Forms Of Citizenship Research Articles

Citizenship and Democratisation in Brazil's Favelas: The End of the Dream?

From the later 1970s through to the end of the military government in Brazil (1985), many social scientists saw signs of a new form of citizenship and a deepening of democracy emerging in favela residents' associations. Some maintained the dream, even as it became clear that the restoration of party politics, pervasive clientelism, and effects of economic globalisation tended to corrode and isolate the associations. Over the decades, however, the dream has been further shattered by studies, mainly of favelas in Rio de Janeiro, which show the associations destroyed or enfeebled in the course of drug wars and the dynamics of ‘the militarisation of urban marginality’ (Loïc Wacquant). This paper reviews several of these studies, and concedes much to them. However, a basis for maintaining the dream is found in a shift of focus from residents' associations in particular favelas to networks and a ‘new institutionality’ in urban politics.

Impacting on Intimacy: Negotiating the Marriage Equality Debate

Impacting on Intimacy: Negotiating the Marriage Equality Debate

Transnational Migrants' Negotiations of Formal and Cultural Citizenship

This article highlights the substantial role of Irish state governmentalities in structuring migrants' ‘possible fields of action’ (Foucault 1982: 790), while taking account of the agency of migrant subjects, albeit constrained, in negotiating Irish immigration regulation. It is based on data gathered from eighteen migrant mothers of Irish citizens and argues that it is important to recognise the political agency of migrants in generating new transnational modes of belonging despite the ways in which the state circumscribes their capacities to engage in transnational practices and maintain transnational relationships. This group of migrants simultaneously endeavoured to maintain transnational practices and relationships while cultivating local identifications. Although they had complex and contradictory attitudes to citizenship, the unifying theme was that social and spatial mobility are not inimical to local belonging. However, their local and transnational practices were impeded by prevailing discourses and regulations drawing on exclusionary configurations of citizenship which combined racialised notions of Irishness with neoliberalised concepts of the ideal citizen.

Lighting a Lamp: Citizenship Behavior and Social Capital

In the present paper, an attempt has been made to link dimensions of citizenship behaviours with dimensions of social capital. For studying dimensions of citizenship behaviour, two frameworks have been used: 1) Podsakoff, KacKenzie, and Paine, Bachrach (2000) which divides citizenship behaviour into seven dimensions and 2) Van Dyne, Graham, and Dienesch (1994) which divides citizenship behaviour into five dimensions. For studying social capital, Nahapiet and Ghoshal (1998) framework has been used, which divides social capital into three dimensions: structural, cognitive and relational. A theoretical framework is developed to see which dimension of Organization Citizenship Behaviour (OCB) will be positively related to social capital dimensions, and simultaneously, propositions have been developed. The basic proposition is that OCBs facilitate the development of structural, relational, and cognitive dimensions of social capital among employees. The framework presented here suggests that different forms of citizenship contribute to the creation of the relational, cognitive, and structural aspects of social capital in different ways. The model also suggests that social capital may, in turn, stimulate additional citizenship behaviours. For future research, OCB and social capital can be linked to three network types proposed by Inkpen and Tsang (2005). In their paper, they studied three types of networks from the single-node divisionalized firm (the intracorporate network) to interfirm relationships (the alliance) to an unstructured collection of firms (industrial district).

Post-refugee African Australians' perceptions about being and becoming Australian: language, discourse and participation

This article provides recent empirical evidence to support the argument that the everyday politics of race and fear of the non-desired Other still persist in Australia more than half a century after the official demise of the White Australia Policy. The article sheds so me insight into how Australian immigration policies are now deliberately designed to normalise and assimilate new migrants into narrow Anglo-Saxon cultural and linguistic norms, thereby inadvertently excluding people from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds who need Australian citizenship the most. The argument of the article is based on outcomes of a study on personal stories of African refugee background Australian citizens regarding their experiences with the Australian citizenship test; their opinions about the literacy-for-citizenship requirement; and their ideas about being and becoming Australian. The participants to the study expressed strong reservations with the idea of having to undertake a formal citizenship test that neither improves their understanding of the everyday way of life in Australia nor opens avenues for greater opportunities for socio-economic participation and recognition of the linguistic and cultural identities they bring to Australia.

From conditional to secured and sovereign: The new strategic link between the citizen and the nation-state in a globalized world

Citizenship―the legal link between the individual and the nation-state―has developed its own independent history. Prior to the American and French Revolutions, citizenship was based on allegiance to versus protection of the King, but in the nineteenth century it was transformed into a conditional status based on rights and duties. Recently, courts and governments have secured citizenship, bringing about a new stage in its development: reversing the traditional dependency of the individual on the state, they recognized that sovereignty belongs to citizens. This model was presented by the U.S. Supreme Court in the late 1950s, but originated in a movement of the whole international community which aimed to guarantee the protections of citizenship to all individuals: it reduced statelessness, securing it for 99.8% of human beings; it gave rise to multiple citizenship and, paradoxically, reinforced nation-states as the main providers of the “the right to have rights.” Far from signifying a “post-national” or “disaggregated” form of citizenship, these legal developments, in the context of globalization, consolidate and reinforce national citizenship.

Global citizenship and marginalisation: contributions towards a political economy of global citizenship

The development of a global form of citizenship stands in a rather tense relation with the realities of vast numbers of marginalised citizens across the globe, to the extent that marginality appears to be the hidden other of global citizenship. The aim of this paper is to contribute to the development of a political economy of global citizenship by elaborating on some of these issues. The paper provides a critical discussion of the literature on global citizenship education using a theoretical approach that stems from political economy theories of globalisation. The notion of an emerging transnational class system will provide the starting point for understanding the processes and forces behind current forms of global structural marginalisation and their implications for the possibilities of a global citizenship.

‘The sleep has been rubbed from their eyes’: social citizenship and the reproduction of local hierarchies in rural Hungary and Romania

In this paper, we make three interrelated points. First, while much of the recent literature on new forms of citizenship has focused on the diversity of large cities and new forms of migration, we seek to establish rural sites as important arenas for negotiating citizenship. We stress that far from being homogeneous, villages in their struggles over belonging are affected by long-standing diversity as well as global discourses. Second, we seek to complicate the interpretation of the demise of socialism as a radical break manifested in a diminished role of the state. We show that if the central state retreats, local state actors may gain in importance for local negotiations of citizenship. Third, we explore how the local state actors sometimes use their new powers over social rights to recreate boundaries of belonging through public performances tied to the administration of these rights. We go on to explore the normative basis for these performances and indicate that membership is still based on a contribution of work to the common good. This can best be conceptualised as a shifting continuity rather than a sharp break after 1989.

On the durability and the decomposition of citizenship: the social logics of forced return migration in Cape Verde

This article explores the impact of deportation, a state practice increasingly applied by European and North American governments, on notions of sociality in transnational social fields. In particular, it concentrates on the dynamics between formal citizenship on the one hand and the moral economies of belonging and membership on the other. Drawing on anthropological fieldwork in Cape Verde, where deportation is producing a new social minority, this article examines the confluence of social and formal legal practices of exercising membership in transnational fields. After summarising the constitutive features of Cape Verdean transnational social formation, the trajectories and perspectives of deportees are highlighted in relation to their family networks, as well as in their encounters with the wider society and state structures. It is argued that understandings of social inclusion and perceptions of membership are embedded in moral discourses on ‘law’ and ‘justice’ as they circulate within transnational social fields. In the context of forced return migration, citizenship emerges as an arena for claiming legitimacy and integration and likewise becomes a key mode of the formulation of conditionalities for integration and social exclusion.

The incorporation of indigenous concepts of plurinationality into the new constitutions of Ecuador and Bolivia

This article studies the new constitutions of Ecuador and Bolivia in order to determine to what extent indigenous concepts of democracy have been incorporated into these important documents. The research presented here suggests that there is a significant correlation between the demands made by indigenous social movements over the past two decades and the new constitutional texts of both countries, which essentially embrace the alternative forms of citizenship and democracy espoused by indigenous social movement groups. For many activists, these changes open the door to what they perceive as a richer democracy.

Dramaturgies of dissent: the spatial politics of squatting in Berlin, 1968–

This paper builds on an emergent scholarly interest in the political geography of the contemporary city. If recent struggles over the meaning of urban space testify to the interarticulation of neo-liberal norms with an increasingly revanchist approach to local governance, the main aim of the paper is to acknowledge various attempts to contest these developments. More specifically, it seeks to highlight the role and significance of the German Hausbesetzerbewegung (squatter movement) from the 1960s onwards. Despite a growing body of literature on the role of ‘1968’ as a watershed moment in the evolution of new social movements in West Germany, there remains little empirical work on the role of squatter movements within a broader matrix of protest and resistance. To what extent was the squatter movement in West Germany successful in articulating a creative reworking of the built form and urban space more generally? In what way were these counterclaims to the city performed? And how were these alternative cartographies organised at the level of the everyday? The paper proposes to answer these framing questions with particular reference to Berlin's squatting scene and longstanding struggles since the late 1960s over architectural space, ecological practice and ‘insurgent’ forms of citizenship.

COMMUNICATION PROCESSES AND THE ‘NEW PUBLIC SPACE’ IN ITALY AND THE USA: A LONGITUDINAL APPROACH

Since the time of ancient Greece, democracy and communication have ineluctably been linked. Seen with the eyes of the Greek citizens, the agora was a somewhat mystical space where direct involvement and face-to-face communication processes paved the way to the kratos of the demos. After more than two thousand years, communication still remains closely linked to democracy, but the ever expanding dimension of modern societies calls for political representation. Consequently, the electoral arena has become a fictitious public space making democracy work. With the agency and the communication theories in the background, the present authors claim that following the advent of the most incredible technological discontinuity in history, things seem to have taken a jump back in time. The widespread dissemination of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), in fact, was crucial to the emergence of a ‘new public space’ bringing with it the poetry of a mirrored image of the ancient agora. Such new public space will be analysed with reference to the US and Italian governments at a federal and central level in order to gain a better understanding of how government-citizens relationships are fashioned in both contexts. As we will see, each understanding of democracy argues for a different design of government-citizens relationships. Consequently, both positive and recalcitrant attitudes towards a citizens’ greater involvement in policy making are often due more to cultural than to technological barriers. Their removal has to pass through the awareness that ICT may have profound consequences for democracy: their real power lies in their capacity to integrate political representation with new forms of citizens’ direct involvement in public life while consequently reinvigorating the pluralistic attitudes of the agora even in large-scale modern democracies.

Activist Capitalism and Supply-Chain Citizenship

In this article I examine the new forms of citizenship that have resulted from the connections between the emergence of new corporate ethics (including fair trade) and outsourcing. The process I call “supply-chain citizenship” is based on a collection of long-distance promises of care that are economically and politically backed by transnational corporations. I analyze the trend toward what the New York Times recently called “activi[st]-capitalism” and how this move is changing relationships between corporations and consumers and consumers and people working along global corporate supply chains. This study builds on my previous research on workers’ bodies, citizenship, and sovereignty, now examined along global corporate supply axes. I observe the kinds of political mobilization that are coming into being as the result of links between corporate governance, negotiations between corporate and nation-state sovereignty, and the related setting and enforcement of global labor and environmental standards. In my investigation, I trace ethnical production from design houses to factory floors, from showrooms to department stores, and from NGO monitoring agencies to consumer protest networks.

Fairness Versus Justice in Language Testing: The Place of English Literacy in the Australian Citizenship Test

This article proposes a distinction between fairness and justice in relation to language tests. Basing its discussion on the validity theory of Samuel Messick, it discusses the way in which these terms have been used in the existing literature, and their relationship to the concept of validity. Fairness, broadly speaking, refers to the technical quality of the test; justice encompasses the values implicit in test constructs, and the social uses to which language tests may be put. It illustrates the potential usefulness of the distinction by discussing the growing international practice of the use of language tests within citizenship procedures, and considers in detail the introduction of a formal citizenship test in Australia by a conservative government in the context of growing public anxiety about security, and about cultural diversity within the Australian population.

The new Amazon geographies: insurgent citizenship, “Amazon Nation” and the politics of environmentalisms

This article reviews the main themes—we are here; this is who we are; insurgent citizenship; Amazon Nation—elaborated in this collection of papers on new Amazonian geographies, and extends their implications to ideas about governmentality and regional identity. The article contextualizes the papers in this issue through understanding Amazonia's role in the structuring of the contemporary Brazilian state through resistance to conventional modernist authoritarian development planning, and the creation of current places and politics through the assertion of new forms of citizenship, identity, governance and the rise of socio-environmentalisms as part of a new “statecraft” from below. Modern Amazonia has reasserted itself by developing a set of alternative epistemes and practices which can be seen, in their language and ideologies, to invoke the idea of the “Amazon nation.” This article emphasizes the cultural underpinnings of these processes in a contested Amazon that is now a major supplier of global agricultural commodities in its deforested landscapes, and pivotal for local livelihoods and planetary environmental services in its forested ones.

Discourses from without, discourses from within: women, feminism and voice in Africa

Discourses of development, education, gender, feminism and critical linguistics arrive in Africa from usually well-meaning but often opportunistic agents from other contemporary socio-political and economic contexts. Each of these forms a new layer that veils the earlier discourses and practices. Simultaneously, people in Africa are (re-)positioned as inarticulate; without literacy, literary traditions or education; living in poverty; and thus dependent upon the more ‘developed world’. Women are further positioned as subject to unmediated cultural or religious practices of the African man. Since women clearly lack voice and agency, they need ‘to be spoken for’ or require the intellectual assistance of development agencies, followed soon after by feminist scripts of the centre. These are most often in the international languages of wider communication, which for most women in Africa are at once alluring but impenetrable or undelivering of promised socio-economic or political capital. In this article, counter-hegemonic voice, agency and assertion of linguistic and other forms of citizenship demonstrate that the discourses from without lack the temporal and spatial subtlety required to gauge the business of women in Africa. Often unwittingly, they contrive instead to re-marginalise women.

Unofficial Citizens: Indian Entrepreneurs and the State-Effect in Dubai, United Arab Emirates

AbstractBuilding upon theories of the state as an “effect” of multiple, sometimes contradictory practices and narratives, I argue that Indian business elites in Dubai play an important role in both bounding the state as distinct from the economy and legitimizing its power. I focus, therefore, on the forms of citizenship and subjectivity that are being produced in Dubai and how the legitimacy of the state relies not just on the recruitment of citizen subjects, but also on those who are excluded from belonging—like Indian elites in Dubai. Neoliberal narratives and practices of economic “freedom” by elite expatriates mask the ways in which foreign elites are complicit with the state in producing social and economic hierarchies that benefit both citizens and elite expatriates while maintaining a structure of labor migration that significantly disadvantages the majority of foreign residents living in the United Arab Emirates.

No space for citizens? Conceptualisations of citizenship in a functional region

This article aims to discuss whether there is such a thing as citizenship performed at the level of the sub-state region and, if so, how this can be studied. It is suggested that aspects of citizenship should be studied not only in the context of sub-state administrative units, but also in the context of more loosely interconnected functional economic regions. The main argument for this is that, although there is no ‘contract’ between the polity and the citizen in these functional regions, they are often highly politicized spaces, governed by coalitions of public and private actors whose actions can be of considerable importance for those inhabiting them. It is also suggested that, in the absence of formal rights and institutionalized relations between citizens and polity, we need to explore how ‘citizens’ and ‘citizenship’ are conceptualized by the polity in these regions more broadly. The article focuses (a) on the conditions for citizenship in the functional region and (b) on those discourses of citizenship that emerge under the conditions identified. A tentative conclusion is that, in the absence of formal citizenship rights connected to the functional space, a discourse about citizens and citizenship has emerged, which is focuses solely on citizens' capacity to contribute to economic growth.

MANAGED LABOR OR HUMAN RIGHTS: CONFLICTING DIRECTIONS FOR IMMIGRATION REFORM

Most of the world's migrants are people displaced from poor countries, traveling to wealthy ones. Their migration is increasingly organized by both the sending countries, increasingly dependent on the remittances sent home by overseas workers, and the receiving countries, which are dependent on their labor. In this global labor supply scheme, however, the rights of workers and the welfare of their communities are not recognized or protected. Yet migrants themselves are asserting new forms of citizenship and new political rights that would give them much greater protection and a much greater voice in this system. Ultimately, the greatest protection for workers and communities, however, is the solidarity among workers themselves.

From Sub- to Super-Citizenship: Sex Hormones and the Body Politic in Brazil

Sex hormones in Brazil are mobilised as modes of regulatory control and to discipline subjectivites. Their packaging effectively differentiates between two forms of citizenship. The first, available to those with private health, is founded on notions of personal autonomy, individual choice and self-enhancement, while the second frames decisions in terms of the individual's moral responsibility to the wider collectivity. Here, technical and biomedical interventions on middle-class bodies have personalising tendencies, while those effected on the bodies of the urban poor can be read as modes of inclusion through standardisation. Personalisation, in the Brazilian sense, concerns the attribution of privileges which place a person above the undifferentiated mass of individuals. The paper critically engages with approaches to bio-citizenships developed in contexts where biological inclusion is predicated on patient activism and shows how, in Brazil, complying with medical regimes is an integral part of constituting oneself as a citizen