Modern Citizenship Research Articles

Is citizenship like feudalism? An egalitarian defense of bounded citizenship

ABSTRACT This article examines the provocative analogy between feudalism and modern citizenship in Joseph Carens’s case for open borders. The analogy raises a distributive objection against bounded citizenship: modern citizenship is an inherited status assigned by birth and is attached to great advantages or disadvantages, and states reinforce these objectionable inequalities by restricting people’s mobility across borders. I argue the analogy is misleading. The case for bounded citizenship does not stand or fall with feudalism. One can be committed to the value of equality and defend bounded citizenship while rejecting feudalism. A key aspiration of the modern liberal ideal of citizenship is to recognize and promote the equality of citizens. One way to promote the equal standing of citizens is to respect their right of collective self-determination, including the right to make decisions about matters of immigration and membership in their political community. A commitment to equality is compatible with bounded citizenship if we adopt certain qualifications on the right of collective self-determination, including the duty to remedy historical injustice, the duty to extend membership to resident noncitizens, the duty to take in refugees and other necessitous migrants, and the duty to alleviate global poverty through development assistance.

The value of ‘ummah’: racio-religious capital and Rohingya refugees’ world-building

Malaysia, a Malay-Muslim majority country with Islam as its state religion, seemed to offer a sanctuary for Rohingya Muslim refugees. However, Malaysia’s refusal to sign the 1951 United Nations Refugee Convention denied refugees the promise of legal-juridical citizenship. The COVID-19 pandemic witnessed Malaysian Muslims’ increasing hostility towards Rohingya refugees, further unsettling the ‘one-ness’ of the ummah or the ecumenical Muslim community. Drawing on ethnographic approaches, I propose the concept ‘racio-religious capital’ to render legible the unequal sociopolitical structures that noncitizen Muslims inhabit in modern citizenship regimes. I take racio-religious capital as a form of symbolic capital and argue that it is not religion that is embedded in racism, but that race is itself embedded within a religious moral economy. Possessing racio-religious capital in Malaysia allows Rohingya refugees to inhabit multiple sociopolitical and economic spaces – spaces that are not always limited by their legal status. However, one’s claim to racio-religious capital is still premised on who the refugee is, demonstrating the intertwining of religious moral economy with the modern nation-state. Attending to the fragmented ummah together with Rohingya attempts to claim belonging to the religious community thus offers a site to unravel the intertwined workings of race and religion beyond the West.

The necropolitics of statelessness: coloniality, citizenship, and disposable lives

ABSTRACT This article critically interrogates the unequal structures of life-saving inclusion and life-shortening exclusion that underpin modern citizenship regimes. By connecting the coloniality of citizenship framework with critical and reflexive migration studies on the nexus of death, migration, and citizenship, it introduces the concept of the necropolitics of statelessness. Bringing the works of Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, Achille Mbembe, Orlando Patterson, Sylvia Wynter, and Frantz Fanon into dialogue with each other and with the work of Caribbean human rights professionals and activists, the article captures how the racialized and gendered exclusion from national membership produces deadly effects. To illustrate and support this argument, two interconnected case studies from the Caribbean are spotlighted: the 1937 Parsley Massacre, which targeted Haitians and those presumed to be of Haitian descent in the Dominican Republic, and the 2013 La Sentencia ruling, which rendered Dominicans of Haitian descent stateless and disposable. The necropolitics of statelessness is thus conceptualized as an extreme manifestation of the coloniality of citizenship, highlighting how colonial histories of violence and their present-day legacies perpetuate conditions where stateless individuals – whose very humanity is systematically denied – are subject to sovereign death-making power.

MOTIVATION: DOES IT MAKE LANGUAGE LEARNING MORE EFFECTIVE?

Proficiency in foreign languages is an indispensable skill for those living in the 21st century, as it enables individuals to engage in global communication, access diverse cultures, and adapt to an increasingly interconnected world. In today’s Ukraine, English is in great demand. However, despite the awareness of the importance of foreign languages for modern citizenship, the boom in learning English, and particular successes achieved, Ukrainian university students’ proficiency in English leaves much to be desired. To change the situation for the better, language teachers are looking for hidden reserves and resources to make their teaching and, thus, learning more effective. One of them is student motivation to learn languages. In the present article, the authors analyze motivation, its types and kinds, reflect on their experience of teaching English at Ukrainian universities, and focus on factors that boost student motivation. In order to understand what motivates their students and how well they, teachers, are informed about their students’ motivation factors to study foreign languages, an instrument was created and employed – a Questionnaire for students. The Questionnaire examines the factors that influence student motivation as well as the problems and difficulties that students face and experience in the process of learning. The Questionnaire and its results help reflect on and assess teaching, see what teachers may be proud of and what should be changed and improved, as well as what measures to be taken to raise student motivation. By reflecting on the results of the Questionnaire, insights into teaching practices can be gained, allowing for the identification of successful strategies and areas requiring improvement. This reflection informs targeted actions to enhance student motivation and create a more engaging and supportive learning environment.

Citizenship and NIMBYism: Identities at the Juncture of Homelessness, Place, and Ideology

Not in my back yard (NIMBY)ism is a form of anti-homeless discrimination intended to displace people experiencing homelessness from urban spaces. While research on anti-homeless discrimination is abundant, the Canadian literature has yet to explore the political dimensions of this type of discrimination. International researchers have studied the connections between homelessness and citizenship, and we take up this theoretical work in this study. We present interview data from people experiencing homelessness in three mid-sized cities in Ontario. Using an analytical framework comprised of citizenship studies, urban geography, and sociological research on stigmatization, we assess participants’ perspectives of their respective communities, their understanding of the typology of homelessness, and how they enact particular kinds of public behaviours. We find that the participants’ public behaviours adapt to the place identity of their community to avoid stigmatization. The participants’ public behaviours are illustrative of how modern citizenship has been reconfigured under capitalism.

Iglesia católica y catolicismo en la construcción de la ciudadanía en Chihuahua, 1915-1931

The contribution of the Catholic Church to the democratization process is recognized in the second half of the XXth century, however it existed even in earlier times. Mexico provides an example of this early role of the Catholic Church in the process of citizen formation and democratization, during the long «liberal» dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz. Here, the performance of the Catholic Church in this sense will be examined in a regional space, the state of Chihuahua, from the end of the Porfiriato to the consolidation of the post-revolutionary regime. The thesis defended here is that the Church and Catholic civil society acted in the sense of promoting the emergence of modern citizenship and democratic participation in regional politics, acting as a brake on the anti-democratic and totalitarian drifts that were taking shape. in the structures and the new political class of the post-revolutionary regime.

Towards a new theory of citizenship: migration rights in the chilean case

Introduction: This article investigates how migration processes impact human rights and redefine the conception of citizenship, using a qualitative case study based on the Chilean experience. Methodology: It applies a qualitative, descriptive and explanatory approach, analysing from a historical-theoretical perspective the contributions of classical sociologists on citizenship rights and how these have been influenced by migration. Analysis and Results: The analysis demonstrates that the traditional notion of citizenship, centred on residence, national identity and legal guarantees, is insufficient in the current context. The findings suggest that modern citizenship must transcend simple national membership and political participation, encompassing a broader spectrum of social and human dimensions. Conclusions: The study concludes that citizenship should not be viewed in a reductionist or exclusively legal manner, but as a multidimensional concept that needs to be rethought to reflect the realities of global migration and cultural interconnectedness. It highlights the need for a more inclusive and adaptive approach to citizenship in the contemporary world.

Public Transport in Pre-Apartheid Literary Johannesburg: Between Progress and Oppression

ABSTRACT A close reading of literary representations of Johannesburg’s public transport in the early decades of the 20th century gives insight into the intricate way in which freedom, mobility, and narratives of progressive modernity interlink with urban mobility regimes of public transportation. The literary representations mark public transport simultaneously as progressive and oppressive, depending on access. Where access is denied, public vehicles become part of an oppressive racist mobility regime and exclude individuals from formative experiences of collective belonging. The present analysis engages with selected concepts from the field of mobility studies, namely Cresswell’s thoughts on the relationship of mobility and modern citizenship, Bissell’s observations regarding ‘mobile collectives’, and the idea of ‘throwntogetherness’ by the social geographer Massey. These will be used to analyze the gatekeeping function of public transport in representations of early Johannesburg, where black, male, urban subjecthood is negotiated against white urban modernity.

The nomos of citizenship: migrant rights, law and the possibility of justice

Superficially, citizenship appears relatively simple: a legal status denoting political membership. However, critical citizenship studies scholars suggest that citizenship is first and foremost a political practice. When non-citizens, such as irregularised migrants, constitute themselves as citizens through their actions, irrespective of legal status, these practices of citizenship have transformational potential because they are extra-legal. Yet, there is an ambivalence here: rights-claiming migrants tend to frame their key demands within the terms of the law often by calling for the regularisation of their status. This article addresses this ambivalence by adopting a ‘deconstructive method’ to investigate the legal dimensions of citizenship as sites of theoretical and political intervention. It is argued that practices of rights-claiming by irregularised migrants are important to grasp because they mobilise the paradoxes inherent to the fact that universal rights are enshrined in the constitutional texts of modern citizenship in order to generate new legal meanings and horizons of justice. This hypothesis is explored through a series of illustrative examples of rights-claiming taking place within and beyond the formal confines of legal orders. In so doing, the article sets out a novel conceptual framework for analysing how migrants’ claims to justice strategically negotiate citizenship in its legal form.

Plantation Logics, Citizenship Violence and the Necessity of Slowing Down

Plantation Logics, Citizenship Violence and the Necessity of Slowing Down Based on the work of anti-colonial thinker Anton de Kom, this article reveals the formative violence of modern citizenship in the Dutch colonial context of Suriname and its inheritances in Europe. The article firstly discusses how Anton de Kom’s work, based on the experiences of slavery and indenture, deconstructs universalist-inclusive narratives about the law and citizenship. From the lens of what I term Citizenship Violence, the racialised socio-legal binary embedded in modernity that De Kom’s seminal work We Slaves of Suriname points to will be analysed. Secondly, the normalisation of capitalism in post-independent Suriname will be discussed. Thirdly, attention is drawn to how De Kom’s work can be made relevant for contesting the coloniality of Europe’s citizenship and migration regime. Lastly, a pressing contemporary afterlife of racial slavery and capitalism in terms of the omnipresent self-exhausting neo-liberal ethics will be discussed. Pleading for an ethics of ‘slowing down’, I ask how Anton de Kom’s anti-colonial and anti-capitalist critique can be translated into a decolonial critique of the neo-liberal subject and the logics of capitalist modernity in which it is embedded.

Struggles for the defence of territories and decolonial politics in Southern Chile

ABSTRACT This article explores the emergence of decolonial political subjectivities in the struggle for the defence of territories and against extractivism in Greater Concepción, Chile. Drawing on a dialogue between decolonial and feminist scholarship, Latin American political ecology, and the praxis of Chilean socioenvironmental movements, we argue that the struggles for the defence of territories in Abya Yala cannot be understood through the lens of modern citizenship, as they are embracing territorialized, racialised, and feminized struggles that challenge the ontological and epistemological foundations of capitalist coloniality. This contribution is informed by participatory action research, militant ethnography, and a commitment to ‘sentipensar’ the defence of Mother Earth. Our findings suggest that the feminization of the struggle, embracing of ancestral ontologies and cosmologies, and decolonization of knowledge production are three features currently shaping decolonial political subjectivities in southern Chile, opening radical possibilities of transformation.

Neither global nor local: Reorienting the study of Islam in South Asia

Neither global nor local: Reorienting the study of Islam in South Asia

Plato’s Crito and the Contradictions of Modern Citizenship

Citizenship, with its presumptive rights, privileges and obligations, has been a fundamental challenge confronting the state since the classical Greek era and the transformation and reorganization of the centralized medieval Holy Roman Empire after the Thirty Years War. With the changing patterns of state formation from the large and unwieldy empires organized into absolutist states to the more nationalistic/linguistic formations a recurring issue has been the constitutional or legal guarantees of the rights of the citizen as well as his/her obligations to the state. This paper engaged in a nuanced study of Plato’s Crito as it relates the contradictions of citizenship as social membership and as participation in the modern state. The primary objective was to adapt Socrates’ experience to discuss the citizenship challenge in the modern state and driven by the research question on the implications of the emergence of new challenges to the contradictions of citizenship. Social contract theory by Thomas Hobbes served as the theoretical framework. Data collection was mainly from secondary sources such as academic journals, books, newspapers and internet sources, and data analysis based on the content and textual analysis of extant and relevant literature on the subject matter. Conclusively, the study realized that citizenship in the modern state is determined largely by the protection, in various ramifications, given to the citizen by the state, but that given a change in the circumstances many would decline to die for the state. Accordingly, it recommended a mutualism in the relationship and responsibilities between that state and the citizen of the modern state, particularly the underdeveloped states of the Third World.

Victorian Humanity in Colonial Korea, Where Asians Did Not See Themselves as the Other

This article reconsiders the racial hierarchies rendering the nonwhite race as the Other in Anglo-American Victorian studies by examining the case of colonial Korea, where both the colonizer and the colonized were people of color. In colonial Korea, reading Victorian and Edwardian literature enabled Koreans to find an alternative humanity beyond the imperial Japanese modernity that stigmatized them. I briefly review how Asian critics located in colonial Korea read Samuel Smiles's Self-Help and Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles. I suggest that their findings included the idea of humanity as a liberal, autonomous self and an environmental subject, both of which challenge the Japanese imposition of modern citizenship named as hwang-gook-shin-min (皇國臣民). I argue that such a response to Victorian literature from a locational perspective not affected by the hierarchical binaries of race or empire suggests that we as contemporary Victorianists (located around the globe) consider “transimperial” solidarity to explore a connection with others outside our immediate national community regardless of racial difference. It also urges us to promote “planetarity” in our reading to embrace willful dislocation accepting heterogeneous locationalities against homogenizing globalization.

Monumental Bodies

Ethiopian artist Dawit Abebe’s Jerba paintings were first exhibited in Addis Ababa in 2015. Jerba, a word that means “back” or “background,” is a series of mixed media and acrylic paintings concerned with historical memory and the political and cultural accounts attending to that memory. Abebe’s jerbas explore the contemporary predicaments of Ethiopia, where ethnic tensions have proliferated and where the trademarks of the human body are objectified to one’s ethnic identity rather than to the body’s lived experience as a human being. The evocative power of the composition, texture, and detail of Abebe’s paintings in representing the human image is exquisite while adding a conceptual component that conjures up, for instance, notions of memory and nostalgia, conflicting imaginations of the nation, and the place of Ethiopia in the passage of history. While the Jerba series skillfully navigates the perspective of the past and its remnants in the interpretation of the present, the visual metaphors connect personally with the spectator. Seemingly faint voices transpire from individual panels, and sounds communicate with the viewer through particular stories. Likewise, impressions of silence also materialize, as if the jerbas are telling the viewer that there are histories and stories one cannot comprehend. Abebe’s critical engagement through these works responds to the changing pressures of time and place, particularly the ambiguities of modern citizenship in the Ethiopian state.

Daniel Defoe on Naturalization

Abstract This essay explores the connection in Daniel Defoe’s writing between naturalization as a civic concept and naturalization as an epistemological or literary-critical process. For Defoe, the incorporation of new subjects was a moral project that entailed the literary interpellation of a more productive, tolerant and empowered populace. A history of his efforts to encourage immigration by broadening access to legal citizenship provides, then, not just crucial insight into his view of the national political community but points to the role his satire, journalism and novels might play in bringing subjects together in its formation. In pursuit of this history, I trace Defoe’s approach to naturalization to The True-born Englishman (1700), the poem that established his reputation as an advocate for immigration reform. I then track Defoe’s activism in favour of The Foreign Protestants Naturalization Act (7 Anne c. 5) before its passage in March 1709 and after its repeal in 1711 (10 Anne c. 9), as debate turned to the fate of successive alien populations: Huguenot and Palatine refugees and England’s Jews. These debates provide an important new context for Defoe’s final novel, The Fortunate Mistress [Roxana] (1724). Attention to the ways Defoe deployed poetry and prose fiction during them reveals how questions of admission and assimilation underpinned his polemical strategy as a popular author and signalled the importance of his work to the history of modern citizenship.

“If God Is with Us, Who Can Be against Us?”

This article puts the analytic of “indigenous cosmopolitics” (as used by Mario Blaser and Marisol de la Cadena) in dialogue with the anthropology of Christianity through an ethnography of a dam construction and resettlement project in Sarawak, Malaysian Borneo. Drawing on long-term fieldwork in the area, I explore how both God and Christian ethnotheology became imbricated with a group of indigenous villagers’ legal struggle to resist the scheme and the template of progressive, modern citizenship bound up with it. I suggest that the villagers’ efforts constituted a form of Christian cosmopolitics that sought to disrupt Sarawakian politics as usual by bringing a previously inconceivable outcome—and a different way of being different—into being. Their eventual victory and its aftermath, however, raise critical questions about the limits and untapped possibilities of “cosmopolitical” proposals, as well as about contemporary anthropology’s own ethicopolitical approaches to difference.

Managing Our Relationship with Free-Roaming Cats in Zoopoland

Abstract Debate over the proper management of our relationship with free-roaming cats has escalated based on concerns over impacts on biodiversity and public health, with some calling for their eradication. It is often waged between animalists, primarily focused on the interests of the individual animal, and traditional conservationists, primarily focused on preserving native species and biodiversity. An ethical paradigm that accounts for the interests of all animals and nature to develop a management scheme that promotes interspecies justice is needed. I propose the political theory of animal rights developed in Zoopolis as a fruitful ethical paradigm. Grounded in modern citizenship theory, it defines universal negative rights due to all sentient beings and positive rights due to them based on our relationships to them as citizens, denizens, or foreigners. Application of this political theory in a modern fictional jurisdiction, Zoopoland, is explored to develop a just management strategy for free-roaming cats.

اليات تفعيل الديمقراطية التعاونية لبناء المواطنة الصالحة في العراق

إنَّ مشاركة المجتمع تعد الحجر الاساس لفكرة المواطنة الحديثة وبذلك فأن الديمقراطية التعاونيةيساهم فيها المواطنون بصفة مباشرة في تسيير شؤونهم العامة فهي تسمح بالمشاركة مباشرة في رسمالسياسات العامة فتحول المواطن من سلبي له الحق في الانتخاب الى ايجابي يشارك في صنع القرار،فالديمقراطية الناجحة تقوم على الحوار المستمر والمتبادل بين مختلف الفئات والمصالح في المجتمع حولالقرارات الرئيسة والخطوات التنفيذية، وذلك من شأنه ان يساهم في ايجاد حكومات جيدة وفاعلة تساهم فيتعزيز الرفاه الاجتماعي بخلق علاقات جيدة بين المواطنين وبناء مجتمع واع يتميز بروح الجماعة، واشراكهم فيعملية صنع واتخاذ القرارات واحترام تنوع المجتمع.

Towards de-Westernism in citizenship studies: implications from China

ABSTRACT Modern citizenship is Western-centric, featuring Weberianism and Marshallianism as core paradigms. That orthodox view obscures the diversity of citizenship. Over the past three decades, three trends in citizenship studies have challenged this ‘orthodox consensus’: the diversification of the subjects and contents of citizenship rights; ‘citizenship after Orientalism’, which advocates bringing oriental societies into citizenship studies; and ‘acts of citizenship’, which shifts the core of citizenship from rights to acts. Sharing ‘de-Westernism’ as a goal, these approaches promote the study of citizenship from a wider range of perspectives. The Chinese experience of citizenship shows that de-Westernism needs to be taken further. We need to adopt even more diverse perspectives to further de-Westernise and enrich our understanding of citizenship. In this paper, ‘contextualism’ and the ‘tree of citizenship’ are advocated as more strongly de-Westernised perspectives.