Conceptualizing and evaluating (new) forms of citizenship between nationalism and cosmopolitanism

In an age of transnational flows and interdependencies, democratic citizenship can no longer be conceptualized exclusively within national boundaries. This paper presents a conceptual map that allows tracing emerging and proposed forms of citizenship within and beyond the nation state in a comprehensive and differentiated way. We disentangle two anchor points: membership in a political community as the fundament of citizenship and the arena of political decision-making as the focal point of citizenship rights, identities and practices. For the former we differentiate between a single national community, the universal community of humankind and multiple (national) communities. For the latter we distinguish the national, supra-national and transnational arena. Our typology thus consists of nine different forms of democratic citizenship. It is used to provide a brief overview over normative proposals and empirical findings leading to the following insights: while membership in a particular national community still dominates the reality in all three political arenas, in the normative discourse it is perceived as deficient. Membership in the universal community of humankind is widely endorsed in the normative discourse, but almost nonexistent. In contrast, membership in multiple communities is not only a growing reality but also normatively promising for democratizing a transnationalizing world.     

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Abstract

South Africa like the rest of the world is facing critical challenges and opportunities relating to the Green Economy. The country has relevant policies, is part of various Green Economy International initiatives, Conventions and Declarations, has allocated funding to green economy programmes and projects and has made job projections in this sector. However, the education policies and the education system do not reflect an adequate paradigm shift towards a Green Economy. The International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) (2012) purports that the education systems in various countries need to adapt to this demand. It is against this backdrop that this article seeks to highlight the fact that the present job projections are not attainable owing to lack of skilled personnel in the green economy sector.     

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.     

亚太地区技术移民的增长

亚太地区技术移民数量不断增加,"人才外流"到发达国家的现象非常突出,与非技术移民的情况相比,亚太地区不同国家或地区间对长期移民和短期移民的政策存在不同的差异。亚洲地区技术移民的流动与资本流动和贸易往来紧密相关,最主要的特点就是技术移民的短期性。     

促进农民工和谐融入城市的思考——基于W市农民工的实证分析

农民工融入城市社会既是现实的需要也是历史的必然.农民工融入城市进程中,对城市而言可能滋生着"动乱",孕育着社会风险;对农民工来讲则伴随的往往是痛苦和无奈.无论从理想考虑,还是从现实而言,农民工都应该是"和谐地"融入城市,而不应是"机械地"融入城市.影响农民工和谐融入城市的关键障碍是制度歧视与供给不足;深层次障碍是利益分歧与冲突.实现农民工和谐融入城市目标,既要从现实问题入手,解决好、维护好农民工的权益,更要未雨绸缪,进行全方位的战略思考,促进农民工自由而全面发展.     

The ‘European Turks’: identities of high-skilled Turkish migrants in Europe

Using exceptionally rich qualitative data coming from the FP7 EUCROSS project on the ‘Europeanization of the Everyday Life’, this paper focuses on high-skilled and highly transnational Turkish migrants who reside in the UK, Romania and Italy. The article analyses participants’ discursive constructions of Europe and Europeanness and shows how specific images and symbols of Europe and Turkey influence their own relationship to Europe. We argue that understanding Turkish migrants’ identification with Europe requires a comprehensive analysis of the development of a Westernization discourse in Turkey that has framed people’s identities. This discourse symbolizes the desire for being part of the Western world, and especially Western Europe, but, at the same time, the fear of being dominated by the very same world. We show that we need to grasp the values, images, symbols and discourses that underline transnational practices to understand the making of European identity among migrants.     

Reflecting on Brexit: migration myths and what comes next for EU migrants in the UK?

This article considers the potential impact of Brexit on the family and welfare entitlement of EU migrants living in the UK and of UK migrants living in other EU Member States. Whilst the vast majority of those campaigning for the UK to leave the EU (publicly at least) argued in favour of those already present in the UK at the time of the referendum having their status protected, the government has been considerably less vocal in its support for this outcome. As such, EU migrants living in the UK presently face considerable uncertainty as to their own and their families’ future legal status and entitlement to welfare rights. The article will expose some of the evidential and legal gaps in the assertions made about EU migrants’ socio economic entitlement with a view to providing a more informed, legally accurate appraisal of how the Brexit negotiations could unfold.     

The 2012 killing of Chinese citizens in Rome and the ambivalence of Italian journalism

Sredanovic discusses the killing of a father and daughter of Chinese origin in Rome in January 2012, and the portrayal of the case in Italian print journalism. He uses a qualitative analysis of a corpus of 193 articles from seven Italian newspapers with different political, market and geographic profiles. The frequency of generally negative and stereotypical portraits of migrants in crime news is well known; however, this specific case offers a number of less familiar insights. Sredanovic shows the multiple and changing frames and themes, both positive and negative, deployed to portray the event across the two-week period in which it was featured on the front pages of newspapers. He demonstrates in particular the ways in which stereotypes that are often used against migrants in crime news find place even in a case in which the migrants were the victims of the crime. He further illustrate how the representation of the perpetrators shifted from describing them as an exception (when it was thought they were autochthonous) to generalizing about their deviance when it was discovered that they were of Moroccan origin. Sredanovic locates this discussion in an anti-groupist theoretical frame, arguing that the stereotypes used cannot be adequately explained by majority-minority group interactions, and that the delimitation and definition of groups should be understood as ideological from the start. He also argues that aspects of the production routines of crime journalism can be added to the factors that explain the portrayal of the event. He concludes by arguing that Sinophobia is a form of prejudice that varies geographically and in time, and calling for non-reifying, practice-informed analyses that mix discriminating and non-discriminating discourses.