Political Citizenship Research Articles

Corrigendum to “Courageous Role Model or Threatening Villain: A Parallel Mediation Model of Corporate Activism and Citizen Political Engagement”

Corrigendum to “Courageous Role Model or Threatening Villain: A Parallel Mediation Model of Corporate Activism and Citizen Political Engagement”

Municipal Politics and the PKK in the early 1970s: A citizenship perspective

This paper examines the Kurdistan Workers Party’s (PKK) municipal politics in the late 1970s through the lens of citizenship politics. The article introduces two concepts—activist citizenship and fugitive citizenship to analyse the PKK’s mobilisation in this period, before the 1980 military coup in Turkey. Activist citizenship challenges the restrictive boundaries of state-sanctioned citizenship, while fugitive citizenship creates alternative political spaces for marginalized groups. Both concepts highlight how individuals and groups, such as the PKK, can assert their political agency in contexts where they are denied formal citizenship. The research questions linear understandings of the PKK’s emergence as a political movement inevitably destined to become an insurgent movement.

How Does Internet Use Affect Citizen Political Participation? The Mediating Role of Social Networks

This study investigates the complex relationship between internet use and citizen political participation, emphasizing the mediating role of social networks. Using cross-sectional data from the 2021 Chinese Social Survey (CSS), we classify political participation into government-led and citizen-led activities and internet use into informational, entertainment-oriented, and service-oriented types. Overall, our findings reveal a positive correlation between internet use and both citizen-led participation and government-led participation (excluding voting), with a stronger association observed in the former. From a categorical perspective, informational and service-oriented internet use significantly influences all types of political participation, while entertainment-oriented use shows no significant correlation. Additionally, social networks mediate the relationship between internet use and political participation. Service-oriented internet use is more dependent on social networks to connect with political participation compared to information-oriented internet use. This study contributes to the ongoing debate on the impact of digital media on civic engagement by providing nuanced insights into how specific internet activities and social networks shape political participation in China.

When Freedom of Speech and Neofeudalistic Buzzers Collide: A Note for the Politics of Citizenship

The term “buzzer” was initially employed in business marketing to promote a product or service by initiating a broader discourse and increasing popularity and sales. However, the function of buzzers has evolved from business to politics, where they are utilized by politicians for political campaigns and maintaining power. This article endeavors to propose a novel concept for contemporary Indonesian political buzzers. The new concept is introduced with the term “Neofeudalistic Buzzers.” The term “Neofeudalistic” is derived from the characteristics of the actions of political buzzers who attack critics of the government and its officials, which resembles the practice of feudalism in the era of precapitalism. This conceptual article has identified that the use of buzzers in Indonesian politics has become a significant propaganda tool. Furthermore, it has been found that government-supporting buzzers are often involved in intimidating government critics. The actions of government-supporting buzzers can discredit freedom of speech and create fear among people who are critical of the government. Theoretically, neofeudalistic buzzers add a new vocabulary to the politics of citizenship studies. Meanwhile, neofeudalistic buzzers can provide practical insights for policymakers and democracy activists to regulate and supervise the activities of political buzzers.

Courageous Role Model or Threatening Villain: A Parallel Mediation Model of Corporate Activism and Citizen Political Engagement

Through their sociopolitical activism, business leaders increasingly call for citizens to become more politically engaged in favor of a partisan position. This research develops and tests a framework that reveals that corporate sociopolitical activism can indeed elicit such political engagement but runs the risk of simultaneously inciting backlash from citizens who oppose the company’s envisioned political ends. Whereas politically congruent citizens perceive a company’s activism to be morally courageous and are thus inspired to support the company’s stance, politically incongruent citizens feel threatened by the company’s activism and become politically engaged in protection of their political identity. Companies may, however, succeed in increasing moral courage attributions without simultaneously affecting citizens’ political identity threat by acting as first movers in their activism. A series of experiments, including a stimulus sampling approach with 30 real cases of corporate sociopolitical activism, lend support for this framework. The results provide several implications for the political responsibilities of business leaders in contemporary democracies.

Introduction: mutual attrition of citizenship, democracy and the rule of law in South and Southeast Asia

ABSTRACT This special issue critically examines the interplay between the law and politics of state trans/formation, status precarity and the abuse of law. Globally, governments have exercised state power to undermine citizenship status, democratic well-being and the rule of law. This introduction makes the case for this focus and highlights the range of the special issue's intervention. Firstly, it shows how the contributions in the special issue build upon scholarship that tackles these three values independently and offers a more comprehensive analysis of contemporary challenges of the law and politics of citizenship. It studies the mutual attrition of citizenship, law and democracy by adopting a focus on South and Southeast Asia, especially India, Myanmar and Sri Lanka. Secondly, it emphasises the special issue’s methodological contribution by drawing from the theory-generative capacities of focusing on Asia and the Global South more generally. Thirdly, the introduction highlights the cross-cutting substantive contributions of the articles, especially status liminality and statelessness, securitisation and authoritarian politics, bureaucracy and paperwork, and minority and human rights.

Communal Trauma, Communal Justice: Discussion of Afarin Kohan and Bettina von Lieres

ABSTRACT In exploring collective trauma, the works of Kohan and von Lieres reveal how political subjectivity emerges through collective activism transforming helplessness, invisibility and despair. Inspired by the two authors, and their deep commitment to political action, I want to find ways to break through the dissociation of those in power. Rather than leaving the responsibility of political citizenship solely in the hands of the marginalized, I explore ways for those of us living in unjust societies to be more generative justice seekers. In the midst of polarization, violence, staggering inequality and ecological disaster it is time to build solidarity across borders of nation, identity, and class. In resonance with the two authors, I am in search of ethical actions that traverse the rough waters of collective trauma. I explore ways that we may continue to develop as an ethical society accepting responsibility for the injuries that have been experienced without acting as rival factions or waging wars of small differences within movements.

BULGARIAN CIVIL SOCIETY – POLITICAL PARTICIPATION AND APATHY

This article aims to analyze the contemporary manifestation of civil society in Bulgaria through the prism of political participation and apathy among citizens. For this purpose, the concept of civil society and the need for active political citizens have been examined successively; an analysis of the political participation of Bulgarian citizens was made, through a study of electoral activity, membership in political parties and their participation in the electoral process as advocates; finally, the main reasons for the relatively high levels of political apathy and anomie among Bulgarian society, in relation to the role of political parties, are presented.

Building Inclusive Political Citizenship in the Aftermath of Village Head Election through Amos Yong's Hospitality Concept

Abstract: Indonesia as a pluralist country holds the principle of equal citizenship, which considers that every individual and community group has the same rights and obligations and adheres to a democratic system of government. One of the main platforms to determine the leader who will represent the will of the people is the village head election. However, after the village head election, conflicts or disputes often occur in various regions including Mamasa, West Sulawesi. This conflict can threaten community unity and integrity. Therefore, the author links the phenomenon of post-village head election conflicts with citizenship politics and Amos Yong's Hospitality theory. The author presents the concept of hospitality as a new approach to overcome post-village head election conflicts and encourage inclusion in society. The method used is a qualitative approach by observing the phenomenon or case study under study, and using literature review to support the analysis. The purpose of this paper is to enrich the understanding of civic politics, apply Hospitality theory, and encourage new thinking in overcoming post-village head election conflicts. Keywords: Citizenship Politics, Conflict, Difference, Hospitality, Village Head Election.

The eviction room: How Carolina Maria de Jesus can help us analyze migration, segregation, and the politics of citizenship in the city

In this paper, I propose the “eviction room” as an analytical frame for the linked struggles of citizens and noncitizens living at the urban margins. The metaphor of the eviction room was coined by Carolina Maria de Jesus, a late Black Brazilian writer and favela dweller. De Jesus sees the city as a house: the city center is its luxurious living room; the favela, its eviction room, a precarious space to which the racialized urban poor are pushed like disposable objects. Expanding on this metaphor, we can think of those segregated and stigmatized in a city’s eviction rooms as not only physically but also politically cast out. Regardless of their legal citizenship status, eviction room dwellers are constructed as the immanent others of the “good citizens” inhabiting the city’s living rooms. Segregated in space, their presence is transient in time given their “evictability.” While the frame of the eviction room can help us make sense of the urban marginalization of both citizens and noncitizens, it assumes neither their social homogeneity nor a united “politics of the evicted.” I expand on possible strategies within such politics, as well as on the spatial and temporal dimensions of the city as a house with an ever-shifting plan. The eviction room advances a research agenda centered on migration, residential segregation, and the politics of citizenship relevant to urban contexts across the global south and north.

East Bengal-Mohun Bagan football fans and Indian politics: parochialism and nationalism in simultaneity?

ABSTRACT The footballing rivalry between East Bengal and Mohun Bagan in Kolkata, India, explicates important facets of the politics of nation-building and identity formation through sport. The sporting nationalism of the colonial era gave way to narrow parochialism in post-independent India where the cultural differences of Bangals (original Hindu residents of East Bengal in colonial India and Hindu migrants from East Bengal/East Pakistan in postcolonial India) and Ghotis (original residents of western parts of Bengal in colonial India and of West Bengal in postcolonial India) emerged as the key linchpin of expressing allegiance to their respective club football teams particularly in the aftermath of immigration of refugees which took place as a result of the partition of 1947 and the 1971 Bangladesh liberation war. However, the legislations pertaining to Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019 and National Register of Citizens (NRC) have propelled fans of these clubs to forego their sub-cultural differences and act in unison to express their grievances against the new regulations of the Indian state. The anti-NRC protest by the fans hinges on the link between football and the debates pertaining to the idea of citizenship in contemporary Indian politics. The displaying of Tifos by the fans that exhibited significant social messages bears semblance with the Ultras of European football.

The Contested Symbolism of the "Cursed Soldiers": Hegemony, Memory and the Politics of Fear in Poland

Abstract: This article has two related goals: theoretical and empirical. First, it develops the theory of hegemony by integrating it with the concept of the collective emotional field in the context of nationalist memory politics. It then draws on the concept of hegemony to analyze the commemoration of the postwar anticommunist underground in Poland after 1989 and its grassroots reception. The article shows how memory politics work not only on the symbolic but also on the emotional level as a manifestation of a nationalist exclusionary affective politics of citizenship that creates a collective emotional field of pride but also of fear and threat.

Digital citizenship and disability in the covid era

The covid-19 crisis has accelerated automation and digitalization in many aspects of social life. Social distancing and lockdowns, combined with the imperative to preserve economic activity, have seen much work and education move online, while the digitalization of government services has intensified. These developments slowed the spread of covid-19 but their broader effects, both positive and negative, have been unevenly distributed. One group for whom covid-driven digitalization has been especially ambivalent is people with a disability. While remote forms of communication and work have afforded physical health protections to many disabled people, these same forms have had exclusionary effects that magnify pre-existing disadvantages and diminish citizenship rights. This article analyses this ambivalent dialectic and the politics of neoliberal digital citizenship with which it is enmeshed. We argue that digital citizenship needs to be decoupled from a constraining neoliberal rationality prioritizing ableist individual competition, techno-entrepreneurship and government cost-cutting.

Russian LGBT activism and the memory politics of sexual citizenship

This article discusses barriers to the citizen practices of Russian lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender activists in the memory politics of Russian sexual citizenship. Based on memories of activism, as told in interviews with Russian lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender activists, we focus on how these memories play a role in their national and transnational struggles for sexual rights and recognition, and how intersectional inequalities may create barriers to their queer and memory space-making practices. The interviews were conducted in 2021 ( before the war between Russia and Ukraine, which started in 2022) and focus on the period between 2010 and 2020. Our findings highlight how intersectional inequalities of power influence Russian sexual citizenship and queer (memory) space-making, both at home and abroad. Theoretically, the results reveal the need to situate Russian lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender activism in time, place and space in research on narratives of progress and social change in studies of queer global politics and transnational solidarities.

Between Appeal to Citizenship and Biopolitical Fracture: Islamophobia and the New Politics of Muslim Citizenship in India

This article aims to analyze the Islamophobic politics at the heart of citizenship denial in the context of India’s CAA-NRC legislation in December 2019 by the Indian Parliament under the leadership of the BJP. The politics of citizenship denial in India thus emerges in appearance as a legal tussle between the Muslim minority citizenship rights and Hindu nationalism in India. However, the biopolitical fracture of the Indian nation-state makes the legal ideal of citizenship further complicated for Muslim minority citizens in India. Tracing the logic of the paradoxical position of Muslim citizenship discourse in India by following its contradictory existence in law, state, and nationalism, this article reveals the limitations of appeal to citizenship, and the necessity need for the question questioning of the biopolitical fracture, wherein the distinction between citizen and non-citizen translates into those with rights and without rights. This article further proposes that rather than sticking to the idealism of citizenship, a critical analysis of Islamophobia and its political correlates must attend to the negative position of the Muslim subject in with respect to the biopolitical fracture at the core of Indian nationalism and the modern nation-state.

(Br)exit citizenship: belonging, rights and participation

ABSTRACT This paper offers an in-depth analysis of perceptions of (Br)exit citizenship, integrating key themes of European Union (EU) mobile and political citizenship, along belonging, rights and participation. It draws on a series of original, semi-structured interviews and follow up conversations with 5 experts, 21 Central and Eastern European (CEE) migrants and 30 citizen activists collected between 2018–2022 in the United Kingdom (UK). Three key takeaways emerge from the evidence: 1) shared reluctance to use the term ‘citizenship’; 2) hierarchised understanding of belonging and rights centred on mobility/migration, gender, class/race and deeply personal identity axes; and 3) the inconspicuous lack of CEE migrant juxtaposed with substantial presence of UK nationals as activists within pro-EU citizen groups. In contrast to being emblematic of EU political citizenship, the findings suggest a ‘business as usual’ juncture, wherein the enduring significance of free movement and intersecting social factors shape (Br)exit citizenship. Hence, the paper offers a cautionary narrative, urging restraint in placing too much emphasis on one-off instances of citizen mobilisations, while highlighting the secondary role migrant and pluralistic citizenship considerations tend to have amidst current and future European socio-political crises.

Individual Responsibility to Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions from a Kantian Deontological Perspective

As a collective action problem, climate change is best tackled by coordination. Most moral philosophers therefore agree on our individual responsibility as political citizens to help establish such coordination. There is disagreement, however, on our individual responsibilities as consumers to reduce emissions before such coordination is established. In this article I argue that from a Kantian deontological perspective we have a perfect duty to refrain from activities that we would not perform if appropriate coordination were established. Moral autonomy means that we do not need to wait for an external lawmaker to tell us what we ought to do. In practice, this means basing our decisions on a shadow price for carbon: if we would not go out for a drive on a sunny Sunday afternoon in a gas-guzzling sport utility vehicle if gas prices were twice as high, we should not do it now. Moreover, we have imperfect duties to reduce emissions by more than our perfect duties require.

Engendering “Illegality”: Blackness, citizenship, and Dominico‐Haitian motherhood

AbstractIn 2013,the Dominican Republic's highest court ruled to retroactively apply the elimination of jus soli citizenship, commonly known as birthright citizenship. The ruling impacted more than 200,000 Dominicans of Haitian descent and culminated a decades‐long attack on territorially based citizenship in the country, which largely provided access to the children of Haitians, who make up more than 80% of the country's migrants. The intensification of anti‐birthright citizenship politics and the implementation of a host of restrictive measures since 2004 shifted focus from the male labor as the primary target of migrant control, to the “pregnant migrant.” This article examines how these policies shaped Dominico‐Haitian women's experiences of motherhood by drawing on interviews and participant observation undertaken from 2014 to 2018 in and around Santo Domingo. I argue that anti‐birthright citizenship politics target Black women's reproduction in a form of racialized violence that shares continuities with the nation's history of enslavement.

‘Caste Census’ to Dismantle ‘Group Inequalities’

The caste system in India continues to endure, resulting in around 85% of the people experiencing socio-economic disadvantages. The process of systematic exclusion renders the policy intentions devoid of acknowledgement towards the demands of communities that have been historically marginalised. Conducting a comprehensive census of castes is necessary to foster inclusivity within India, as it enables the recognition and subsequent mitigation of entrenched disparities that persist due to factors such as caste affiliations, religious distinctions, gender disparities, ethnic variations, and racial differences. The transition from a focus on ‘Political Citizenship’ to ‘Social Citizenship’ via the implementation of inclusive policies is paramount in pursuing a more equal and just society.

Posthuman citizenship

ABSTRACT Citizenship and the posthuman have not been often theorized together. In this paper, I want to think about their coalition both as a new episode in the efforts of politics for citizenship, including knowledge politics, and as a source of rebalancing power against governmental and corporate interests in citizenship politics. Here, I seek to address two questions: (1) What is posthuman citizenship? (2) What does posthuman citizenship bring to analysis of intersectional, complex, and multi-layered struggles of citizenship? Section I of the article addresses possible conceptual connections between citizenship and posthumanism at the posthuman political system level. Section II concentrates on a posthuman genealogy of citizenship to show why posthuman citizenship is a much-needed ontopolitical praxis. Section III details the main principles of posthuman citizenship with respect to mediation of rights, political agency, and political responsibility. The paper contributes to the understanding of politics of/for citizenship with two concepts: augmented political responsibility and posthuman deeds.