Constitutional patriotism,migration and the post-national dilemma

This article addresses the challenges of justifying restrictions on migration given a rejection of nationalism as a defensible mode of political integration. Specifically, it focuses on constitutional patriotism, which is proposed as a means of making robust democratic practice possible in diverse contexts. Given that constitutional patriotism represents a commitment to universal principles as a source of attachment rather than the binding sentiment of nationalism, can we continue to rely on nationally defined and controlled migration practices? This article argues that, appropriately understood, constitutional patriotism implies a commitment to much freer movement of individuals across political boundaries than theorists have previously acknowledged. Applying such an approach, however, provokes some challenges to the sustainability of shared rule informed by principles rather than identity. This seeming paradox may mean that constitutional patriotism is more difficult to implement, and highlights practical challenges surrounding the liberalisation of border controls that are pertinent to theorists concerned with post-national citizenship more broadly conceived.     

Fiction and reality of mobility in Africa

This article draws on rich ethnographies and ethnographic fiction depicting mobile Africans and their relationships to the places and people they encounter to argue that mobility is more appropriately studied as an emotional, relational and social phenomenon as reflected in the complexities, contradictions and messiness of the everyday realities of encounters informed by physical and social mobility. The current dominant approach to studying and relating to mobile Africans is problematic. Nationals, citizens and locals in communities targeted by African mobility are instinctively expected to close ranks and fight off the influx of barbarians who do not quite belong and must be ‘exorcised’ so that ‘insiders’ do not lose out to this particular breed of ‘strangers’, ‘outsiders’ or ‘demons’, perceived to bode little but inconvenience and savagery. If and when allowed in, emphasis is on the needs, priorities and convenience of their reluctant hosts, who tend to go for the wealthy, the highly professionally skilled, the culturally bleached and Hottentot Venuses of the academy, even at the risk of accusations of capital flight and brain drain. The article demonstrates how to marry ethnography and fiction to study African mobility not only as a ‘collection of logical bones and flesh’ but also as ‘emotional beings’. It calls for conceptual flexibility and ethnographic empirical substantiation, and challenges social scientists to look beyond academic sources for ethnographies and accounts of how a deep, flexible and nuanced understanding of mobility and interconnections in Africa play out in different communities, states and regions of a world permanently on the move.     

Mobilizing the self-governance of pre-damaged bodies: neoliberal biological citizenship and HPV vaccination promotion in Canada

Nikolas Rose and Carlos Novas use the term biological citizenship broadly to describe the increasing connectivity of biological categories of citizens' identities. In line with Rose and Novas, social scientists use biological citizenship today to describe the emergence of citizens' rights to protection and their increased mobilization around biology as a claim to active citizenship. In this article, I critically engage with the conception of biological citizenship forwarded by Rose and Novas, and detail the ways in which this concept is more complex and less emancipatory than is often assumed – especially in today's neoliberal age. Drawing on the example of human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination promotion in Canada, I elucidate the intricacies and complex techniques that are often involved in citizenship projects. Specifically, I position HPV vaccination biocitizenship as a biopolitical tool, and pay close attention to the forms of knowledge, practical mechanisms, and types of authoritative bodies that frame biological risks for HPV and bioidentities in gendered ways. It is hoped that, through this example, the scope of biocitizenship can be expanded to encompass more than the rights and entitlements of citizens in relation to their biologies. I conclude by offering insights into theorizing emerging neoliberal biocitizenship projects today.     

Disconnection and resistance: anti-terrorism and citizenship in the UK

The corroding impacts of anti-terrorism measures on citizenship have been much discussed in recent years. Drawing on qualitative research from the UK, this article argues that citizens do indeed frequently feel that aspects of citizenship – such as rights, duties, identity claims and the ability to participate in the public sphere – have been significantly dampened by developments in this policy area. At the same time, however, participants in our research also articulated a number of strategies through which they or others have sought to resist the logics, exercise and impacts of anti-terrorism powers. These included voicing explicit opposition to particular measures, resisting ‘outsider’ or ‘victim’ subject positions, and a refusal to withdraw from established forms of political engagement. Whilst such resistance should not be overstated, we argue that these strategies emphasise the co-constitutive rather than linear relationship between public policy and citizenship. Anti-terrorism powers do indeed impact upon citizenship claims, for instance in the curtailment of formal rights. Equally, the everyday, lived, experiences and practices of citizenship contribute to, and help shape, the perceptions and understandings of anti-terrorism policy from within the citizenry     

Green citizenship and the political critique of injustice

Over recent decades, normative theories of green citizenship have drawn upon observations that a long-prevalent dualistic understanding of society, as completely subjecting nature, is being displaced by growing political and cultural support for a holistic view of society, as participating in nature. Differences between avowedly liberal and civic-republican interpretations of green citizenship notwithstanding, the normative theories share five key social critiques: (1) the need to challenge nature/culture dualism; (2) to dissolve the division between the public and private spheres; (3) to undermine state-territorialism; (4) to eschew social contractualism and (5) to ground justice in awareness of the finiteness and maldistribution of ecological space (ES). This article offers a sympathetic provocation to normative theories of green citizenship. Adopting a critical realist perspective, it describes the partial and problematic realisation of these critiques in the contemporary types of social and political participation, contents of the rights and duties and institutional arrangements of the ‘stakeholder’ citizenship that has become established within the neoliberal or weak eco-modernising, global competition state. This perspective is important because it offers new insights into the discursive framework that encompasses contemporary debates over justice and injustice. In particular, injustice from within the post-industrial ecostate appears to be a diffuse whole-of-society problem, the by-product of unsustainable development that lacks an identifiable class of perpetrators. This makes the progressive task of enunciating claims that injustice is present in some senses difficult, while conservative ideological positions are simplified.     

From New Labour to New Conservatism: the changing dynamics of citizenship as self-government

This article examines the shift in discourses of citizenship from Britain from notions of entitlement and obligation to those of self-government, and the reciprocity between the responsibilisation of individual and collective citizen-subjectivities. Against the backdrop of debates about society as the telos of government, this article will interrogate the claim that New Conservatism's ‘Big Society’ represents a unique rationality of government and an alternative formula of advanced liberal rule. By doing so, the article will extend our understanding of ‘post-welfare regimes of the social’ and illustrate precisely how they operate in contemporary Britain.     

Transgendering Mother's Day: blogging as citizens' media,reproductive rights and intimate citizenship

Citizenship is fast emerging as a central concern for transgender politics. This article approaches the topic of transgender citizenship by investigating empirically how the practice of blogging has served as a way of claiming, or practicing, intimate citizenship for transgendered people. Theorization of intimate citizenship helps us to further our understanding of the ways in which our most private decisions and practices are inextricably linked with public institutions, law and state policies. Significantly, this development is also tied up with other characteristically late modern technological advancements, ranging from new reproductive technologies to new Information and Communication Technologies. In the case of transgender politics, such interlacings become particularly perspicacious, not only due to modern discourses concerning diagnosis and treatment, but also because the presence of social media resources affords new possibilities for the sharing of personal and political narratives about ‘being transgendered’. In this article, I investigate an event in the Swedish blogosphere, namely the way in which the national celebration of Swedish Mother's Day became a site for the contestation of the current limitations of the reproductive legal rights for transgendered people, providing an opening for a more general debate on transgender reproductive rights.     

Representations of reproductive citizenship and vulnerability in media reports of offshore surrogacy

In his elaboration of the concept of ‘reproductive citizenship’, Turner (Turner B.S., 2001. The erosion of citizenship. The British journal of sociology, 52 (2), 189–209) suggested something of a homogeneous accumulation of cultural capital to those who make a reproductive contribution to contemporary western societies. The present article takes up this suggestion and proposes that whilst reproduction is indeed a hallmark of contemporary citizenship, the cultural capital arising from this is still differentiated by mode of reproduction, with reproductive heterosex remaining the norm against which other modes are compared. This norm, it is suggested, produces what is termed here ‘reproductive vulnerability’, namely vulnerability arising from being located outside of the norm. Through an analysis of media representations of Australian people who have undertaken offshore surrogacy arrangements in India, this article demonstrates how reproductive vulnerability is highlighted only to be dismissed through recourse to the construction of those who undertake reproductive travel as agentic citizens. The article concludes by considering what it would take for an ethics of reproductive travel to exist; one in which multiple, incommensurable vulnerabilities are taken into account, and the representation of which encourages, rather than inhibits, careful thought about the reproductive desires of all people.     

Uneven inclusion: consequences of universal healthcare in Thailand

‘Post-national’ scholars have taken the extension of social rights to migrants that are normally accorded to citizens as evidence of the growing importance of norms of ‘universal personhood’ and the declining importance of the nation-state. However, the distinct approach taken by the state toward another understudied category of non-citizen – stateless people – complicates these theories by demonstrating that the state makes decisions about groups on different bases than theory would suggest. These findings suggest the need to pay more attention to how the state treats other categories of ‘semi-citizens’. This article examines the differential effects of universal healthcare reforms in Thailand on citizens, migrants, and stateless people and explores their ramifications on theories of citizenship and social rights. While the state has expanded its healthcare obligations toward people living within its borders, it has taken a variegated approach toward different groups. Citizens have been extended ‘differentiated but unambiguous rights’. Migrants have been granted ‘conditional rights’ to healthcare coverage, dependent on their status as registered workers who pay mandatory contributions. Large numbers of stateless people, however, saw their right to state welfare programs disenfranchised following passage of the new universal healthcare law before later being granted ‘contingent rights’ through a new program.     

Citizenship and the marginalities of migrants

How should we conceive and address the position of migrants in receiving states? The argument offered here presents an account of this position in terms of civic marginalization, that is, marginalization relative to the norm of the national citizen. Two dimensions of civic marginalization are distinguished. First, marginalization with respect to the status of national citizenship which is addressed in terms of the issue of whether specific kinds of migrants should be entitled to access to national citizenship, and what, if any, conditions governing such access are justifiable. Second, marginalization with respect to the rights and duties of the national citizen, which is addressed in terms of the rights to which specific types of migrant are entitled and the duties which can be demanded of them as well as the duties of the state towards them. Distinguishing these two dimensions also helps to bring into focus their interaction with one another by demonstrating that whether, and under what conditions, a migrant has access to national citizenship is normatively consequential for their rights and duties and the duties of the state towards them. The argument also offers methodological reflections on approaching this topic and draws attention to the strengths and limitations of its own methodological strategy.