UK, it was only after a media outcry 10 years ago over the release of foreign nationals from British prisons, that the ‘Foreign Criminal’ exploded into political and popular consciousness. Despite the small numbers of people involved, the location of this folk devil at the intersection of legal and moral assessments of ‘wickedness’ and alterity imbues it with considerable potency and has ensured that its reverberations are still felt strongly a decade later. Drawing on qualitative research with immigration detainees, deportees and irregular migrants, the article considers some of the many faces of the Foreign Criminal and illuminates their racialised, classed and gendered natures. It argues that a twin set of developments – coalescing around Operation Nexus and curtailed Article 8 right protections – work together to taint a growing number of non-citizens with criminality, whilst simultaneously undermining their claim to belong. Case studies are presented to demonstrate the fault lines of this malleable and expanding category, and to argue that the Foreign Criminal is paradigmatic of both social disorder and national boundaries, and is fundamentally shifting the lines of citizenship and belonging.     

Environmentally friendly food initiatives in Iran: between environmental citizenship and pluralizing the public sphere

In this article I analyze acts of citizenship within environmentally friendly food initiatives in Iran. I show that act of environmental citizenship intersects with politics of pluralizing the public sphere within these initiatives. I present original research that shows how these practices are determined by state-society relations. It is shown that the main objective of most of the initiators of these enterprises is to provide a source of information about healthy and environmentally friendly food as well as providing access to such food. In contrast, many consumers also use these initiatives as spaces where they can experience and make a more pluralistic public sphere. This article contributes to a better understanding of the concept of environmental citizenship and demonstrates the relevance of the concept to broader notions of citizenship.     

Court pedagogies and the construction of passive ordinary citizens in the French banlieue

ABSTRACT

This article contributes to conceptualizations of the pedagogical state by analyzing judicial spaces, beyond the courtroom, as key sites of citizenship formation. I explore pedagogical sessions organized by a judicial structure in France, whose geographical proximity to seemingly non-integrated populations in the banlieue allows it to teach them the laws, rules, and institutions that support citizenship. I argue that the pedagogical court seeks to construct governable ‘passive ordinary citizens’ whose main duty is to embody and practice the basic rules of socialization – respect for others and the rule of law – in their ordinary lives as a strategy of crime prevention. In that sense, courts are able to redefine not only the procedural but the substantive elements of citizenship as well.     

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.     

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.     

Norway as an Example in the UK Women’s Suffrage Campaign

This article analyses the character and meanings of references to Norwegian experiences in the UK women’s suffrage campaign. It argues that the references to Norway served two main purposes. Firstly, they served as evidence of all the good things that would happen as a result of women gaining the vote, such as wage equality and social reform. Secondly, they played a significant part in establishing a counter-narrative to the anti-suffragist warnings of all the terrible things that would follow women’s suffrage. The study also discusses the limitations of political exchange and shows how different political contexts came into play in the debates on the validity of the Norwegian example.