Domestic Citizenship Research Articles

Scenes of Domestic Citizenship in Negro Home Demonstration Work 1921–1938

AbstractReading two United States Department of Agriculture propaganda films, Helping the Negro Farmer (1921) and The Negro Farmer (1939) along with Maryland narrative reports, this article considers the evolution of state‐sanctioned discourse around domestic science, race and diet. The films rely on themes that construct the Negro home as a foil to a whitewashed progressive domestic front. Tasked with reforming this home, Negro female home demonstration agents participated in these films and worked as interlocutors, selling the narrative of kitchens as workshops of patriotism and civility. Yet, they also negotiated a form of domestic citizenship, crafting tactics of early Black food sovereignty despite being underfunded. This important period of African American foodways urges us to consider how agents were both framed as expert and expendable in the production of a national domestic standard.

Passports for Sale: How (Un)Meritocratic Are Citizenship by Investment Programmes?

Abstract In recent years, citizenship by investment (CBI) and residency by investment (RBI) programmes have been burgeoning throughout the world, including in a range of European States. At first sight, such programmes are blatantly anti-meritocratic: they hinge on a person’s wealth, and not on her skills, potential, and intrinsic qualities. Yet upon a closer look, the public discourse that surrounds CBI and RBI is influenced by the same meritocratic conceptions as those that have been driving domestic citizenship and immigration law in the past decades. In this article, I take a step back from existing debates about CBI to argue that the concept of meritocracy is key to understanding, supporting, but also challenging contemporary immigration and citizenship law, including CBI. First, I analyse the merits—if I may say so—of the concept of meritocracy. I then show the limitations of using meritocratic arguments to justify the existence of CBI schemes.

Investment Citizenship and Democracy in a Global Age. Towards a Democratic Interpretation of International Nationality Law

The process of commodification of democratic citizenship through the current proliferation of “investment citizenship” (IC) programs, i.e. the various state-led programs that offer the acquisition of domestic citizenship through financial contribution only, needs to be addressed urgently, and, so the chapter argues, through stronger democracy-oriented interpretations of international nationality law (INL). Unlike other arguments against IC advanced in political theory, the present chapter argues from within the legal practice itself: it proposes its normative critique as the best interpretation of nationality law. In contrast to other existing legal critiques of IC, however, it does not focus on domestic or European Union law, but on international law: it develops a new interpretation of INL that excludes granting nationality on monetary grounds only. In short, the chapter argues that contemporary INL is best interpreted in the light of the international principle of democracy (the IPD), and the customary international law principle of individual equality, as a form of international pre-commitment of democratic citizenship. What this means is that the factual conditions for the justification of democracy need to be protected not only under the IPD, but also under INL. In turn, this implies that the conditions of naturalization encompass the sharing of equal and interdependent stakes, both positively so as to include those who share such stakes and negatively so as not to include those who do not. The matching of those conditions under the IPD and INL explains in turn how the genuine-connection test in Nottebohm is best interpreted, under contemporary circumstances, as a test for the sharing of equal and interdependent stakes. The consequence, the chapter argues, is not only the lack of opposability, but also of validity of IC under INL.

L'Arche, Learning Disability, and Domestic Citizenship: Dependent Political Belonging in a Contemporary British City

AbstractThis paper compares two ways of providing care for adults with learning disabilities in a British city. It explores how different ways of supporting those who are particularly dependent affect the kind of political belonging these individuals can achieve. Most care providers in Endsleigh see caring relationships as merely instrumental to enabling people with learning disabilities to be independent in their local ‘community’. In this respect, they see the relationship between bodily needs and political belonging similarly to Hannah Arendt, who argues that citizenship is achieved by mastering dependence. As a counterpoint to this mode of care, I delineate ethnographically a contrasting form of urban citizenship enabled by a Christian care provider called L'Arche. L'Arche builds a religious sociality around and in the care home. In doing so, it creates an urban community in which dependence on others is not an obstacle to, but a vehicle of political recognition. I argue that this alternative form of care challenges us to reconsider the relation between domestic dependence and public political belonging, and to investigate the diverse forms of urban citizenship that disability, dependence, and cognitive conditions require and enable.

CITIZENSHIP, WAR, AND THE ORIGINS OF INTERNATIONAL ETHICS IN AMERICAN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY, 1960–1975

ABSTRACTThis article examines a series of debates about civil disobedience, conscription, and the justice of war that took place among American liberal philosophers, lawyers, and activists during the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War. It argues that these debates fundamentally reshaped American political philosophy, by shifting the focus from the welfare state to the realm of international politics. In order to chart this transition from the domestic to the international, this article focuses on the writings of two influential political theorists, John Rawls and Michael Walzer. The turn to international politics in American political philosophy has its origins, in part, in their arguments about domestic citizenship. In tracing these origins, this article situates academic philosophical arguments alongside debates among the American public at large. It offers a first account of the history of analytical political philosophy during the 1960s and 1970s, and argues that the role played by the Vietnam War in this history, though underappreciated, is significant.

Citizenship and the Origins of Women’s History in the United States by Teresa Anne Murphy (review)

Citizenship and the Origins of Women's History in the United States. By Teresa Anne Murphy. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013. Pp. 228. Cloth, $42.50.)Reviewed by Rosemarie ZagarriModem U.S. women's historians often assume that they pioneered the field. As Teresa Anne Murphy shows in her excellent study, however, many of women began to be published in England and elsewhere in western Europe as early as the eighteenth century. In the United States, the genre came into its own during the first half of the nineteenth century. Unlike previous scholars, Murphy maintains that the emergence of women's history should not be understood simply as effort to create a separate story about women's role in the past, parallel to that of men. Instead, according to Murphy, these works were part of a larger political debate that developed about the meaning of in the new nation. By focusing on both typical and exceptional women from other times, places, and cultures, early historians of women were able to re-imagine from a distance controversial issues about women's power and status that were surfacing in the newly formed republican polity.Murphy argues that during the eighteenth century, the most popular of women articulated a notion of womanhood that she calls citizenship (8). Drawing on the framework created by philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment, these linked social progress with the rise in women's status. While more primitive societies treated women much like slaves, advanced commercial societies granted women greater privileges and benefits, and accorded women greater respect. Yet according to Murphy, these histories (133) were of sexual difference. They portrayed women as individuals who acted through men rather than as independent agents. Women's primary responsibilities lay with their homes, husbands, and families where they would promote manners and cultivate sociability. Only indirectly might women exert an influence on society or politics. In fact, many of the most popular authors, such as Antoine-Leonard Thomas and William Alexander, often chastised or maligned women who dared to exercise more direct forms of political authority. The possibility of citizenship, then, seemed to be effectively foreclosed.By the third and fourth decades of the nineteenth century, Murphy says, there were significant changes in the genre. As more women became educated, women rather than men began to publish of women. Many of these women, such as Lydia Maria Child, Sarah Grimke, and Margaret Fuller, also participated in the moral reform movements of the day. These newer of women proceeded from different assumptions than earlier ones. Instead of assuming a fundamental difference between the sexes, they aspired to gender equality. Instead of accepting the limitations of domestic citizenship, they pushed against its restrictions. Women, they emphasized, had always been oppressed by men. Despite men's oppression, women still had found ways to exercise a public role. The implication was clear: The country needed a new model of women's participation in public life, one that welcomed women's contributions and acknowledged women as equal citizens with men. …

Regulation of citizenship in the territory of former SFR Yugoslavia

The continuity with the former federal and republic nationality in the successor states of former SFRY confirms that it has kept on being regulated by their internal laws. However, not in all cases regulations of citizenship have been implemented in accordance with the provisions that are defined by international law. The basic nationality principles have not been applied to the citizens of different ethnic origin. For their own political interests the states did not take measures to duly grant citizenship to the persons that at the time of succession were nationals of the predecessor state. The delay in passing and implementing the laws, non-respect of the right of option, the exclusiveness of domestic citizenship and the absence of solutions for the protection of family unity had a negative reflection on the achievement of rights of citizens. The problems have gradually been overcome by introducing novelties in laws, by adopting administrative legislation and jurisprudence of the successor states, but as far as equality before the law is concerned some issues have remained unsolved.

The Limited Europeanization of Domestic Citizenship Policy: Evidence from the Netherlands

This article analyses the Europeanization of domestic citizenship policy by focusing on the attempt to introduce the principle of multiple nationality in the Dutch Nationality Act. Considering that citizenship is often seen as a last bastion of national sovereignty, it is not surprising that neither the European Union nor the Council of Europe could play a decisive role. Nevertheless, the evidence from the Netherlands shows that, resulting from negative integration, the importance of Brussels could increase after a landmark ruling by the Court of Justice, and also that Strasbourg‐based European norms should not be underestimated as they can substantially ‘frame’ domestic discourses.

Disability and Domestic Citizenship: Voice, Gender, and the Making of the Subject

Disability and Domestic Citizenship: Voice, Gender, and the Making of the Subject