Citizenship Today: Global Perspectives and Practices

2012

The institution of citizenship has traditionally been understood as equal membership of a political community. Developments in the Theory and Practice of Citizenship comes at a time when this is undergoing a period of intense scrutiny. Academics have questioned the extent to which we can refer to unified, homogeneous national citizenries in a world characterised by globalisation, international migration, socio-cultural pluralism and regional devolution, whilst on the other hand in political practice we find the declared Death of Multiculturalism, policy-makers urging for active, responsible citizens, and members of social movements calling for a more equitative, equal and participatory democracy. Citizenship is being reassessed and redefined both from above and from below in politics and society. The contributions to this volume engage in analysis of the processes which are bringing about an evolution of our understanding of citizenship and the individual s relationship to the state, the polity and globalisation. Through empirical case studies, they highlight how in practice the terms of membership of a citizenry are negotiated in society through laws, political discourse, cultural associations, participatory processes, rituals and ceremonies. In doing so, these contributions offer an illustration of the diversity of venues and processes of citizenship and illustrate the benefits of an understanding of citizenship as a social practice. The book thus provides an opportunity to pose theoretical, practical and moral questions relating to these issues, as well as offering avenues for further research in the future.

Political Geography, 2004

Each of the books reviewed in this essay addresses a fundamental question: "What is citizenship?" and places this question within the broader context of a changing world in which international migration is a distinguishing feature. Each has a different focus, however, which can be placed along a spectrum of inquiry. From Migrants to Citizens: Membership in a Changing World (2000), edited by T. Alexander Aleinikoff and Douglas Klusmeyer, places historical and contemporary citizenship and naturalization policies in comparative international perspective. Immigration and Citizenship in the Twenty-first Century (1998), edited by Noah M. Pickus, specifically addresses the changing institution of formal citizenship in the United States. And the third volume, Citizenship and Migration: Globalization and the Politics of Belonging (2000), co-authored by Stephen Castles and Alastair Davidson, questions the territorial assumptions which undergird formal citizenship and discusses how political membership is being challenged in the context of increasing transnational migrant flows. In other words, Aleinikoff and Klusmeyer engage actually-existing citizenships around the world, Pickus and the authors in his volume explore what US citizenship can or should be, and Castles and Davidson fundamentally question citizenship as a political identity grounded in the nation-state in an increasingly global context. From Migrants to Citizens, edited by Aleinikoff, a prominent legal scholar who publishes frequently on citizenship and naturalization policy, and Klusmeyer, a comparative citizenship and migration policy analyst with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, is the first book is a three-part series published by the Carnegie Endowment on the subject of citizenship and migration in a changing world. While the second and third volumes, Citizenship Today: Perspectives and Practices (Aleinikoff and Klusmeyer, 2001), and Citizenship Policies for an Age of Migration (Aleinikoff and Klusmeyer, 2002) identify challenges to the institution of citizenship at a time of mass migration and develop policy recommendations to answer these

Comparative Law Review, 2011

The mass migration phenomenon calls into question the meaning of citizenship status in contemporary constitutional democracies as it represents a quest for a kind of global solidarity. This article explores the transformation of the concept of status civitatis from a European comparative perspective. The emerging role of citizenship in today political communities will be examined through the legislations concerning the recognition and protection of social rights of non citizens since: whilst on the one hand they are tied to citizenship through a nexus of principle, on the other hand they entail individual legal rights recognised under case law as having universal status. Relevant provisions of Italian, Spanish, French, Belgian and Dutch laws will be analysed with a view of sketching a map of problems and (possible) solutions. The comparison among European legal systems is, at the end, put to the test of theories that suggest moving beyond the idea of citizenship as a solution to the human rights/universal rights dialectic.

CIRS Special Issue of The Middle East Journal, 2019

Citizenship is a central feature of the modern nation-state. Neither scholars nor policymakers can provide us with a unified and agreed upon idea of what citizenship means in all places, at all times, and for all people. But, pared down to its most basic construct, citizenship is recognized as being that which establishes the fundamental rules of membership, participation, and belonging for the people who inhabit a particular territory. Citizenship creates the legal instruments and political boundaries that shape the relationship between individuals and the state to which they belong. In the absence of a universal definition of citizenship as a category, there are certainly still universally understood ideas, norms, and notions of what citizenship should be as an aspiration and an ideal. In sum, although citizenship exists and develops within its own local context, as a result of a particular historical trajectory, and based on local social and cultural practices, it is still often bound, even if just in the imagination, to the universal, lofty, and idealized form of itself.

Revus, 2009

"Citizenship is the right to have rights" was famously claimed by Hannah Arendt. he case of the Slovenian erased sheds new light on this assumption that was supposedly put to rest ater World War II. We lack a comprehensive paradigm for grasping what citizenship means today in, and for, our societies. My thesis is that there are currently three ways to understand the notion. hese diferent views tend to merge and overlap in today's debate, furthering misunderstandings. I will account for the diferent conceptions of citizenship by looking at the opposite of citizenry. he political model holds the subject (sujet) in opposition to the citizen (citoyen), entailing problems related to the democratic quality of institutions. Law and jurisprudence look at citizenship by trying to limit the numerous hard cases arising in a world of migration where the opposite of the citizen is the alien and the stateless. While in social science citizenship is the opposite of exclusion and represents social membership, my aim is therefore to distinguish and clear out these three diferent semantic areas. his essay is presented in four sections: First, I briely recall the case of the erased. he second section focuses on discourse analysis so as to enucleate the three diferent meanings of citizenship that we ind in the current debate according to the prevailing disciplinary ields: political, legal and social sciences. hirdly, attention will be directed to the composition of the diferent semantic areas that are connected to the term citizenship. I suggest that we are now dealing with a threefold notion. Finally, I will point to an array of questions that citizenship raises in today's complex society and try to show how this tri-partition of the meaning of "citizenship" can be a useful device for decision makers so as to design as consistent policies as possible.

Dahlstedt, Magnus & Neergaard, Anders (eds) International Migration and Ethnic Relations: Critical Perspectives, London: Routledge [forthcoming]

This chapter gives an overview of some key ideas about citizenship. The starting point is T.H. Marshall and his thoughts about the development of civil, political and social rights. The focus is the relationship between citizenship, migration and ethnicity. International migration challenges established conventions about who the citizen is or should be – which characteristics, abilities or values he or she should have and how the relationship between citizen and society should be organized. In the context of international migration certain individuals are clearly seen as belonging to a national community guaranteeing the citizen a set of rights, while other individuals are seen as not belonging. The question here is how should this be understood? How are the boundaries around this community actually drawn? Who draws them? The chapter particularly emphasizes the distinction between formal and actual rights as central to the understanding of contemporary citizenship. Here we focus on the meaning of ethnicity and migration, by emphasizing existing citizen(ship) ideals, formed by beliefs about similarity and difference on the basis of ethnicity, culture, nation and race. The central line of reasoning in the chapter is exemplified by cases from multiethnic Sweden, which illustrate the differences between formal rights and what happens in practice.

SSRN Electronic Journal

Thanks to the work undertaken by different research teams (GLOBALCIT, MACIMIDE, MIPEX…), data on citizenship policies are becoming available on a wide range of countries worldwide. The collection of these data makes it possible to develop new comparative research frameworks that go beyond the dominant European/Western-centred perspective that we find in traditional citizenship studies. The development of cross-regional comparative frameworks allows testing the generalisability of explanations for policy-variations more comprehensively and contributes to formulating new hypotheses and theories to account for both convergences and divergences across time and space. However, the need to adapt concepts and measurement tools to the different realities of citizenship at the global level raises important challenges. Drawing on the workshop 'Going Global: Opportunities and Challenges for the Development of a Comparative Research Agenda on Naturalisation Policies at the Global Level' that was convened in 2021 at the Robert Schuman Centre, under the framework of the Global Citizenship Governance programme, contributors to this working paper have been invited to reflect on the promises and difficulties that the articulation of a global comparative perspective in citizenship studies involves. Two main recommendations for the advancement of a comparative agenda at the global level stand out from this symposium: the first is to accommodate as much as possible the specificities of each context within the construction of comparative frameworks; the second is to acknowledge the biases and limitations of the perspective that we take as researchers. It therefore emerges that in order to make a distinct contribution to scholarly knowledge by expanding the geographical scope of their investigations, citizenship scholars need to address the challenge of comparability.

COLLeGIUM, 2017

‘Citizenships under Construction: Affects, Politics and Practices’ presents a selection of extended papers presented at the HCAS Symposium on Citizenship and Migration, held in October 2014. With contributions by Anne Marie Fortier, Bridget Byrne, Anu Koivunen and Olli Löytty, the volume aims to further interdisciplinary dialogue on citizenship in the context of increased global migration. It provides unique insight into the ongoing theorization of the complicated workings of power and affects in constructions of race, gender and class, in the shaping of narratives of history and nation, and in the creation of hierarchies of belonging and deservedness.

2001

International Journal of Constitutional Law, 2010

This symposium explores the extent and constitutional significance of the changes that are taking place in the conception and practice of citizenship in countries throughout the world. The six papers reveal a preoccupation with broadly similar issues in the regions on which they primarily focus: Europe, North America, and southern Africa. At the same time, however, the papers show how sometimes deep contextual differences between states also ground differences in the way questions of citizenship are approached, leading to differences in outcome. In this respect, the symposium also offers useful insight into the challenges of comparative constitutional law.

Belgrade Journal of Media and Communications 3 (6), 2014

Citizenship seems to be inextricably associated with rights, although the scope of citizenship rights has evidently varied across time and space. A rather simplistic belief in the constant enlargement of citizenship rights in liberal democracies made many perceive cultural and identity rights as yet another historic layer of citizenship rights. What is at stake today, however, is a new dynamic between these different bundles of rights in the face of new realities at a global scale that over the last three decades have deeply transformed contemporary citizenship regimes. In this context, citizenship rights, the practices which engage with them, and the task of understanding these bodies of rights, face, in our view, three general challenges: global markets, trans-national and sub-state phenomena, and human rights. In this short paper, we explore these dimensions using the heuristic device of the citizenship regime.

mcrg.ac.in

This paper examines how transnational migration, understood as cross-border social fields formed by migrants with their community of origin, impacts on the contours of liberal democratic citizenship. I examine citizenship in terms of membership, rights and identity and I focus on the normative argument made by liberal political philosophers regarding the appropriate response to immigration by the receiving state and contrast this with the notion of transnational migration. This finds that the liberal prescription of facilitating their access to membership of the polity commonly misunderstands what transnational migration actually is, i.e. the ongoing allegiance of emigrants to their communities of origin. This situation places strain on the hyphen between the nation and the state. In the receiving country the liberal argument calls for citizenship to emphasize the individual's relation with the state where they reside and to downplay the national dimension. From the perspective of the sending country the opposite holds true, transnational migration is based on the notion of citizenship as membership of a nation –even when the individual is absent from the state's territorial borders. Transnational migration thus brings out the disjuncture between the notions of citizenship and nationality. This paper explores how the contours of liberal democratic citizenship are affected by the transnational dimension of contemporary migration. There have been two distinct areas in which the term 'transnational' has been applied to citizenship in political philosophy, the first involves normative discussions on the liberal democratic response to the presence of foreign nationals in the national polity, and this is what this paper concentrates on. The other dimension is not directly concerned with migration and instead enquires about citizenship under conditions of globalization (Held 1999, Slaughter and Hudson 2007) as well as cosmopolitanism (Linklater 1999). I will discuss the normative debate on how citizenship policies should accommodate immigration and how transnational migration impacts on the notion of citizenship. Concordantly my research questions have been: how does transnational migration apply to the concept of citizenship –in both receiving and sending countries? Following this, what dimension of citizenship is brought to the fore? This study has undertaken a text analysis of academic material in English using the keywords citizenship and transnational migration. A notable limitation is that these studies concentrate exclusively on the receiving countries of the Western world, although the ongoing role played by the countries of origin is a defining facet of transnational migration studies (Basch et al. 1994, Levitt et al. 2003). Unfortunately, no studies were found from developing countries that focused on how their nationals abroad impact on notions of citizenship. The ontological position of this paper is the continuous

Feminist Review, 1997

This issue on women and citizenship appears at a moment when questions of citizenship are at the forefront of diverse political agenda. The contributions bring together global perspectives with considerations of issues of citizenship in particular regional and national contexts. 'Citizenship' highlights the complexity of the relationships between individuals and the 'nation-state'; the construction of collectivities within, between and across states and nations; and categories of belonging and the forces of globalization.