Mission Bogotá: pedagogical governance in a weak state

Wracked by crime and violence, Bogotá, Colombia adopted a unique urban security policy in 1998 called Mission Bogotá (MB). MB identifies the poor as ‘at risk’ of being violent. The program seeks to decrease crime by employing the poor and educating them on entrepreneurial urban citizenship, fomenting their sense of belonging to the city, a good work ethic, conflict resolution skills, and cosmopolitanism. Participants are then employed as citizen ‘guides,’ modeling their citizenship skills in public in order to instill exemplary citizenship in others by example. There is no evidence that MB reduces either crime or poverty. Nevertheless, the program establishes norms for ideal citizenship and structures the relationship between state and society. Based on one year of ethnographic research, I argue that MB uses pedagogy as a technology of governance to transfer responsibility for security provision from the state to society by making citizens responsible for their own security provision.     

Latinos in the war on drugs: The role of offender citizenship status and family ties on downward departures

The present study analyzes Latino drug offenders sentenced in U.S. federal courts from 2006–2014 in order to assess whether any family ties effects were contingent on offenders’ citizenship status. The findings indicate that citizenship status conditions the influence of family ties on the decision to grant downward departures, but not the decision on the magnitude of the discount granted. The findings indicate the importance of conducting intra-ethnic examinations of sentencing outcomes for Latinos rather than assuming parity in treatment and solely comparing them to other groups.     

“We're Just Like the Irish”: Narratives of Assimilation,Belonging and Citizenship Amongst Arab-American Activists

This paper examines narratives of assimilation and belonging as activists attempt to position Arab-Americans as citizens and full members of the American polity. In interviews with activists, the experience of the Irish as immigrants and citizens was often invoked as the paradigmatic example of how immigrants are incorporated as citizens—an example that activists promoted as one that Arabs would follow. By invoking the Irish experience, activists hope to remind Americans that immigration history is not one of effortless assimilation, but is rather characterized by systematic exclusion and marginalization. In so doing, they articulate narratives of assimilation and belonging that draw attention to (1) a shared history of immigration, marginalization, and acceptance, (2) the importance of civil rights movements that may seem to distinguish immigrants from a mythic mainstream whose race and ethnicity go unmarked, and (3) the ways in which the American experience is based on the acceptance of cultural differences predicated on shared political values of community. We argue that these strands of the narrative draw on themes in the national myth of immigration, belonging and citizenship, but that they are braided in ways that challenge many Americans’ views of their history.     

Terror and the loss of citizenship

Terror in the name of God and the specter of returning fighters for the so-called ‘Islamic State’ have recently moved some Western states, including Britain, Canada, and France, toward revoking the citizenship of terrorists. To critics, this constitutes a ‘return to banishment,’ a ‘fate universally decried by civilized people,’ as an American Supreme Court Chief Justice put it in the late 1950s. In a double reflection on the changing nature of terror and of citizenship, this paper argues that denationalization is, in principle, the adequate response to terror. This is because terror, particularly of the Islamist kind, is no ordinary crime but attack on the fundaments of citizenship. But what is right in principle may not be the right thing to do, because denationalization raises serious practicality problems.     

Imagining and practising citizenship in austere times: the work of Citizens Advice

This article explores the significance of citizenship for those working in Citizens Advice, a network of voluntary organisations in the UK that exists to provide peer-to-peer advice and support to those facing problems. Drawing on a recent research study, the article considers the ways in which the ‘citizen in citizens advice’ is imagined and translated into practice. Despite current political and policy moves to shrink citizenship (in terms of eligibility, access and substance), the ‘citizen in citizens advice’ is regularly thought about in expansive ways that draw on other imaginaries of citizenship. We suggest that these everyday discursive practices of citizenship are important both in analytic terms and in reinvigorating a political discussion otherwise focused upon restriction and exclusion.     

Militarisation of citizenship education curriculum in Turkey

In response to the United Nation’s (UN) Decade for Human Rights Education initiative, the Turkish Ministry of National Education changed the title of citizenship education courses from ‘Citizenship Studies’ to ‘Citizenship and Human Rights Education’ in 1995. However, this curriculum reform was overshadowed by the rise to power of a political Islamist party. The secularist military toppled the first Islamist party-led government in the name of preserving the principle of laicism. Announced after the 1997 coup, the main textbook for the citizenship and human rights education course showed a profound influence of the militaristic discourses as evidenced by the negative depiction of the Kurdish people and political Islamists and the hagiographic portrayal of Atatürk and the army. By drawing on interviews with key informants, archival/public policy documentation and textbooks, this paper argues that the curriculum reform began with the participation in the UN initiative ended with the military’s instrumentalisation of the subject because it was launched with no recognition of Turkey’s human rights and democracy problems.     

Ecomodernist citizenship: rethinking political obligations in a climate-changed world

Green accounts of environmental citizenship typically seek to promote environmental sustainability and justice. However, some green theorists have argued that liberal freedoms are incompatible with preserving a planetary environment capable of meeting basic human needs and must be wound back. More recently, ‘ecomodernists’ have proposed that liberalism might be reconciled with environmental challenges through state-directed innovation focused on the provision of global public goods. Yet, they have not articulated an account of ecomodernist citizenship. This article seeks to advance the normative theory of ecomodernism by specifying an account of ecomodernist citizenship and subjecting the theory’s core claims to sympathetic critique. We argue that state-directed innovation has the potential to reconcile ambitious mitigation with liberal freedoms. However, full implementation of ecomodernist ideals would require widespread embrace of ecophilic values, high-trust societies and acceptance of thick political obligations within both national and global communities. Ecomodernism’s wider commitments to cosmopolitan egalitarianism and separation from nature thus amount to a non-liberal comprehensive public conception of the good. Furthermore, ecomodernism currently lacks an adequate account of how a society that successfully ‘separates’ from nature can nurture green values, or how vulnerable people’s substantive freedoms will be protected during an era of worsening climate harms.     

Xenophobic violence and the ambivalence of citizenship in post-apartheid South Africa

This essay examines the way that the language of rights has been used to both justify and challenge xenophobia in South Africa. South Africa has struggled with incidents of xenophobic violence against African migrants, with major outbreaks of violence taking place in 2008 and in 2015, and despite substantial anti-xenophobia efforts, African migrants continue to be subject to discrimination and abuse. Part of the reason for the persistence of anti-African migrant sentiment is a prevailing rhetoric of victimization, which frames irregular African migrants as a threat to the rights of South Africa’s poor. This essay analyzes that rhetoric, as well as analyzing how a grassroots movement of shackdwellers, Abhlali baseMjondolo, has challenged that rhetoric by highlighting the interconnection between the rights of citizens and noncitizens in the country. In examining the contestation over rights in South Africa, this essay seeks to engage with the ambivalence of citizenship in South Africa and the conflict between the human rights framework that has been established in the country and the necessary limitation of the rights of noncitizens.     

从民族认同到公民身份——现代民族国家的社会整合与多元稳定

现代民族国家的治理面对多元文化和全球化的双重挑战,实现多元社会的整合与稳定是民族国家必须面对的问题。哈贝马斯将其交往行动理论向政治哲学领域推进的过程中倡导话语政治与商谈民主。借用哈贝马斯对民族和民族国家的解读,解析公民身份与宪法爱国主义,有助于解决民族国家内部蕴含着的普遍主义与特殊主义之矛盾、共和主义与民族主义之张力。