History Of Citizenship Research Articles

Unequal access: wealth as barrier and accelerator to citizenship

ABSTRACT Combining insights from the history of citizenship with contemporary legal analysis, this article both highlights and problematizes what we may call sorting strategies – restrictive closure and selective openness – which rely on ‘varieties of affluence’ (income, wealth, equity, credit, and the like) in shaping possibilities for entry, settlement, and naturalization. By emphasizing the growing significance of income barriers and thresholds on the one hand, and fast-tracked investment-based entryways on the other, this article investigates the role of wealth as both accelerator and barrier to citizenship, contributing to the varied toolbox used by governments to advance goals that may at times appear contradictory; these tools both tighten and relax the requirements of access to membership at the same time. These new developments represent different facets of the same trend. Without explicitly stating as much, programs that turn wealth into a core criterion for admission conceptually reignite an older, exclusive, and exclusionary vision according to which individuals must hold property (in land, resources, or in relation to one’s ‘dependents,’ including women, slaves, and children) in order to qualify as a citizen. While such a trajectory is no stranT8ger to ancient models, it raises profound challenges to modernist accounts of political membership that place equality at their core.

Full-time education: A brief overview

Integral education is an important part of the history of citizenship, therefore, of man, and, thus, it is a theme that has been deeply discussed and its concepts reworked over the years. This proposal aims to discuss and reflect, from a literature review, on the Full-Time Education Program. This is a bibliographic and descriptive study. It is hypothesized that in order for education to be, in fact, integral, only to increase the length of stay in school does not entail integral education. Considering this context, the article will deal with the paths taken by comprehensive education, focusing on this program. The fact that integral education, even today, even if it has become popular, is a challenge for the country, due to the lack of resources and training of teachers in most schools, which justifies the relevance of the study. Public policies on the theme will be presented and how this proposal has been consolidated in Brazil.

El retorno del amo en tiempos de la pospolítica

En la contemporaneidad asistimos a la emergencia de un orden social y político basado en la represión de la política y la negación de las subjetividades colectivas que han protagonizado la historia de la ciudadanía. En este nuevo orden, se pone en cuestión la operación del significante amo en calidad de sujeción del sujeto del inconsciente a la estructura, negando la causalidad y los efectos de su discurso en el lazo social. No obstante, aunque se niegue en el discurso público posideológico, los efectos del discurso del amo se dejan ver en su dimensión real, a través de formas de violencia que desbordan la capacidad social de gestionarla en la democracia consensual, lo cual plantea para la sociedad la necesidad de redefinir su relación con el goce de la política, desde la ética, para situar posibles salidas a la violencia social.

Un ensayo sobre la historia de la ciudadanía en América Latina desde una perspectiva a largo plazo

Resumen Este ensayo presenta un punto de vista sobre la historia de la ciudadanía en América Latina. A partir de la literatura clásica, se toma a la ciudadanía como una serie de representaciones de las tensiones entre universalidad e igualdad, derivadas del modo en que se desarrollaron a través de la historia las prerrogativas y obligaciones de los individuos miembros de las organizaciones políticas territoriales; y un estatus material y simbólico cuya universalidad e igualdad relativas dependen de situaciones históricas concretas. Se propone una visión a largo plazo de estas tensiones, y una periodización de la observación, que muestra cuáles son los puntos de equilibrios que se producen entre coyunturas críticas, y que permite percibir algunos aspectos interesantes de la historia de la inclusión política y social en los Estados territoriales de la región. Se argumenta que el último siglo (entre las primeras décadas del siglo XX y el presente), a pesar de la naturaleza dramática y no lineal de muchos de sus procesos, puede ser visto como una serie de movimientos de amplitud regional hacia puntos de equilibrio garantizan una mayor inclusión ciudadana en la mayoría de los aspectos políticos y sociales, gracias a regímenes políticos más amplios y Estados más capaces de generar efectos materiales sustanciales en sus territorios.

Civic Longing: The Speculative Origins of U.S. Citizenship

Carrie Hyde's Civic Longing is a history of citizenship in the United States between the American Revolution and the Civil War. According to Hyde, the fractured, uneven, and inchoate nature of American citizenship during this period authorizes an expansion of what we should look at when recounting its history. As she puts it: “the history of citizenship cannot be told solely from the perspective of the law”; “to fully understand the prehistory of citizenship, we need to undo a relatively modern interpretative bias that treats fiction and other imaginative traditions as secondary and subordinate expressions of political practice”; and “although citizenship lacked substantive content in early U.S. law, Americans sustained an idealized image of citizenship by imagining it from the outside” (pp. 9–10). Accordingly, Hyde advances a history of pre–Civil War citizenship through readings of religious texts, political commentaries, and, especially, literary works. Nonlegal texts are often set alongside legal...

Greek History

This is a particularly rich crop of books on Greek history. I commence with two important volumes on citizenship in archaic and classical Greece. Traditional narratives of Greek citizenship are based on three assumptions: that citizenship is a legal status primarily linked to political rights; that there was a trajectory from the primitive forms of archaic citizenship to the developed and institutionalized classical citizenship; and that the history of citizenship is closely linked to a wider Whig narrative of movement from the aristocratic politics of archaic Greece to classical Athenian democracy.

Citizenship by descent: how Canada’s one-generation rule fails to comply with international legal norms

ABSTRACTSince 1947, the Canadian Citizenship Act has set out the laws that determine eligibility for Canadian citizenship. Throughout the Act’s various enactments, the Canadian government has recognised the right to citizenship by descent, meaning the right for a Canadian citizen to pass on his/her citizenship status to his/her child born outside of Canada. Citizenship by descent is a commonly recognised path to citizenship in many countries. Canada has recently changed its approach to citizenship by descent and has imposed a one-generation rule. This article examines the history of citizenship by descent, the current regime governing this type of citizenship acquisition and then examines how these laws comply with Canada’s international legal obligations and the rule of law. Ultimately, the article argues that Canada’s new approach to citizenship by descent has the potential to render children stateless, thus violating international law and the rule of law.

The Construction of Prostitutes: Identity, Citizenship and Equality in Brazil

The construction of Prostitutes: Identity, Citizenship and Equality in Brazil. This article tries to analyse the real-life issues of prostitutes through the lens of citizenship. That is, we try to understand how prostitutes are seen in a citizenship sense and how they are (mis)treated because of their profession. In a more concrete sense, this work has as its focus the prostitutes that work on the streets of W3 Norte, in Brasilia. The research was developed using ethnography methods, being that the author accompanied most of the situations narrated. Other ethnographies were also used to complement and cause reflection on the view of the researcher as well as bibliography that resonated gender and citizenship questions, almost always concerning women and their sexuality in modern society. Being that the research has as one of its specificity the region and the history of Brasil, the concept of equality and the notion of citizenship must and is relative to these particulars. That being said, this dissertation tries to embody the concepts of citizenship comparing them to other uses of the word in other cultures. In that way, it makes it clearer what is to be expected in prostitution cases and their (mis)treatment in the public sphere. The history of citizenship in Brasil has obvious bearing on the way prostitutes have been treated throughout the course of the region’s past. One also analyzes the manner in which prostitutes and women in relate in general, with a more specific look towards the influence of the symbol ‘prostitute’ on women’s morals. The idea of the rule of law and the rights and guarantees that go along with it are important to better understand citizenship and, in that sense, the necessity to include people in a democracy threshold. Those that do not feel and are not represented by the very same institutions that have the duty of including all those that are affected by their laws and underrepresented and normally treated as second-class citizens. Nowadays, the most common debate that regards prostitute’s right involves the regulation of their profession and, in that sense, this dissertation tries to work out what kind of treatment can be expected from an eventual regulation. One has found that regulation is a step towards a recognition of rights, but is far from resolving all the citizen aspects of these women that are treated as if they lose all rights they have once they begin exercising their profession.

Concepts of Citizenship in Eastern and Western Europe

AbstractThe classical meaning of citizenship evokes a nation-state with a well-defined territory for its nationals, where national identity and sovereignty play a key role. Global developments are challenging the traditional nation-state and open a new stage in the history of citizenship. Transnational citizenship involving dual and multiple citizenships has become more and more accepted in Europe. Numerous scholars envisaged a post-national development where the nation-state no longer plays a key role. While scholarly research tended to focus on developments in Western Europe, a dynamic development also took place in Eastern Europe following the collapse of communism. Dual citizenship was introduced in most Eastern European countries, but its purpose was to strengthen the nation by giving the ethnic kin abroad citizenship and non-resident voting rights. In Western Europe, the right of migrants to citizenship has been expanded throughout the years in the hope that this would result in their better integration into society. Eastern Europe and Western Europe operate with different concepts of citizenship because of their diverging historical traditions and current concerns. The concept of nation and who belong to the national community play a key role in the type of citizenship that they advocate.

Citizenship and its discontents: an Indian history

Breaking new ground in scholarship, Niraja Jayal writes the first history of citizenship in the largest democracy in the world-India. Unlike the mature democracies of the west, India began as a true republic of equals with a complex architecture of citizenship rights that was sensitive to the many hierarchies of Indian society. In this provocative biography of the defining aspiration of modern India, Jayal shows how the progressive civic ideals embodied in the constitution have been challenged by exclusions based on social and economic inequality, and sometimes also, paradoxically, undermined by its own policies of inclusion. Citizenship and Its Discontents explores a century of contestations over citizenship from the colonial period to the present, analyzing evolving conceptions of citizenship as legal status, as rights, and as identity. The early optimism that a new India could be fashioned out of an unequal and diverse society led to a formally inclusive legal membership, an impulse to social and economic rights, and group-differentiated citizenship. Today, these policies to create a civic community of equals are losing support in a climate of social intolerance and weak solidarity. Once seen by Western political scientists as an anomaly, India today is a site where every major theoretical debate about citizenship is being enacted in practice, and one that no global discussion of the subject can afford to ignore.

The ‘Impossible’ Community of the Citizens: Past and Present Problems

In the wake of previous reflections on the antinomies of citizenship—which derive both from the tension between an ‘insurrectional’ logic of equal liberty and a ‘constitutional’ project of building a community of citizens, and more recently from the conflict between (national) social citizenship and neoliberal forms of global governance—this paper focuses on problems of ‘representation’ and ‘agency’ linked to the idea of democratizing democracy itself. It will try in this sense to propose a more specific determination to the idea of an unfinished, although contingent, history of citizenship in the modern world.

The Good Citizen: A History of American Civic Life.

In 1996, less than half of all eligible voters bothered to vote. Fewer citizens each year follow government and public affairs regularly. Is popular sovereignty a failure? Not necessarily, argues Michael Schudson in this history of citizenship in America. This work sees American as evolving from a politics of assent in colonial times and 18th century, in which voting generally reaffirmed social hierarchy of community; to a politics of affiliation in 19th century, in which party loyalty was paramount for good citizen. Progressive reforms around turn of century reduced power of parties and increased role of education, making way for informed citizen, which remains ideal in American civil life at end of 20th century. A fourth model, the rights-bearing citizen, supplements informed citizen model and makes courthouse as well as voting booth a channel for citizenship. From Civil Rights movement on, rights-consciousness has thrust into everyday life. This message seeks to counter recent claims that American civic life has declined because participation in traditional civically oriented associations has declined.