Disabled Istanbulites’ everyday life experiences as ‘urban citizens’: accessibility and participation in decision-making

This article assesses whether the everyday experiences of disabled Istanbulites can be considered from an urban citizenship perspective. To this end, Lefebvre’s notion of the ‘right to the city’ and its relationship with the literature on urban citizenship and Disability Studies is discussed, and two broad categories of analysis are presented to elaborate the issue in the case of Istanbul. These are, namely accessibility – to space, but also to education, health, and employment – and participation in decision-making. Interviews show that the limited rights-based discourses, which guided the institutional transformation of the greater and district municipalities in the early 2000s, have had almost no impact on the everyday experience of disabled Istanbulites. Istanbul remains a largely disabling city with major problems of accessibility and no room in decision-making processes for disabled people. Unfortunately, current developments do not point to the possibility of a more powerful practice of urban citizenship.     

Small wars in Marsabit County: devolution and political violence in northern Kenya

Abstract

When the elections of 2013 devolved budgetary and legislative powers to 47 counties in Kenya, there was nationwide relief when they passed off peacefully. The new county governments settled down to bargaining over local powers and appointments, delivering on their new institutional mandates, spending money and dealing with recentralisation manoeuvres. Now with the 2017 elections looming, the question has been raised, will there be violence? Based on qualitative interviews with citizens of the northern town of Marsabit shortly after the 2013 elections, this article presents citizens’ views on how devolution affected political competition, including how familiar repertoires of violence were used to influence not only the vote but also the construction of the new country government. To explain what concerned voters in the newly devolved county, the article explores the role played by colonially constituted ‘ethnicity’ in control of land and citizenship in the pastoralist north of Kenya and in the evolution of politics and the state after independence. It shows how the new configuration of power brought by devolution in 2013 has not yet resolved people’s feelings of deep insecurity over territorial tenure. It offers insight into the task faced by devolved institutions in relation to land, adding texture to current literature on the politics of devolution.     

Citizenship as Targeted Behavior: Responses to Organizational Justice and the Role of Culture

The study aimed at reviewing citizenship as targeted behavior in response to justice perceptions and investigating the role of within-culture differences on citizenship responses to organizational fairness perceptions. Data were solicited from 150 employees and their supervisors representing various public sector entities of Pakistan. Results showed that distributive and interactional fairness predict interpersonal organizational citizenship behavior. Organizational fairness did not predict citizenship behavior targeted at organizations. Organizational justice had negative values of citizenship behavior for higher values of collectivism. Findings and implications for human resource management practitioners and suggestions for future research are discussed.     

Creating capacities for peacebuilding citizenship: history and social studies curricula in Bangladesh,Canada, Colombia,and México

Public education is one influence on how young people learn to navigate social conflicts and to contribute to building democratic peace, including their sense of hope or powerlessness. Social studies curricula, in particular, introduce core concerns, geographies, governance and civil society, and participation skills and norms. History education narratives frame identity, (dis)trust or peaceful coexistence, and provide exemplars of how social conflicts and injustice have been handled in the past. To shed light on these peacebuilding and peace-blocking choices, this paper examines government-sanctioned social studies and history curricula in contrasting contexts of violent conflict and peace: Bangladesh, Colombia, México, and (Ontario) Canada. Our comparative analysis shows how these official curricula (de)normalize violence and militarism, present national identities as hegemonic/exclusive or plural/inclusive, and create opportunities for teaching/learning peacebuilding citizenship competencies such as conflict dialog, human rights awareness, and engagement in collective processes of civil society and governance.     

Learning to live with irregular migration: towards a more ambitious debate on the politics of ‘the problem’

What might be gained by learning to live with ‘the problem’ of irregular migration, rather than attempting to solve it? This article engages two senses of ‘the problem’ at stake: first, the ongoing nature of displacement and migration and second, the contested justice claims that sit behind different policy perspectives. The second sense of the problem (its political dimension) is rarely addressed explicitly in public debate. Yet direct engagement with the political dimension offers the potential to unlock debate from a polarised impasse. To make this argument, I first diagnose debate on irregular migration in terms of three archetypal positions and examine their implicit justice claims. I then argue for a more ambitious debate that pushes contending justice claims to their logical extensions. Debate of this kind requires a more coherent defence of justice claims, whether they are based in communitarian, cosmopolitan, anti-capitalist or hybrid values with respect to citizenship and political community. The article concludes with an illustration of how this approach can generate momentum for less circular, more sustainable and politically achievable policy responses. The argument is made with reference to illustrative examples from Australia and Europe but holds for a variety of contexts where ‘the problem’ is framed in similar ways.     

Quasi-citizenship as a category of practice: analyzing engagement with Russia’s Compatriot policy in Crimea

This article analyzes engagement with Russia’s Compatriot policy, as an example of ethnizenship-type of quasi-citizenship, in Crimea, as the most likely case of Compatriot engagement. The article focuses on unpacking the lived experience of Compatriot identification and engagement and the rationale for this engagement. The article finds a narrow and niche engagement with the Compatriot policy in Crimea where only the most politicized and discriminated individuals, alongside beneficiaries of the Compatriot policy, identify as Compatriots. However, the article also finds dissatisfaction with the Compatriot policy because it fails to offer the kind of status, and rights and benefits, of ‘full’ citizenship. Thus, while citizenship might be becoming fractured, via quasi-citizenship policies, citizenship remains the key point of entry to the kin-state. Focusing on the lived experience of quasi-citizenship, and examining quasi-citizenship as a category of practice, is crucial for developing understanding of the social and political impacts of quasi-citizenship policies.     

Explaining the birthright citizenship lottery: Longitudinal and cross‐national evidence for key determinants

In the modern nation‐state, birthright citizenship laws – jus soli and jus sanguinis – are the two main gateways to sociopolitical membership. The vast majority of the world's population (97 percent) obtains their citizenship as a matter of birthright. Yet because comparative research has focused on measuring and explaining the multiple components of citizenship and immigration policies, a systematic analysis of birthright citizenship is lacking. We bridge this gap by analyzing the birthright component in prominent databases on citizenship policies and complementing them with original data and measures. This allows us to systematically test institutional and electoral explanations for contemporary and over‐time variation in birthright citizenship. Institutional explanations – legal codes and colonial history – are consistently associated with limitations on birthright law. As for electoral explanations, specific electoral powers – Nationalist, Socialist and Social‐Democratic parties – rather than the traditional left/right‐wing divide, are linked with reforms in birthright regimes.     

Remediation of Social Withdrawal in Young Children:

The last 15 years have witnessed a marked increase in the development of intervention techniques designed to promote isolate children's friendships and to increase their peer group interactions. However, there has been a paucity of research directed towards defining social competence and its underlying skill components. With the practitioner in mine, the present report presents a recent intervention strategy for remediating social withdrawal, followed by our current development of a skill deficit model designed to expand our knowledge case of causal contributors. PEERS, a broad-based intervention program, involves all of the child's social agents, thus assuring him/her of entry into the peer group in an atmosphere of social support. Our more comprehensive view of social withdrawal examines deficits in four skill areas: the child's social, language, and motoric competences, and the parents' child-rearing ability. Additional research is needed to pinpoint the precise relationship between these skill components and social withdrawal. With the further contributions of researchers in the field, we foresee the development of a more refined set of intervention procedures which the practitioner may use selectively to meet the individual needs of each child.     

Engaging the youth – citizenship and political participation in Pakistan

The article explores the issue of youth political participation in Pakistan. In the light of the attention devoted by the Pakistani press to the youth vote in the 2013 Pakistani elections, this article discusses young Pakistanis’ articulation of their views on mainstream politics and their views of the state, and attempts to answer the question as to why young people in Pakistan are disillusioned with mainstream politics. The article focuses in particular on the perceptions held by those in their late teens to late 20s. Since 59 per cent of Pakistan's population is below the age of 24 and overall over 67 per cent of the population is under 30, their views on the state, rights, responsibilities and their concept of citizenship are a window into how Pakistan is likely to develop. The focus of the article is on voices that are rarely heard and which stand in stark contrast to the solutions offered by the institutional literature. The research is located in the wider discussion of the concept of citizenship and builds on previous work on citizenship in Pakistan.     

Terror,territoriality and the struggle for indigeneity and citizenship in northern Nigeria

The struggle of the minority ethnic groups against the majority Hausa-Fulani ethnic-amalgam in the north of Nigeria has persisted. As a result of the twentieth-century jihad and politico-cultural and economic factors, Fulani (Muslims) are found in many parts of the minority areas of the geographical north. Many of the minority ethnic groups often claim to be ‘indigenous’ to the areas and regard the Fulani – and Hausa – as ‘settlers’. The struggle for political, economic and social values and rights in these communities often produce violent clashes between these indigenous groups and the settler Hausa-Fulani. This paper uses the territorial claims and counter-claims over indigeneity in the Yelwa area between the Tarok/other ethnic (Christian) groups and the Fulani/other ethnic (Muslim) groups which degenerated into serial blood-letting in 2004 to interrogate the citizen-deficit in Nigeria, and the contradictions of reconciling indigenous rights with citizenship rights in a typical multi-ethnic postcolonial state.