Political Citizenship Research Articles

Beyond political citizenship: marriage migrant women’s voting practices in South Korea

ABSTRACT This study examined the voting practices of Filipina marriage migrants in South Korea. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 66 women, we examine marriage migrant women’s voting through the lens of cultural and performative citizenship. We focus on the gendered and ethnicized integration of marriage migrants into Korean families and in the larger society and how their marginalised social position shapes the women’s voting practices. We identified three voting patterns – dependent, independent, and transitioned – that vary in their degrees of cultural and performative citizenship. We also unpack the characteristics or factors associated with each voting pattern that facilitated marriage migrants’ ability to engage in performative citizenship; that is, to contest their marginalised status and exercise greater autonomy in their candidate choices. Our findings illustrate how viewing immigrant voting through the perspectives of cultural and performative citizenship provides nuanced insights about the meaning and practice of voting beyond its intrinsic function of political representation.

Sorting Out the Mixed Economy: The Rise and Fall of Welfare and Developmental States in the Americas

Sorting Out the Mixed Economy: The Rise and Fall of Welfare and Developmental States in the Americas

Constructing Conflict: The Politics of Job Creation Policy, Precarious Work, and Citizenship in South Africa’s Construction Industry

The paper examines the politics of state job creation policy in South Africa. We focus on the construction industry, which is a major sector for job creation policy, especially through a large scale public works programme. We argue that, while the creation of jobs is framed by government as a path towards dignity and social inclusion for poor and unemployed citizens, the precarious reality of low-wage work in the construction industry undermines the potential pro-social effects of wage employment. Beneficiaries of job creation policy often experience frustration and alienation, and the construction sites on which they work are often marked by conflict and disruption. We describe two different forms that this conflict takes, on the one hand demanding wage work as a citizenship right, on the other eschewing generalized citizenship claims in favour of particularistic and exclusionary demands for jobs based on localized identities. These seemingly contradictory but intertwined types of conflict show the complexity of the relationship between state job creation and citizenship rights in an industry and an economy defined by precarious forms of employment.

Oppressive Energopolitics in Africa’s Last Colony: Energy, Subjectivities, and Resistance

AbstractFocusing on energy developments and energy infrastructure in Moroccan‐occupied Western Sahara, this article engages with the politics of energy and energy citizenship in situations of conflict, authoritarianism and settler colonialism. We contribute to the body of research on how energy infrastructure, including renewable energy infrastructure, furthers (neo)colonial social and political power imbalances. Using Dominic Boyer’s concept of energopower, which allows us to explore how energy is used to govern populations and produce subjectivities, we argue that a colonial and oppressive energoregime will produce subjects hostile to itself. Putting colonised people’s lived experiences and perceptions of an oppressive energy system centre stage, we further research on the interrelationship between energy infrastructure, citizenship and identity by showing how an energoregime can inadvertently foster a rejection of certain citizenships and national identities in favour of others. Our data are generated using ethnography and semi‐structured interviews with Saharawis living in Moroccan‐occupied Western Sahara.

Family Separation and Everyday (In)Security in the Lives of Unaccompanied Refugee Minors

This article examines the impact of family separation on the organization of everyday security among unaccompanied refugee minors living in Finland. By focusing on the concept of everyday (in)security, this article analyses the consequences of the recent political decisions on young refugees’ family connections. The data in this study includes interviews among 16 Afghani, Iraqi, Ethiopian and Somali refugees who have attained residency in Finland and who are attempting to bring family members to the country via family reunification. The data is analysed using categorization analysis. I found four main ways though which young refugees establish security in their often insecure lives. First, the youth constructed collective identities which connected their lives with their transnational families and gave a purpose in life. Second, they turned to religion and created ontological securities. Third, the youth wanted to live ‘ordinary’ lives. Fourth, they also engaged in enacting political citizenship.

Ciudadanía y transformación social: Nuevos discursos y acción contra el cambio climático

Climate change has been at the centre of the environmental debate for three decades. Despite international agreements, humanity has not been able to stop the global increase in temperature. The coronavirus crisis has relegated the climate emergency debate to the background, although the connections between climate change and the pandemic prove that we have many reasons to act for climate. Public policies have favoured regulations, market instruments, and modernisation strategies that consolidate a sort of green capitalism that aggravates and depoliticises the problem. The fight against climate change needs a new approach based on citizen politics and social transformation.

Public toilets for women: how female municipal councillors expanded the right to the city in Sweden, c. 1910–1925

ABSTRACT This article shows that women’s formal political citizenship is intertwined with the right to the city. Using Carol Bacchi’s ‘What’s the Problem Represented to be’ approach, we study how female municipal councillors argued for more public toilets in Sweden's three largest cities. In their motions, the lack of public conveniences was mainly related to a binary discourse of gender, and arguments referring to biological needs of the female body and women as mothers proved more successful than the argument that uneven access to public toilets was an example of gender inequality. Class-based arguments against fees were largely ignored when the motions were transformed from potentially contentious political issues into technical issues of urban planning and municipal utilities. However, the material effects of the policies—public toilets placed mainly in working-class areas—led to an extension of possible radiuses of movement within the city for women, and perhaps especially working-class women.

The Politics of Azusa: Transforming Citizenship at the Margins

ABSTRACT The Azusa Street revival of 1906 is one of the most important revivals in early Pentecostalism and offers resources in rethinking the Christian political imagination. I want to offer sustained reflection of this revival, as it resignifies the nature of what is political. I argue that Azusa embodied a non-statist idea of the citizen, encouraging radically inclusive practices of political belonging. Members of Azusa did not trust the institutional logic of the modern state, as Azusa believed that white supremacy over-determined the American state. This paper explores how Azusa challenged American democracy and its statist idea of the citizen-subject, as this political idea created the very conditions of black subjugation. Examining how Azusa rejects the statist idea of the citizen, this paper reflects on questions of the democratic, moral and political agency, citizenship, and political belonging. This paper poses questions such as: Why is it essential to foreground forms of political agency that are not in service to the state? What is the shape of the democratic in light of non-statist political practices? What does Azusa’s ecclesial life teach us about political practices of human belonging?

Citizen Wayn? The Struggle of Parliament in Contemporary Jordan

Abstract This article is part of the Special Issue “Parliaments in the Middle East and North Africa: A Struggle for Relevance.” Because the politics of citizenship is felt at all stages of the parliamentary process, the very question of parliamentary relevance itself cannot be answered without reference to the citizenry. That Jordan’s citizenship regime influences and impedes parliamentary politics is explored through two cases. The first being decentralization, understood as a relocating of tasks, decision-making and mandates from a centralized location to different, more localized levels. The second study focuses on the uprisings occurring from May 30, 2018 against the draft domestic tax law introduced to parliament by the government of then-Prime Minister Hani al-Mulki. Both cases are implicated in the Kingdom’s parliamentary politics, and their selection is a conscious move away from election analysis. Taken together they elucidate how citizenship is a key battleground on which any future emancipation/development of parliament will be fought.

Seeing Like a State, Enacting Like an Algorithm: (Re)assembling Contact Tracing and Risk Assessment during the COVID-19 Pandemic

As states increasingly use algorithms to improve the legibility of society, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic, it is common for concerns about the expanding power of the algorithm or the state to be raised in a deterministic manner. However, how are the algorithms for states’ legibility projects enacted, contested, and reconfigured? Drawing on interviews and media data, this study fills this gap by examining Health Code (jiankangma), the Chinese contact tracing and risk assessment algorithmic system that serves as the COVID-19 health passport. I first explore the intensive and invisible work and infrastructures that enact and stabilize Health Code’s sociotechnical assemblage. I then show how this assemblage is frequently challenged and destabilized by errors, breakdowns, and exclusions. Facing unintended engagements from heterogeneous social actors, local interests, and power hierarchies, Health Code reassembles into multiple and contradictory assemblages at different periods and social localities. Finally, I examine how people game and bypass the algorithm’s surveillance with their agencies. Recognizing this messiness and heterogeneity contributes to a more nuanced and realistic understanding of states’ use of algorithms, including the risks. Doing so also urges us to rethink the politics of citizenship and inequality in the digital age beyond inclusion.

CosmopolitanismsNegative Cosmopolitanism: Culture and Politics of World Citizenship after Globalization

CosmopolitanismsNegative Cosmopolitanism: Culture and Politics of World Citizenship after Globalization

National Penalties Reversed: The Local Politics of Citizenship and Politician Responsiveness to Immigrants

Local politicians can play an important role in promoting citizenship, but their helpfulness varies considerably across local councils. Do politicians discriminate against immigrants seeking to nat...

Navigating in-between the EU and Russia

ABSTRACT This Special Issue examines the ways states, regions, de facto states and local actors situated in-between the EU and Russia cope with the competitive external pressure coming from the two regional powers. States, diverse groups and actors in this overlapping neighborhood navigate between varied economic and political integration projects and between different values, ideas and visions of society. This introductory article, first, contextualizes this “inside-out” perspective by presenting the nature of the current EU and Russian projects vis-à-vis the region, how they clash and how this puts regional actors in a state of “in-betweenness”. Then, it unpacks the concept of “navigation” by outlining the ways local actors at different levels of domestic governance studied in the contributions to this Special Issue respond to and manage areas of contestation relating to issues such as citizenship politics, minority rights, and political and trade strategies. The role of elite agency serves as a central thread running across the contributions. Caught “in-between” Russia and the EU, domestic actors, be it at national or sub-national level, navigate while adjusting to the external pressures, negotiating and appropriating external discourses. In the process, constraints are often turned into opportunities for the local actors to exploit.

Los contornos federales de la soberanía popular. La reforma electoral de Sáenz Peña y los ciudadanos de los Territorios Nacionales

The citizens settled in the National Territories could not participate in national elections for almost the whole history of these spaces. A conventional approach has taken this situation as the sign of a deprivation of political citizenship that would reflect the restrictive nature of the political order imposed on the Territories. Nothing would have changed with the passing of the Saenz Pena Law, which would have kept the settlers of the Territories excluded from citizenship.However, Saenz Pena’s electoral reform did include the Territories and their inhabitants. Even if they remained without the possibility of voting in federal elections, it was not due to any attribution of political incapacity but to the legal status of such spaces. By studying published and unpublished documents, this paper not only questions that traditional interpretation but also aims to depict the way the principle of popular sovereignty was mediated by the federal frame of the representative regime.

Precarious Citizens: Iraqi Jews and the Politics of Belonging

AbstractThis article examines the politics and practices of citizenship among Iraqi Jews, using one woman's life history to explore the dynamics of exile and belonging. In 1950–1951, the Iraqi government issued a law that stripped Iraqi Jews who had migrated to Israel of their citizenship. Iraqi citizenship laws and directives did not only define citizens and noncitizens but also emerged as a venue of internal differentiation. Ruling elites facilitated political closures and constructed internal others within the very category of the Iraqi citizen, whereby practices of denaturalization and deportation of citizens became forms of state and colonial governmentality. In Israel, Iraqi Jews faced systems of racialization since their Arabness was associated with the enemy and racial inferiority. Iraqi Jews found themselves entangled in structures of power that rendered their Arab Jewishness an unintelligible category. However, Iraqi Jews resisted these conditions of dispossession and exclusion, and asserted a notion of Iraqi citizenship based on political activism with the aim of writing themselves onto the Iraqi social and political landscapes. Their political activism—whether in Iraq, Israel, or the diaspora—became sites of resistance that carved new ideas about community and undermined formal and legal definitions of citizenship. [citizenship laws, exclusion, legal violence, exile]

Bare life production and the author's criticism in the short story "Manuel" by Seno Gumira Ajidarma: the study of agamben’s sociology of literature

The short story “Manuel” written by Seno Gumira Ajidarma set in the Santa Cruz incident in Dili (1991), raised humanitarian issues in the relation to state power. East Timor citizens lost their human rights because of the Indonesian military invasion of their territory, and were in a homo sacer or bare life situation. This research uses the theory of political philosophy developed by Giorgio Agamben. The method used is descriptive qualitative. The research questions that are trying to be answered: first, how does the state impose the state of exception so that it raises bare life in short story “Manuel?”; and second, how does the author form of criticism through the short story “Manuel?” towards the New Order citizenship politics? The finding of this study are: first, First, the motive for the application of the state of exception is using the pretext of integration, anticipation of communism, development, and agreements related to the exploration of Timor Gap; and secondly, criticism of the state was conveyed through the speeches of the figure of Manuel, borrowing the speech of East Timor activists, and the adoption of discourse of resistance to the Indonesia military. However, this strategy has an impact on the originality of criticism which deserves to be questioned again.

Homeland Political Trust Among Emigrants: The Case of Finland-Swedes

How does emigrating affect one's political trust for their native country's political and state institutions? This question is increasingly relevant as a result of growing migration in the wake of globalization and the willingness to widen electoral laws and channels for participation to also include emigrated citizens in homeland politics. Despite the research conducted on homeland politics and voting from abroad in political science, the question of homeland political trust among emigrants has not been given sufficient attention. This could be seen as surprising from the perspective of trust research, which has exhaustively analyzed political and social trust. This paper seeks to map the effect of migration on political trust by comparing the trust in Finnish political and state institutions of emigrated Swedish-speaking Finns, also known as Finland-Swedes, and Finland-Swedes living in Finland. The Finland-Swedes are a resourceful minority with a sizeable diaspora, which in relative terms is comparable to nations with a renowned diaspora. The paper analyzes the political trust of migrants and residents with two high quality random surveys and using two methods, linear regression and propensity score matching, with analysis of average treatment effects to counter potential endogeneity of political trust and migrating citizens. The analyses show emigrants have on average significantly higher homeland political trust. Comparing the linear regression analysis and the average treatment effects after matching we get similar results, although the linear regression analysis that controls for potentially endogenous factors seems to somewhat exaggerate the effect of migration.

Place attachment and political orientation: The case of localists in Hong Kong

Abstract This study extends the application of place attachment, which is widely used in environmental science research, to the field of political and civic studies. It compares place attachment between citizens with different political orientations and citizenship identities. In addition to its “cognitive” aspect, this study includes an “affective” dimension that has rarely been featured in the extant literature. Our findings, based on a telephone survey of 607 Hong Kong residents, confirm that place attachment is composed of both cognitive and affective dimensions. Besides, the mean score of self-identified “localists” and “Hong Kongers” on place attachment was significantly lower than that of “centrists” and those with no political orientation, as well as those who identified themselves as “Chinese Hong Kongers,” respectively. The weak place attachment among the localists amid Hong Kong's tremendous social and political challenges is most alarming, which highlights the need for policy makers to quickly address the issue.

How conflicting perspectives lead a history teacher to epistemic, epistemological, moral and temporal switching: a case study of teaching about the holocaust in the Netherlands

ABSTRACT This case study reports on a history teacher in a multicultural classroom in the Netherlands who is confronted with students’ conflicting perspectives on a sensitive topic, namely the Holocaust. We have used Dialogical Self Theory in combination with the historical multiperspectivity framework to make sense of the teacher’s considerations and instructional responses. Informed by interactions between three inner-voices (i.e. history teacher, caring teacher, and political citizen) and two inner-other voices (i.e. Jews as victims and ‘the resistant boys’), the teacher switches from a temporal focus on the past to a temporal focus on the present. The epistemic, epistemological, and moral consequences of this temporal switching are discussed.

Categorisation. Classification. Confiscation. Dealing with enemy citizens in the Netherlands in the aftermath of World War II (1944-1967)

ABSTRACT Anticipating the end of the Second World War, the Dutch government in exile classed all civilians with German nationality as enemy citizens. Tens of thousands of German nationals who resided and worked in the Kingdom of the Netherlands were stripped of their assets, regardless of political allegiance or place of residence, and without any Dutch compensation. Some were arrested, imprisoned and expelled; others left of their own accord. Many appealed against their status as enemy citizens, in the hope of clearing their names and regaining their property. This article discusses the categorization and classification of German nationals as enemies of the state, and examines how politics of citizenship and nationality triggered policies of exclusion, but also informed policies of inclusion. Whilst German nationality determined a civilian’s enmity, a seemingly homogeneous Dutch national identity constituted the criteria for so-called ‘de-enemization’ (ontvijanding). German nationals were judged on their wartime and post-war behaviour, and had to prove that they behaved like ‘good Dutch citizens’. In addition, ethnicity, class and gender were used as parameters to judge civilians classed as German nationals. As the case studies in this article illustrate, thousands of civilians categorized by the Dutch government as German citizens were unjustly affected by the status of their (former) German citizenship.