Citizenship Agendas in and beyond the Nation-State


Book Description

In today’s world, citizenship is increasingly defined in normative terms. Political belonging comes to be equated with specific norms, values and appropriate behaviour, with distinctions made between virtuous, desirable citizens and deviant, undesirable ones. In this book, we analyze the formulation, implementation, and contestation of such normative framings of citizenship, which we term ‘citizenship agendas’. Some of these agendas are part and parcel of the working of the nation-state. Other citizenship agendas, however, are produced beyond the nation-state. The chapters in this book study various sites where the meaning of ‘the good citizen’ is framed and negotiated in different ways by state and non-state actors. We explore how multiple normative framings of citizenship may coexist in apparent harmony, or merge, or clash. The different chapters in this book engage with citizenship agendas in a range of contexts, from security policies and social housing in Dutch cities to state-like but extralegal organizations in Jamaica and Guatemala, and from the regulation of the Muslim call to prayer in the US Midwest to post-conflict reconstruction in Lebanon. This book was previously published as a special issue of Citizenship Studies.




Beyond Citizenship


Book Description

American identity has always been capacious as a concept but narrow in its application. Citizenship has mostly been about being here, either through birth or residence. The territorial premises for citizenship have worked to resolve the peculiar challenges of American identity. But globalization is detaching identity from location. What used to define American was rooted in American space. Now one can be anywhere and be an American, politically or culturally. Against that backdrop, it becomes difficult to draw the boundaries of human community in a meaningful way. Longstanding notions of democratic citizenship are becoming obsolete, even as we cling to them. Beyond Citizenship charts the trajectory of American citizenship and shows how American identity is unsustainable in the face of globalization. Peter J. Spiro describes how citizenship law once reflected and shaped the American national character. Spiro explores the histories of birthright citizenship, naturalization, dual citizenship, and how those legal regimes helped reinforce an otherwise fragile national identity. But on a shifting global landscape, citizenship status has become increasingly divorced from any sense of actual community on the ground. As the bonds of citizenship dissipate, membership in the nation-state becomes less meaningful. The rights and obligations distinctive to citizenship are now trivial. Naturalization requirements have been relaxed, dual citizenship embraced, and territorial birthright citizenship entrenched--developments that are all irreversible. Loyalties, meanwhile, are moving to transnational communities defined in many different ways: by race, ethnicity, gender, religion, age, and sexual orientation. These communities, Spiro boldly argues, are replacing bonds that once connected people to the nation-state, with profound implications for the future of governance. Learned, incisive, and sweeping in scope, Beyond Citizenship offers a provocative look at how globalization is changing the very definition of who we are and where we belong.




Home Rule


Book Description

In Home Rule Nandita Sharma traces the historical formation and political separation of Natives and Migrants from the nineteenth century to the present to theorize the portrayal of Migrants as “colonial invaders.” The imperial-state category of Native, initially a mark of colonized status, has been revitalized in what Sharma terms the Postcolonial New World Order of nation-states. Under postcolonial rule, claims to autochthony—being the Native “people of a place”—are mobilized to define true national belonging. Consequently, Migrants—the quintessential “people out of place”—increasingly face exclusion, expulsion, or even extermination. This turn to autochthony has led to a hardening of nationalism(s). Criteria for political membership have shrunk, immigration controls have intensified, all while practices of expropriation and exploitation have expanded. Such politics exemplify the postcolonial politics of national sovereignty, a politics that Sharma sees as containing our dreams of decolonization. Home Rule rejects nationalisms and calls for the dissolution of the ruling categories of Native and Migrant so we can build a common, worldly place where our fundamental liberty to stay and move is realized.




The Dimensions of Global Citizenship


Book Description

The Dimensions of Global Citizenship takes issue with the assumption that ideas about global citizenship are merely Utopian ideals. The author argues that, far from being a modern phenomenon, world citizenship has existed throughout history as a radical alternative to the inadequacies of the nation-state system. Only in the post-war era has this ideal become politically meaningful. This social transformation is illustrated by references to the activities of global social movements as well as those of individual citizens.




The Anthropology of Citizenship


Book Description

The Anthropology of Citizenship introduces the theoretical foundations of and cutting edge approaches to citizenship in the contemporary world, in local, national and global contexts. Key readings provide a cross-cultural perspective on citizenship practices, and an individual citizen’s relationship with the state. Introduces a range of exciting and cutting edge approaches to citizenship in the contemporary world Provides key readings for students and researchers who wish to gain an understanding of citizenship practices, and an individual’s relationship with the state in a global context Offers an anthropological perspective on citizenship, the self and political agency, with a focus on encounters between citizens and the state in education, law, development, and immigration policy Provides students with an understanding of the theoretical foundations of citizenship, as characterized by liberal and civic republican ideas of political belonging and exclusion Explores how citizenship is constructed at different scales and in different spaces Twenty-five key writings identify what is a new and vibrant subfield within politics and anthropological research




Corporatization and the Right to Water in Colombia


Book Description

This book explores how conflicts around access to water shape cities, citizenship and infrastructures by tracing how water is commodified and controlled by the Public Enterprises of Medellín (EPM), one of the most successful publicly owned utility companies in the global South. Why are water inequalities dramatically increasing in Medellín, a city that is located in an area of bountiful water resources and owns a successful, established utility company? This book explains this paradoxical situation by weaving together two central threads. The first is a critical historical analysis of the political, economic and ecological conditions that enabled the city’s utility company to grow and expand internationally, and the second is a rich account of the everyday practices and struggles of residents in low-income areas to secure access to water and demand citizenship rights. The EPM is a case of global significance as the company continues to expand its commercial operations in the Latin American services market by taking over the utilities in Panama, El Salvador and Guatemala, Mexico and Chile. Although its successful international expansion has been a source of pride and admiration for many Colombians, the implementation of market-oriented operating principles in all activities of the utility company raises important and complex questions about its public character and responsibility in the provision of basic services, which has much wider implications given how it is poised to be a model for other for-profit municipal service operations in other Latin American countries. This book advances the empirical knowledge of corporatized utilities, with a globally significant case, as well as providing new theoretical insights with which to understand the limits, challenges and opportunities faced by public utility companies to provide affordable and equal access to water in cities. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of water resource management, corporatization, privatisation and commodification of natural resources, urban studies, citizenship and human rights, environmental sociology and Latin American studies.




Border Culture


Book Description

This book introduces readers to the cultural imaginings of borders: the in-between spaces in which transnationalism collides with geopolitical cooperation and contestation. Recent debates about the "refugee crisis" and the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic have politicized culture at and of borders like never before. Border culture is no longer culture at the margins but rather culture at the heart of geopolitics, flows, and experience of the transnational world. Increasingly, culture and borders are everywhere yet nowhere. In border spaces, national narratives and counter-narratives are tested and evaluated, coming up against transnational culture. This book provides an extensive and critical vision of border culture on the move, drawing on numerous examples worldwide and a growing international literature across border and cultural studies. It shows how border culture develops in the human imagination and manifests in human constructs of "nation" and "state", as well as in transnationalism. By analyzing this new and expanding cultural geography of border landscapes, the book shows the way to a fresh, broader dialogue. Exploring the nature and meaning of the intersection of border and culture, this book will be an essential read for students and researchers across border studies, geopolitics, geography, and cultural studies.




Introducing Urban Anthropology


Book Description

This book provides an up-to-date introduction to the important field of urban anthropology. This is a critical area of study, as more than half of the world’s population now lives in cities and anthropological research is increasingly done in an urban context. Exploring contemporary anthropological approaches to the urban, the authors consider: How can we define urban anthropology? What are the main themes of twenty-first-century urban anthropological research? What are the possible future directions in the field? The chapters cover topics such as urban mobilities, place-making and public space, production and consumption, and politics and governance. These are illustrated by lively case studies drawn from urban settings across the world. Accessible yet theoretically incisive, Introducing Urban Anthropology will be a valuable resource for anthropology students and also for those working in urban studies and related disciplines such as sociology and geography. The revised second edition includes updated theoretical discussions and new ethnographic case studies. It features a new chapter on neoliberalism, austerity and solidarity, and engages more extensively with digital transformations of urban life.




Migrant Mothers' Creative Challenges to Racialized Citizenship


Book Description

How do racialized migrant mothers contest hegemonic racialized formations of citizenship? Bringing together leading scholars from international and multi-disciplinary perspectives, this book shows how migrant mothers realise and problematise their role in bringing up future citizens in modern societies, increasingly characterised by racial, ethnic, religious, cultural and social diversity. The book stimulates critical thinking on how migrant mothers creatively intervene into citizenship by reworking its racialized meanings and creating new, racially plural practices and challenging boundaries. The contributions explore the processes that shape migrant mothers’ cultural and caring work in enabling their children to occupy a place as future citizens despite and against their racialized subordination. The book contributes to disciplinary fields of politics, sociology, anthropology, psychoanalysis, participatory arts practice and theory, geography, queer and gender studies, looking at the thematic areas of participatory arts, family forms, social activism, and education in the US, Canada, the UK, France, Portugal. These cross-cultural and disciplinary perspectives contribute to the exciting emergence of a distinctive field of research engaging with pressing intellectual and social issues of how ideas and practices of citizenship develop in the face of increasing spatial mobility and across boundaries of generation and ethnicity, in the process requiring new, creative interventions into how we think about and do citizenship. This book was originally published as a special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies.




The Vigilant Citizen


Book Description

How the problematic behavior of private citizens—and not just the police force itself—contributes to the perpetuation of police brutality and institutional racism “Warning: Neighborhood Watch Program in Force. If I don’t call the police, my neighbor will!” Signs like this can be found affixed to telephone poles on streets throughout the US, warning trespassers that the community is an active participant in its own policing efforts. Thijs Jeursen calls this phenomenon, in which individuals take on the responsibility of defending themselves and share with the police the duty to mitigate everyday insecurity, “vigilant citizenship.” Drawing on eleven months of fieldwork in Miami and sharing the stories and experiences of police officers, private security guards, neighborhood watch groups, civil society organizations, and a broad range of residents and activists, Jeursen uses the lens of vigilant citizenship to extend the analysis of police brutality beyond police encounters, focusing on the often blurred boundaries between policing actors and policed citizens and highlighting the many ways in which policing produces and perpetuates inequality and injustice. As a central premise in everyday policing, vigilant citizenship frames racist and violent policing as matters of personal blame and individual guilt, ultimately downplaying the realities of how systemically race operates in policing and US society more broadly. The Vigilant Citizen illustrates how a focus on individualized responsibility for security exacerbates and legitimizes existing inequalities, a situation that must be addressed to end institutionalized racism in politics and the justice system.