Getting a “Flexible Eye”: Round-the-World Travel and Scales of Cosmopolitan Citizenship

The “flexible eye” describes a particularly cosmopolitan perspective derived through mobility, detachment and multiplicity as opposed to rooted-ness or national affiliation. In this article, I explore the extent to which the “flexible eye” serves as an apt metaphor for the spatial and civic affiliations enacted by round-the-world travellers. The discussion here is based on research that examines the narratives travellers publish online while travelling around the world. Drawing on recent academic work on cosmopolitanism and global citizenship, I investigate the way a discourse of cosmopolitan citizenship circulates in these narratives. In particular, I examine the way travellers frame these related activities—moving around the world and sharing their experiences via the Internet—in terms of civic responsibility. Travellers respond to a sense of obligation to produce tolerance, interconnectedness and cultural understanding out of encounters with difference. This formulation of a round-the-world trip as a civic obligation entails movement not only around the world, but also between national and global scales of belonging. How is cosmopolitan belonging filtered through practices of national citizenship? How are travellers both detaching from and re-attaching to notions of national identity in their quest for the “flexible eye” of the cosmopolitan citizen?     

Citizenship,migration and loyalty towards the state: a case study of the Kyrgyzstani migrants working in Russia and Kazakhstan

Building upon recent studies in the field of citizenship and transnationalism, this article examines the relations that Kyrgyzstani migrants in Kazakhstan and Russia entertain with their homeland, both in terms of concrete status (rights and responsibilities) and subjective attitudes (feeling of membership and loyalty). The article relies on field research, including semi-structured interviews, conducted in March and April 2007. Findings show that Kyrgyzstani migrants have developed a distinctive and somewhat paradoxical relation to their state of origin, in which pragmatic interest and long-term loyalty are not easily reconciled.     

扩大公民有序政治参与的现实意义及路径依赖

扩大公民有序的政治参与是当今中国政治发展面临的重大课题。它是我国经济社会发展的客观要求,是社会主义政治文明的重要体现。扩大公民有序政治参与有利于保障公民的利益诉求、推进民主政治的发展、维护社会政治稳定和体现公共行政的公共性,要不断加强对公民有序政治参与路径的研究。     

‘Yes,but all responsible Finns want to stop living on credit’: Feeling rules in the Finnish politics of austerity

In 2015, the newly elected government of Finland introduced austerity measures designed to improve the public economy, which had not recovered from the financial crisis of 2007–2008. The article examines how the government sought to secure acceptance for austerity by appealing to citizens’ emotions. We analyse how the measures were emotionally motivated and how, according to the parties in power, citizens should and should not have felt about them. The article shows how the politics of austerity produces various and contradictory feeling rules. These seek to temper citizens’ negative emotions towards austerity, such as dissatisfaction over unfair sharing of pain and distrust towards political authority. Interestingly, the rules evoke hope that a better future lies ahead if citizens follow the proposed measures, yet prompt fears of what will happen if they do not. The government also emphasised its transparency and honesty to prompt empathy and trust from the population.     

Local electoral rights for non-French residents? A case-study analysis of British candidates and councillors in French municipal elections

The French Constitution restricts local electoral rights to French nationals and EU citizens. Third country nationals have long been excluded from suffrage as France has maintained a stronghold on nationality and republican values. Academics have called for expansive and liberal citizenships that would allocate political rights to all non-citizen residents, independent of nationality. This paper argues that Brexit and cessation of Britons’ electoral rights present a pivotal moment to discuss expansive citizenship and alien suffrage. Taking a bottom-up approach, the paper presents actual experiences of Britons as candidates and councillors in French municipalities. It demonstrates the importance of residency, representation, participation and inclusion, rather than nationality at the local level to underpin claims for expanding electoral rights. These findings foreground an empirical case for further promotion of theoretical ideas that propose expansive citizenship based on effective residency rather than nationality. Consideration is also given to third country nationals.     

Guardians of the environment in Canada’s Chemical Valley

Citizens of the Aamjiwnaang First Nation fight for justice with their bodies at the frontlines of daily toxic exposure. This paper examines struggles for environmental and reproductive justice in the polluted heart of Canada’s ‘Chemical Valley’. These are as struggles over life, land and knowledge. Based upon community-engaged qualitative research, from a participatory action research approach, including field immersion, participant observation and 35 in-depth interviews with First Nations residents, I document the Aamjiwnaang First Nation’s citizens’ activities and practices on the ground as they cope with the impact of their contaminated surroundings on their health and habitat. This community-engaged scholarship lens brings into view the lived experiences and ongoing practices of resistance by the Anishinabek citizens who are surrounded by Chemical Valley. I situate these struggles within the green citizenship literature to assess three blind spots of green governmentality: greening citizenship, lifestyle blame and Western dualisms. I discuss the multiple edges of ecological citizenship and argue that citizens are simultaneously bound up within disciplinary power relations and place-based belonging. This place, although polluted, is crucial to practices of relational Anishinabek citizenship and the identity of indigenous citizens who call this place both ‘prison and home’.     

Tracing the roots of social citizenship: Jane Addams’ thought between formal rights and moral obligation

The modern social citizen is a dual figure: at one and the same time a legal-universal abstraction and a particular living being with specific capacities, proclivities and attitudes. The Settlement movement from the late nineteenth century articulated and shaped both universal and particular dimensions of social citizenship. It contained the imperative of guidance of individual conscience and the modern discourse of universal social rights. The article demonstrates that it is impossible to maintain a division between, on one side, the subject of individualizing pastoral care originating in religious poor relief and philanthropy, and, on the other side, formal rights based on universalism and the modern state. The Settlement movement lies at the pathway of belief, subjective interpretation and respect for the particular person and at the pathway of factual knowledge of social patterns and large-scale policy reforms. The focus on the particular person as subject was the legacy of Christian piety, whereas the concept of universal citizen was associated with the rise of social science at the University of Chicago. We explore this paradox of the particular and the universal through the work of Jane Addams as both sociologist and founder of Hull House.     

Ethnicizing citizenship,questioning membership. Explaining the decreasing family migration rights of citizens in Europe

Citizenship does not equal belonging. In this paper, we investigate how the disjunction between the ‘imagined community’ and the formal citizenry impacts on citizens’ rights. In particular, we analyse decision-making on the family migration rights of citizens in France, Germany and the Netherlands. Our analysis shows that in these three countries, notwithstanding their different migration and citizenship regimes, the reduction of citizens’ family migration rights is based on the same discursive mechanism: the ‘membership’ of citizens of migrant origin who marry a partner from abroad is called into question. As they are excluded from membership of the imagined community, their entitlement to family migration rights is decreased. Ethnic conceptions of national community, intersecting with gender and class, play a crucial role in shaping the rights attached to citizenship in Europe today.     

George Orwell and ecological citizenship: moral agency and modern estrangement

Theories of ecological citizenship seek to conceptualize political agency while taking into account humanity’s embeddedness in nature. This essay intervenes with contributions from an author distant from discourses about environmental politics, but with insights to offer them. George Orwell’s writings respond to a problem continuously articulated in the history of ecological thought: the estrangement from the conditions of one’s existence. In doing so, he provides a literary case study of ecological moral reasoning, a practice whereby the virtues of ecological citizenship are cultivated. Such virtues are cultivated by confronting the conditions of one’s existence in embodied terms, incorporating that experiential knowledge, and contributing to practices of self-government using it. This essay presents Orwell’s case, explains its relevance to the contemporary discourse on ecological citizenship, and concludes by suggesting that it also provides resources for empirical social scientists seeking to operationalize ecological citizenship theory by way of a moral sociology of the environment.     

Hate Crime and the Privatization of Political Responsibility: Protecting Queer Citizens in the United States?

My purpose in this article is to address issues that arise with the emergence of “hate crime” law as a response to violence against historically subordinated groups, with particular reference to gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered (henceforth “GLBT”), and otherwise queer citizens. The specific jurisdictional context of my reflection is the USA but the issues I raise have significance beyond that context. Increasingly in recent years hate crime legislation has been adopted or proposed in the US as well as other jurisdictions as a response to bigotry and violence directed against minority groups in multi-cultural societies. In 2006 in the UK, proposals to outlaw “incitement to religious hatred” were hotly debated. In 2008 demands are being made to extend the ‘incitement laws’ to include incitement to homophobic hatred. In 2007 in the US the Senate and House of Representatives in Washington DC passed an Act, which some described as the Matthew Shepard Act, to promote and enhance the use of the criminal law against perpetrators of crimes motivated by hatred based on perceived sexual orientation and gender identity. Ultimately the Act failed to become law. The debates in the UK and US provide the backdrop against which I want to examine the arguments for and against hate crime legislation, both generally and with specific application to queer citizens. This require us to think again about the relation of queer citizens to the state, the reach of political equality and human rights, and the aims and limits of the criminal law and system of “criminal justice”.