Political Citizenship Research Articles

Political citizenship experiments: young people’s quotidian politics and (a)political subjectivities in East Asian liberal arts universities

ABSTRACT Higher education spaces are where ideas about citizenships, social norms, and values are mediated between state and youth citizens. In recent years, there has been a rise of new American-style liberal arts initiatives in East Asia, and yet little attention paid to the interface between liberal arts education and youth politics in this region. This article draws upon qualitative research conducted between 2017 and 2019 at two liberal arts universities in Shanghai and Singapore to examine how students fashion political subjectivities and meanings within the spaces that they live and learn in. It argues for a capacious conceptualisation of youth politics to analyse political subjectivities and sentiments as enmeshed in a relational field tied to wider-scale understandings of social movements and progressive ideals. To do so, conventional framings of universities as sites of political mobilisations need to be recast as sites of political citizenship experiments.

The Cracks of Legality and Documentation During Residence in the United States Before Deportation to Mexico

ABSTRACT The aim of the article is to analyze the relationship between the processes of deportation and the search for identity documents that the people interviewed in Tijuana carried out during their residence in the United States. Through the biographical method and with in-depth interviews, the main findings show that there are diverse and complex paths that migrants follow towards documentation or non-documentation in the United States that impact the forms of permanence and belonging in the different stages of life, the construction of social capital and affective and family networks, which after deportation will become fundamental factors of the conditions of reincorporation and the relationship with the State of the country of origin, which is manifested, mainly, through the control and surveillance over their bodies. All of this calls into question the hegemonic notion of political citizenship.

From earthquake victims to citizens: dependencies and precarious claims on the state in Azad Kashmir, Pakistan

ABSTRACT Based on ethnographic research after the 2005 earthquake in Pakistan-controlled Azad Kashmir, this article uses ‘disaster citizenship’ as a conceptual lens focusing on how people renegotiated their relationships with the state in the context of political interventions for reconstruction. The promise of relief encouraged the poor to make new claims on the state as disaster victims and needy citizens deserving material assistance. Given the social and political inequalities and limited democratic rights in post-disaster Azad Kashmir, people pursued a politics of citizenship that resisted both notions of liberal rights and neoliberal politics of self-responsibility, seeking instead rightful material dependence on the state. This dependence was ambivalent and precarious as the poor were often deprived of the material rights they claimed. Therefore, disaster citizenship remained deeply entangled with social dependencies, and people had to resort to favors, bribes, and submissive patron-client relationships to access state resources and counter their political neglect.

Propaganda and authority in José Ricardo Morales’ play Los culpables (1964): a connection with the Chilean context

ABSTRACT Throughout recent history, Chilean society has suffered severe socio-political events, such as the advent of authoritarian regimes like Pinochet’s dictatorship (1973–1989) disseminating propaganda to defend political power and control citizens. This article critically analyzes and discusses the issue of military regimes performing authoritarian power and political repression against their citizens, which, in turn, is connected with the Chilean context of the second half of the twentieth century and the first decades of the twenty-first century. Using a discourse analysis approach, this study examines José Ricardo Morales’ play Los culpables to critique the emergence of an authoritarian political-military system disseminating political montage against innocent citizens throughout the twentieth century. The analysis of the play reveals an avant la lettre discourse on authoritarianism, which is relevant to shed light on a new interpretation of the current use of propaganda and violence as a form of political action by the Chilean government.

Democratic Isolation, Thin Citizenship, and Insurrection: A Theory

Citizens are deeply cynical of the institutions and practice of representative democracy, resulting in increased isolation and extremism rather than nuanced public debate and democratic involvement. Three interrelated background conditions have led to this inevitable cynicism: the erasure of political citizenship by neoliberalism, the ability of technology (especially social media) to provide perfect information filtering, and the resulting fragmentation of civic experience. In this article, the authors outline a theory of democratic isolation that was exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, exploited by populist politicians, and ultimately led to the January 6th insurrection.

Land Rights, Industrialization, and Urbanization: China in Comparative Context.

What do studies of land rights in China contribute to the broader discipline of political science? First, the Chinese case challenges orthodox theories of secure, private property rights as a prerequisite for growth and sheds light on the distinctly fiscal roots of urban bias, a phenomenon pervasive in countries making the transition from agriculture to industry. Second, studies of land grabbing in the Chinese case provide a basis for comparisons of state-society relations in authoritarian vs. democratic regimes. While democratic institutions create more openings for aggrieved actors to organize and shape policy, ordinary citizens in both authoritarian and democratic regimes use protest in order to capture a greater share of rents from land. Third, land grabbing exacerbates inequalities; research on the Chinese case in comparative context shows that exclusionary modes of land ownership and limits on full social and political citizenship are mutually reinforcing across all types of regimes.

“The Land Belongs to Us”: Ethnic Claims Over Land During Zimbabwe’s Land Reforms

Zimbabwe’s radical Fast Track Land Reform Programme (FTLRP), implemented in 2000, diversified the agrarian structure by replacing a few large commercial farms with many smaller-scale farms. In understanding how the allocations evolved, studies have emphasized the effects of class, political party affiliation, gender, citizenship, and generation. However, the influence of ethno-regionalism or ethnicity on land access has been understudied. This article examines how ethnic mobilization structured the results of land distribution on the basis of survey data and other sources. Ethno-regionalism was inevitable in the small-scale A1 farms, since it mainly resettled peasants near their communal areas of origin. However, in the small capitalist A2 farms, ethnic tensions were perceived through exclusions of the “insiders,” as they were edged out of the allocations by the urban middle classes seeking accumulation opportunities in the context of an economic crisis. It is argued that if the latter trajectory persists, demand for land will continue to rise and fuel future land struggles, which might be colored by grievances of prior marginalization along ethnic lines.

Credibility, trust, and suspicion: Social relationships put to the test by Covid-19

The Covid-19 pandemic has generated a broad feeling of uncertainty in social relationships and has had a significant impact on different forms of trust and mistrust. In this contribution, the authors address some central questions: how did the medical emergency challenge interpersonal trust and the trust of citizens in science, politics and media? More generally, what is the destiny of trust in contemporary societies in this Covid-19 epoch and afterwards?

In defense of citizenship testing: a reply to Daniel Sharp

ABSTRACT I have argued that citizenship tests are not, in principle, unjust, were they to accurately test the acquisition of those particular aspects of local history and vocabulary necessary for participation in the local political community. Daniel Sharp disagrees, and argues that such tests are always unjust; they impose unjustifiable burdens against all and only migrants seeking admission to political citizenship. In this paper, I defend the possibility of a just test. I argue, first, that the burden on prospective citizens is not an undue or unjust one, were we to have some reason available to us by which that burden might be justified; and, second, that some such reason is available, given the relevance of local knowledge to political discourse – a relevance acknowledged in both current law and in theories of public reason.

Transparency of Political Parties in Spain and e-Accesibility for People with Disabilities

This article analyses the transparency webs of Spanish political parties in order to verify whether they are accessible to people with disabilities (hearing, visual, motor or cognitive) and also to establish which elements determine or condition, to a greater or lesser extent, the level of accessibility of these spaces. To this end, an evaluation model was generated (4 criteria, 10 variables and 31 indicators) inspired by the guidelines for the development of e-accessibility of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which was applied through the use of automatic and manual techniques for the web pages’ review. In addition, the Pearson Correlation Coefficient was used to determine the relationship between the degree of incidence or relationship of a series of factors (active transparency index, seniority, number of votes and number of deputies) on the level of accessibility of the transparency portals of the political parties. The research provides novel results, which will allow us to verify whether political parties manage inclusive transparency. That is, whether the websites, generated to comply with their legal obligations in terms of active advertising, favour the access of all people to e-information, including people with disabilities so that they can exercise their political citizenship on an equal footing with the rest.

Women in the legal professions: From the eradication of direct discrimination to the prevalence of “epistfemicide” and the glass ceiling

The article analyses the situation of women in the legal professions in Argentina, with special reference to the Argentine judicial system. It enquires into the context of the main socio-legal transformations that allowed Argentine women, initially, to access higher education, professional practice and political citizenship and, later, to access the rights that provide the framework to have a life free of gender-based discrimination, including the cluster of LGBTI+ rights. It describes the incorporation of gender mainstreaming into the legal and institutional universe of legal professions in recent decades. Lastly, it reflects on two dimensions of gender-based discrimination that still prevail: that of epistfemicide and that of the glass ceiling, and provides some keys to design strategies for its eradication.

The implications of COVID-19 for concepts and practices of citizenship

Based on a review of citizenship and citizen participation in politics and policy studies, this article reveals diverse concepts of citizens and citizenship and their changing roles within the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. It argues that the pandemic will result in bringing citizens back into the policy process, given that active participation of citizens in solving wicked social problems has been emphasised. Our results suggest that the pandemic will result in a return of public citizens as their voluntary, active participation and coproduction practices are expected to increase.

Guest Editor's Introduction

In this introduction to a special section on the philosophy of Bat-Ami Bar On, guest editor Court Lewis introduces Jennifer Kling’s article on equitable resettlement of refugees, Wim Laven’s article on meaningful political citizenship, and his own work on the analysis of the violent threat of citizen culture-warriors.

Daring to be Good

In this tribute to the life and work of philosopher Bat-Ami Bar On, I start by describing what daring to be good looks like. I present engagement with good and evil as a dilemma, one that I believe Bar On’s work overcomes. In the experience of evil in the world, people can make good decisions with incomplete information and uncertainty, or people can experience atrocity in bold relief and remain apathetic. We should understand the causes and motivations for both. I make suggestions about how we can bring these visions into the classroom with the critical, engaged pedagogies of Paolo Freire and David A. Kolb, concluding with a return to the idea of philosophy as political action. We are daring—courageous—when we endeavor to do good, especially when the outcome is uncertain and/or requires sacrifice. In the end, I summarize Bar On’s five-step method for confronting evil with meaningful political citizenship.

Danish satisfaction and Austrian discontent with their governments’ measures during the Covid-19 crisis: Explanations from a citizenship perspective

AbstractThe various interventions that governments took in the first wave of the Covid-19 outbreak impacted people severely. Given the low satisfaction with the government performance in Austria compared to Denmark, though both governments set out with a suppression strategy early on and were able to lower infection rates, we analyse the changes in civil, political and social citizenship and the governmental communicative practices during the first Covid response phase from March to August 2020. Employing a case-oriented qualitative comparison, we find that a combination of factors explains the different degree of satisfaction. In Austria, there was a combination of politics of fear, extensive and authoritarian regulations of civil citizenship, political citizenship was challenged and social citizenship undermined. In Denmark, an engaging and caring communicative strategy was employed, political citizenship was maintained and civil citizenship was curtailed less obstructively and was less policed. Social citizenship also was upheld for larger groups.

Staatsburgerschap en Nederlanderschap in Nederlands-Indië in de negentiende eeuw

Abstract The development of political citizenship in the Dutch East-Indies in the nineteenth century This article aims to analyze the political inequality between Dutch subjects in the Dutch East-Indies and the Netherlands based on developments in nineteenth century national citizenship debates and legislation. It argues that the juridization of the idea of political citizenship by J.R. Thorbecke in the 1840s and 1850s, led to the exclusion of the indigenous colonial population on the basis of descent (ius sanguinis). A close inspection of this principle shows how it was legitimized and implemented for the colonial territories on the basis of a ‘Dutch and European civilization criterion’ under which a series of other criteria – such as religion, skin color, education – could be used for political, cultural and economic exclusion. The ‘colonial differences’ that were gradually enshrined in legislation surrounding political citizenship in the nineteenth century would create a new layer of colonial hierarchy in the Dutch East-Indies.

The Indian Ocean as a Memory Space

Abstract This conversation with the author Neera Kapur-Dromson took place in Nairobi, Kenya, on 9th March 2018 during filming of the documentary film ‘Afrasian Memories in East Africa’ in which Neera Kapur-Dromson features. Neera Kapur-Dromson lives in France and Kenya. She is the author of the book ‘From Jhelum to Tana’. Here, Neera-Kapur Dromson reflects upon transregional interactions across the Indian Ocean as a memory space through life histories of various generations of her ancestors, various actors within the cosmopolitanisms of the Indian Ocean and her own experiences. She discusses how specific Indian Ocean societies experienced, were shaped by and negotiated multiple transformations related but not limited to nation-state politics, transoceanic trade, citizenship politics, colonial railway projects, identity politics, religion and transculturality as migrations, colonialism, and resultant interactions occurred across time and space. Her discussion visualises and demystifies the emergence of entangled Afrasian transregional spaces within the complexity of cosmopolitan societies across the Indian Ocean. The film was part of an international research project at Goethe University, Frankfurt, Germany, titled Africa’s Asian Options (AFRASO). It was launched during an AFRASO symposium titled “Afrasian Entanglements: Current Dynamics and Future Perspectives in India-Africa Relations” at the University of Mumbai in June 2018.

Evaluating Inclusive Transparency in Spanish Local Government

This article defines and analyzes a new concept: inclusive transparency. Specifically, it conducts a comparative study of transparency portals in twenty-five Spanish local councils, all of which occupy prime positions in Transparency International’s Index of Municipalities. The evaluation aims to establish their degree of compliance with Spanish and European regulations, ensuring website accessibility for people with disabilities. To this end, an evaluation model (composed of 4 criteria, 11 variables and 45 indicators) has been generated, taking inspiration from electronic accessibility guidelines, which have been applied using automatic techniques and transparency portal revision manuals. The results of the research allow verification of a positive correlation between the levels of active and inclusive transparency. In other words, whether in terms of active advertising benchmark municipalities design and manage their portals in ways which also guarantee, alongside all other citizens, the right of access for people with limited capacities (hearing, visual, mobile and cognitive) thereby enahancing the exercise of their political citizenship and their social integration.

Navigating stigma through everyday city-making: Gendered trajectories, politics and outcomes in the periphery of Lima

Over the last two decades, a growing body of scholars from the fields of psychology, sociology, law and public health have devoted their attention to examining how and why stigma operates as a form of discrimination, paying particular attention to ethno-racially stigmatised groups. However, less attention has focused on how ordinary women and men engaged in peripheral urbanisation processes are stigmatised through multiple material, social and political mechanisms and with a myriad of outcomes. Building on this literature, and drawing on the trajectories of a man and a woman living in the periphery of metropolitan Lima, I explore how stigmatisation shapes the daily lives of poor and impoverished citizens as they try to find a place in the city, and how and why their everyday practices contribute, or not, to the transformation of stigma traps. I argue that the everyday city-making practices of the ‘unsheltered’ are inextricably linked to the politics of bare citizenship. As those stigmatised become individualised, isolated and undermined, they also are deprived of being part of a collective experience, and are deeply challenged to reclaim their agency as entitled citizens. The wider the range of stigmatisation mechanisms at work, the more difficult it is for those subjected to stigma to counteract them, as they become disadvantaged in a broad range of domains: from social relations, to tenure security, access to services and infrastructure, livelihood opportunities, and psychological and physical wellbeing. I further contend that a deep examination of the material world – the dwelling, the neighbourhood and the city – and of the practices and imaginaries that produce this material world, opens a window into the micro-politics of how stigma is negotiated, apportioned and resisted in the everyday lives of those who are politically and materially unsheltered.

“DEAR CONGRESS, JUST PLAY DEAD”: TIKTOK’S ABSURD GUIDE TO SURVIVING #LOCKDOWN

This paper examines how young TikTok creators enact strategies of playfulness and absurdity in response to gun violence and trauma. Through a ludic-carnivalesque reading of young people’s irreverent engagement with school shootings, we demonstrate how youth use TikTok to reclaim emotional control of uncontrollable situations. We situate our analysis of playful #schoolshooting videos as part of an imitation public that is constituted through practices of mimesis, replication, and imitation. However, we broaden our focus to consider the latent political potential of the publics that memetic practices create. Within this framework we ask: What discourses and shared practices emerge through playful #schoolshooting memes on TikTok and what are the implications for the everyday politics of youth citizenship? Our methodology consists of two phases conducted over an 18-month period. The first phase of analysis, performed August–December 2019, relies on collated systemic searches for specific hashtags and sounds that young people use to memeify school shootings. In the second phase, we identified two seemingly unrelated events that young people discursively and memetically linked to school shootings: COVID-19 lockdowns from March-May 2020 and the storming of the U.S. Capitol building by radicalized Trump supporters on January 6, 2021. By analyzing these practices through the lens of the ludic-carnivalesque, patterns reveal the ways young people enact strategies to demarcate boundaries, articulate cogent critiques of policies and policymakers that do not prevent school shootings, and to turn painful and traumatic realities into a fun and harmless Bakhtinian carnival.