Inclusive Citizenship: Realizing the Potential1

Abstract

Citizenship has been described as a “momentum concept”. One important development over the past decade has been the various ways in which scholars and activists have developed citizenship's inclusionary potential. The first part of the article explores these developments in general terms with regard to the values underpinning inclusive citizenship; the implications of the notion of cultural citizenship; and the theorization of differentiated forms of citizenship, which nevertheless appeal to universalist principles. These principles provide the basis for the citizenship claims of people living in poverty, a group largely ignored in citizenship studies. Other lacunae have been disability and, until recently, childhood. The second part of the article discusses how citizenship studies has reworked the concept in a more inclusionary direction through the development of a multi-tiered analysis, which pays attention to the spaces and places in which lived citizenship is practised. It focuses in particular on the intimate and domestic sphere, with particular reference to debates around care and citizenship, and on the interconnections between the intimate/domestic and the global, using “global care chains” and ecological citizenship as examples.