Hierarchies Of Citizenship Research Articles

Sex Workers’ Everyday Security in the Netherlands and the Impact of COVID-19

IntroductionThe COVID-19 pandemic has laid bare and exacerbates the existing insecurities of sex workers. This paper asks: What are sex workers’ everyday experiences of (in)security? And: How has the COVID-19 pandemic influenced these?MethodsWe engage with these questions through collaborative research based on semi-structured interviews carried out in 2019 and 2020 with sex workers in The Hague, the Netherlands.ResultsRevealing a stark mismatch between the insecurities that sex workers’ experience and the concerns enshrined in regulation, our analysis shows that sex workers’ everyday insecurities involve diverse concerns regarding their occupational safety and health, highlighting that work insecurity is more multi-faceted than sexually transmitted infections (STIs). Widespread employment and income insecurities for sex workers are exacerbated for transwomen and male sex workers. Their legal liminality is enabled not only by the opaque legal status of sex work in the Netherlands, but also by the gendering of official regulation. The COVID-19 pandemic made visible how the sexual and gender norms that informally govern sex workers’ working conditions intersect with hierarchies of citizenship, complicating access to COVID-19 support, particularly for migrant sex workers.ConclusionsSex work regulation in the Netherlands leaves workers in a limbo—not without obligations and surveillance, yet, without the full guarantee of their labour rights.Policy ImplicationsTo effectively address sex workers’ insecurities, a shift in regulation from its current biopolitical focus to a labour approach is necessary. Besides, public policy and civil society actors alike need to address the sex industry’s harmful social regulation through hierarchies of gender, sexuality and race.

Transnational Solidarity? Academia and the Politics of Knowledge, Translation, and (Im)Mobility

Globally escalating attacks on critical scholars and their scholarship demand a response that matches their urgency, intensity, and scale. But the struggle to mobilize academia as a transnational solidarity network is troubled by the complicated political affects attending the labors of solidarity, the uneven burdens of translating local struggles for diverse audiences, and the unequal access to mobility experienced by academics differently situated within hierarchies of citizenship, race/ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality. Local and international solidarity efforts with over two thousand Academics for Peace, who in 2016 petitioned the Turkish state for a Turkish-Kurdish peace process and were summarily criminalized en masse, offers an opportunity to reflect on academia as just such a transnational solidarity network. This article offers a feminist analysis of solidarity efforts by and for Academics for Peace and maps the coalescing forces of neoimperialist war, nationalist/racist border xenophobia, heteromasculinist militarism, and academic neoliberalism that together shape the terrain on which flows of solidarity and exiled academics, migrants, and refugees are both facilitated and thwarted. The article concludes with attention to the alternative spaces of knowledge production created by these solidarity efforts and the potential these locales hold for revisioning academia itself.

Multicultural Citizenship and the Status of ‘Others’ in the Post 1991 Ethiopia: A Study on Membership and Self-Governing Status of Amhara People in Benishangul-Gumuz Regional State

Following the regime change in 1991, the Ethiopian government sought to institutionalize inclusive multicultural citizenship in the country. Membership status and selfgoverning rights are crucial entitlements in the multiculturalists’ notion of citizenship. Though citizenship is considered to be part of domestic affairs of a state, it is also influenced by the policies of sub-state political units. Hence, this paper examines the membership and self-governing status of Amhara and analyzes how the citizenship status is affected at sub-state units, with a focus on Benishangul Gumuz Regional State. Concurrent embedded mixed approach was employed and data were collected through interviews and document analysis. Interview data were obtained from 29 respondents, chosen by means of an intensity sampling method. Quantitative data were also acquired from Ethiopian Central Statistical Agency. The data were analyzed qualitatively with some quantitative backup. Though Amhara People of BGRS have the legal status of Ethiopian citizenship, BGRS has failed to fully integrate these people to the mainstream political community. Particularly, the exclusionary politics of recognition (as only selected nationalities receive the so-called ownership of the region ) and the prohibition of Amhara from exercising selfgovernment rights (this right is exclusively given to the ‘owner’ nationalities by the regional constitution) demonstrate the hierarchy of citizenship, where Amhara people are treated as secondclass citizens in BGRS, which is contradictory to the notion of multicultural citizenship.

‘Some Animals Are More Equal Than Others’: The Hierarchy of Citizenship in Austria

While this article aims to explore the connections between citizenship and ‘race’, it is the first study to use fictional tools as a sociological resource in exemplifying the deviation between citizenship in principle and practice in an Austrian context. The study involves interviews with 73 Austrians from three ethnic/racial groups, which were subjected to a directed approach to qualitative content analysis and coded based on sentences from George Orwell’s fictional book, ‘Animal Farm’. By using fiction as a conceptual and analytical device, this article goes beyond the orthodox particulars of citizenship to expose the compressed entitlements of some racial/ethnic minorities. In particular, data analysis revealed two related and intertwined central themes: (a) “all animals are not equal or comrades”; and (b) “some animals are more equal than others”. All ‘animals’ may be equal in principle, whereas, in practice, their ‘race’ serves as a critical source of social (dis)advantage in the ‘animal kingdom’. Thus, since citizenship is a precondition for possessing certain rights that non-citizens are not granted, I argue that citizenship cannot only be judged by whom it, in theory, excludes (i.e., non-citizens), but also by how it treats the included (i.e., citizens) on the basis of their ‘race’. I conclude that skin colour is a specific aspect of the hierarchy of citizenship in Austria, which reinforces that ‘some animals are more equal than others’.

Governing neoliberal authoritarian citizenship: theorizing hukou and the changing mobility regime in China

ABSTRACTDrawing on insights from critical citizenship studies and governmentality studies, this article explores and theorizes the changing mobility regime in China and its centerpiece, the household registration (hukou) system, from a global comparative perspective. First, we conceptualize the hukou system within the broader problematique of the spatiality of social citizenship and show how it enables processes of boundary-making that are comparable to the policing of the migrant poor in pre-welfare-state Europe and the subordination of international migrant labor in the contemporary world. Second, we argue that the shifting mobility regime envisaged by the current hukou reforms and new urbanization, which moves away from the dualistic structure of inclusion/exclusion to a multiplication of legal statuses and boundaries of citizenship, embodies a neoliberal-authoritarian rationality of government. Engaging with the debate on the hybrid governmentalities of post-socialist China, we focus particularly on new techniques of mobility management in China’s first-tier cities, whose national positioning resembles that of Northern countries in the global hierarchy of power. Through examples of the point-based system and the strategy of functional dispersal, we demonstrate how these globalizing cities actively engineer a highly polarized mobility regime in their pursuit of generating globally competitive spaces. The article contributes to the critique of methodological nationalism by denaturalizing national citizenship as a pre-given point of departure in examining mobility and socio-spatial boundaries. It also offers new insights into the converging trends of neoliberal authoritarianism and authoritarian neoliberalism in governing the ‘glocal’ hierarchies of citizenship and mobility.

Migration, Boundaries and Differentiated Citizenship: Contested Frameworks for Inclusion and Exclusion

Contemporary migration across borders is beset by contradictory pressures and challenges. Some borders remain relatively open, especially for potential immigrants with valued skills and assets or for humanitarian reasons, but in many other cases borders are becoming increasingly more regulated or impermeable. The differential capacities for mobility that accompany these developments are contributing to new categories and hierarchies of citizenship and belonging which are being shaped by and exacerbate significant social, economic and political inequalities. This editorial highlights core relationships that have emerged in the process of regulating geographical and social boundaries in different national contexts, focusing on the intersections between dynamics of social inclusion and exclusion and the construction of differential categories of citizenship. The editorial establishes a framework for the articles that follow in this thematic issue, emphasizing the contested, fragmented, variable and highly uneven nature of borders and citizenship regimes.

“One message, all the time and in every way”: Spatial subjectivities and pedagogies of citizenship

ABSTRACTWhat are the pedagogical encounters through which we learn about hierarchies of citizenship and the positions to which we belong in a nation? In this article, we seek to answer this question by examining the ways Muslim and non-Muslim bodies are spatially related to the settler nation-state of Canada, to reveal how outsider subjectivities are constructed and maintained. We articulate the ways spatiality and subjectivity are intertwined with how normative and non-normative citizenship is learned. This relationship is examined through the events of the Parliament Hill shooting in Ottawa in 2014, and the subsequent state funeral held in the city where the authors live. We argue that these events were explicitly pedagogical and demonstrate the ways spatial subjectivities are produced along the racial lines of the nation. We trace how spatiality and subjectivity are interwoven in conceptions of Canadian citizenship, how these relationships prioritize the maintenance of a normative white settler citizenship identity, and we highlight this process in the pedagogical nature of the War Memorial and the subjectivity it calls forth. We define what we see as pedagogies of citizenship and analyse the subsequent state funeral and procession through our own lived experiences of the funeral's spatial imperative of subjectivity. We take up how the funeral as pedagogy asserted explicit Anglo-colonial power and its necessary constructs of embodied emplacement and settler futurity. Throughout, we consider how Anglo-dominance rests on multiple oppressions.

Eligible men: men, families and masculine duty in Great War Australia

This article investigates how Australian men and their families negotiated the competing demands of military duty and domestic male responsibility during the First World War. This was a matter of real consequence in a nation that did not impose conscription for overseas military service: men were obliged to weigh the duty they might feel to their nation and empire against that which they owed to their families. As many as one in two military-aged men responded to calls to enlist; just as many declined to do so. Wartime and post-war efforts to build hierarchies of citizenship with returned servicemen at their apex have, however, obscured the realities faced by those thousands of Australians who did not enlist. This article argues that despite the potent language of martial citizenship, space existed within families and communities to assert the legitimacy of men remaining at home as breadwinners, fathers, sons and carers. The presence and responsibilities of the breadwinning male were integral to family economies that would not be conceded readily to the war. Those confronted by this choice were not rejecting one form of manhood in favour of another. Rather, their experiences show that the definitions and obligations of manhood remained delicately and painfully indexed to material realities.

全球化生產下民工公民身分差序體制:比較中國沿海三個區域

China’s migrant workers are not treated as equal citizens in their sojourning cities. They are systemically discriminated against by virtue of China’s system of differential citizenship, but their situation varies according to different local conditions. Scholars have argued that globalization has brought about hierarchies of citizenship among the world’s nation-states. However, they have paid little attention to the effects of globalization on the hierarchical allocation of citizen rights within the nation-state. The article argues that globalization in the form of foreign investment does not have a uniform impact on the allocation of citizen rights across regions in a huge country rich in diversity. Rather, divergent local citizenship regimes have emerged due to varying configurations of local conditions and their interaction with state policy and global capital. The article defines three types of local migrant citizenship regimes and compares different institutional arrangements, official and corporate behavior, and migrants’ situation across regions. 中國農民工在旅居地缺乏完整公民權,不被當成平等的市民(公民)對待,遭受公民身分差序體制的歧視與排除,但歧視待遇因地而異。有研究者論證,全球化使得民族國家之間產生公民身分階層化的關係。但是,該類研究甚少注意到全球化帶給民族國家內部之公民權利階層化的現象。本文論證:全球化生產下,外資對中國公民權利配置的影響並非單一模式,而是表現出區域差異。不同地區條件的組合,以及這些條件與國家政策和全球資本的互動,催生了不同的地方公民身分體制。本文界定了三種地方公民身分體制的類型,並比較上海、蘇南、珠三角等區域之間在制度安排、地方政府與企業行為、以及民工處境上的差異。本文研究材料來自田野調查深度訪談、匯總統計資料分析、以及官方文件分析。 (This article is in English.)

Prodi-gals: Statelessness and Place-lessness in Lauretta Ngcobo’s “The Prodigal Daughter” (2012)

ABSTRACTPolitical exile is an integral part of post-1994 liberation struggle narrative in South Africa. Lauretta Ngcobo’s autobiographical short story, “The Prodigal Daughter”, is the title story of Prodigal Daughters (2012), an anthology of South African women’s stories of political exile during the anti-apartheid struggle. I enter the analysis through Ngcobo’s intertextual reference to the gendered figure of the prodigal son (Luke 15:11–32). The parable creates a clichéd schema of exile which lends itself to a feminist critique through the figure of the female “prodi-gal” (Carter 1985). Drawing on a black feminist conception of placelessness, I examine racial and gendered hierarchies of citizenship in relation to political exile and consider Ngcobo’s female “prodi-gal” as speaking back to the constructed radical subalternity of black South African women. Reading exile as a narrative form I argue that both the anthology and Ngcobo’s personal account are informed by a gendered insider/outsider perspective of the liberation movement: insider or “in place” as an activist but outsider “out of place” as a woman. I firstly analyse the notion of “statelessness” in relation to the racialised hierarchy of citizenship under apartheid as external exile. I then analyse “place-lessness” with reference to the marginalisation of women within patriarchal liberation movements while in political exile – this I read as internal exile. Over and above the historicising of women’s political exile, Ngcobo’s narrative recasts the exiled “women’s place” as a space of political agency through its erasure of the separation between the political and personal. By contrasting the gendered division of labour and resistance with the “domestication” of women’s activism in exile, Ngcobo challenges the perceived gender-neutrality of political exile. The male figure of the prodigal is thus re-cast as a female “prodi-gal”, creating a feminist schema for women’s political exile.

Politics of power and hierarchies of citizenship in Angola

This article discusses citizenship and belonging with reference to processes of post-war state formation, namely: the MPLA’s political hegemony and the centralisation of power in the presidency. It argues this political arrangement imposes upon individuals an oscillation between different ‘levels’ or hierarchies of citizenship with a tendency towards marginalisation, formally allowing them to access both but under the specific circumstances dictated by the MPLA party state. Without a strong political opposition with a plausible alternative citizenship doctrine and with little incentives to improve the terms of citizenship it provides to the population, the Angolan government constructed a system of interests whereby the MPLA functions as a gatekeeper. Both in control of the state and of the distribution of citizenship, the regime regulates the flow of resources to the bottom through strategies of poverty and dependency, which increase the distance between the state and the population and sponsors the marginalisation of the majority.

Gender and cultural citizenship among non-Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union in Israel

About 330,000 of partial Jews and gentiles have moved to Israel after 1990 under the Law of Return. The article is based on interviews with middle-aged gentile spouses of Jewish immigrants, aiming to capture their perspective on integration and citizenship in the new homeland where they are ethnic minority. Slavic wives of Jewish men manifested greater malleability and adopted new lifestyles more readily than did Slavic husbands of Jewish women, particularly in relation to Israeli holidays and domestic customs. Most women considered formal conversion as a way to symbolically join the Jewish people, while no men pondered over this path to full Israeli citizenship. Women's perceptions of the IDF and military service of their children were idealistic and patriotic, while men's perceptions were more critical and pragmatic. We conclude that women have a higher stake at joining the mainstream due to their family commitments and matrilineal transmission of Jewishness to children. Men's hegemony in the family and in the social hierarchy of citizenship attenuates their drive for cultural adaptation and enables rather critical stance toward Israeli society. Cultural politics of belonging, therefore, reflect the gendered norms of inclusion in the nation-state.

Avoidance of Military Service in Israel: Exploring the Role of Discourse

This study examines the use of the derogatory term mishtamtim (literally, 'shirkers') for Israeli citizens who do not serve in the military, as employed in a variety of widely circulating cultural texts and in several focus group discussions. I suggest that in addition to revealing and reflecting Israeli society's dominant views and opinions on military service and its relation to civil society, the inherent ambiguity of the mishtamtim label enables interlocutors to construct different notions of the Israeli collective, which are then translated into different patterns of inclusion and exclusion, hierarchies of citizenship, and disciplinary meas ures. In addition, the discursive construction of non-service as avoidance of participation in a symbolic, non-violent, civilianized, and benevolent contribution to the collective conceals the military's own tendency to discharge conscripts, as well as its inherently violent nature and the role that violence plays in providing the glue that keeps society together.

Nation and Empire: Hierarchies of Citizenship in the New Global Order

In our book Citizenship and Migration (Castles and Davidson, 2000), Alastair Davidson and I argued that the nation-state and citizenship were becoming global norms. For the first time in history, the great majority of the world’s people lived in countries with the constitutional forms and institutional structures of democratic nation-states. This also meant that most people in the world were legally defined as citizens — rather than as subjects of monarchs or dictators. Of course, many of these nation-states were democracies in name only. Nonetheless, the rapid proliferation of the nation-state model was a significant development both for national politics and international relations. We went on to examine the serious challenges to nation-state citizenship posed by globalization and international population mobility.