Group items tagged

"This article uses the lens of development discourse to shed light on subaltern politics of citizenship and rights claims in contemporary India. It argues that battles for development entitlements allow subaltern subjects to meaningfully inhabit and simultaneously alter the contours of legal citizenship, which they have been formally granted by the Indian constitution, but, in effect, denied. Subaltern claims on citizenship, articulated from a position of subordination and difference, not equality, and through specific idioms, contest and radically transform the generic and universal slot of personhood that liberalism provides - one that is rational, secular, sovereign and individualistic. Their citizenship claims draw upon multiple discourses, extending well beyond the law, mixing morality and materiality, ethics and politics, and traditional and bureaucratic languages of power, and thereby muddy the very distinctions on which modern citizenship rests. Subaltern struggles over development, thus, force us to reconsider hardened, normative ideas of legal citizenship and to widen the scope through which we look at and think about rights claims, justice, personhood and, indeed, the state in the neoliberal era."

"This article considers the relationship between ethnic and racial minority rights and citizenship in Asia. The most ethnically divided and populous region in the world, Asia is home to some of the most contrasting state responses to ethnic minority assertions of diversity and difference. Asia is also awash with wide-ranging claims by geographically-dispersed ethnic minorities to full and equal citizenship. In exploring the relationship between ethnic minority rights claims and citizenship in Asia, this article considers the relevance of certain core assumptions in Western-dominated citizenship theory to Asian experiences. The aim is to look beyond absolutist West-East and civic-ethnic bifurcations to consider more constructive questions about what Asian and Western models might learn from one another in approaching minority citizenship issues."

"Multiple citizenship has in recent decades moved from an unwanted phenomenon in international relations to a fairly common transnational status. Multiple citizenship has nevertheless so far been studied mainly as a political and juridical status by comparing national legislations. Much less notice has been given to actual dual citizens' citizen participation and construction of citizens' identities. Only when citizenship is studied as these kinds of practices do the hypothetic possibilities and problems associated with the status get their meanings and contents. This paper concentrates on examining dual citizens' identifications to their respective citizenships and how these affiliations transfer into possible citizen participation. Results are based on extensive analysis of survey (n = 335) and interviews (n = 48) carried out among dual citizens living in Finland. Contents and forms of dual citizens' national identification and citizen participation were reviewed through ideal types: resident-mononationals, expatriate-mononationals, hyphenationals, and shadow-nationals."

"Over the past three decades, relations between African emigrants and their home-states have been changing from antagonism to attempts to embrace and structure emigrant behaviors. This transformation in the conception of emigration and citizenship has hardly been interrogated by the growing scholarship on African and global migrations. Three of the most contentious strategies to extend the frontiers of loyalty of otherwise weak African states, namely dual citizenship or dual nationality, the right to vote from overseas, and the right to run for public office by emigrants from foreign locations are explored. Evidence from a wide range of African emigration states suggests that these strategies are neither an embrace of the global trend toward extra-territorialized states and shared citizenship between those at 'home' and others outside the state boundaries, nor are they about national development or diaspora welfare. Instead, they seem to be strategies to tap into emigrant resources to enhance weakened state power. The study interrogates the viability and advisability of emigrant voting and political participation from foreign locations, stressing their tendency to destabilize homeland political power structures, undermine the nurturing of effective diaspora mobilization platforms in both home and host states, and export homeland political practices to diaspora locations."

The aim of this paper is to examine the principles that New Labour has employed in its citizenship and multicultural policies in Britain, and to clarify theoretical locations as well as philosophical rationales of those principles. By deliberative multiculturalism, I mean a set of policies and discourses of New Labour about citizenship and multicultural issues, which emphasizes rational dialogue and mutual respect with firmly guaranteed political rights especially for minorities. New Labour tries to go beyond liberal and republican citizenship practice through enhancing deliberation, the origin of which goes back to the British tradition of parliamentary sovereignty. It also attempts to achieve a one-nation out of cultural cleavages, shifting its focus from redistribution with social rights to multicultural deliberation with political rights. I organize my discussion with a focus on the difference between two theoretical concepts: the relationship between cultural rights and individual equality, and the relationship between national boundaries and global belonging. In the concluding section, I explain three positive developments of New Labour's approach and also four limitations it has faced.

This article investigates the complex relationship between digital media, religion, and politics in Egypt since the early 1990s. Charting the emergence of a new media landscape - one that is facilitated by technological innovations such as mobile telephony, high-speed Internet, and small digital cameras - this paper explores how a very strong Islamic revivalist trend is capitalizing on the power and reach of these new media practices in an effort to develop Islamically inflected models of citizenship. The paper argues that such a mediascape is contributing to the development of new models of nationalism and civic citizenship in Egypt - ones that are not orchestrated by the Egyptian State but are mediated through oppositional groups, mainly of the Islamist variety. The paper aims to chart a map of media practices in Egypt in the past two decades, and trace how these practices are informing the rise of new notions of citizenship, cultural policy, digital activism, and media consumption.

"This paper offers a normative argument for reconfiguring borders that rests on a critique of intersecting logics bearing on security, incorporation, agency, subjectivity, encounter, and citizenship. Especially important to my critique is the mutually reinforcing relationship between border security and prevalent assimilationist and integrationist forms of incorporation associated with the dominant single-citizenship model. I offer instead an alternative framing of incorporation I call enfoldment, which is anchored in the contingent and negotiated agency and subjectivity of mobile persons and a multiversal understanding of societies. As I argue, one avenue for opening the possibilities of migrant agency and subjectivity is via what I term 'mediated passage'. It entails shielding migrants and travellers from the direct control of movement by states at borders, allowing for passage across borders mediated by civil society organizations possessing independent power and authority."

This special issue arose from a concern with the political logic of the foregrounding of collective culture(s) in the context of changing citizenship regimes.1 Its key focus is the conjuncture in which 'culture' - claims of a collective distinction concerning heritage, location, moralities and values - has become the terrain of political struggles over the subject of rights in national and international politics, the re-allocation of entitlements, definitions of value and new forms of political representation. This appears to be linked to contemporary processes of neoliberalization, the politics of which are often defined in terms of economic policies promoting private accumulation, entrepreneurship and free markets, but which typically also include a project of governance in which not only individuals, but also collective agents - which may be 'cultural' entities - are charged with increasing responsibility for their own regulation, welfare and enterprise, but in a depoliticized and bureaucratized mode (Santos, 2005). Citizenship is central here as the modern political and legal institution which links certain notions of personal rights and duties with the structures of governance and political agency, on the one hand, and with the national and, by extension, transnational economy, on the other.

"This contribution relies on the narration of the stories of Valquíria, Maria and Marcela, three women living in São Paulo's suburbs, to explore citizenship in contemporary Brazil. Based on ethnographic research conducted between 2005 and 2009, the text is organised in three parts. In the first one, the author justifies his choice of analysis categories and briefly discusses relationships between politics and violence, so as to give the context of the discussion. The second part is dedicated to the description and discussion of the three types of violence that affect Marcela, Maria and Valquíria in their personal trajectories. In the third part the radically distinct connections between these three stories and the established political world are presented, linking this difference with experiences of violence."

Using the Cronulla Riots as a starting point, this article explores the way in which neoliberal ideology, and the social and economic practices associated with it, have transformed Australia from an inclusive nation-state to one founded on the premise of exclusion. From this foundation, relative inclusion is based on a person's utility to the economic requirements of Australian capitalism. More and more people live outside of Australian citizenship which, previously, marked the limits of the inclusive state. In this new order of relative exclusion, many white Australians, who previously had felt themselves to be entitled members of the Australian state, experience an increasing disenfranchisement. Resorting to nationalism as a way of asserting their membership of the nation-state, the Cronulla riots were a manifestation of the frustrations of many white Australians.

"Mediated representations of gender, ethnicity and migration play an increasingly important role in the way these categories are understood in the public sphere and the private realm. As media often intervene in processes of individual and institutional communication, they provide frameworks for the production and consumption of representations of these categories. Thus media - in their production, representations and consumption - need to be analysed, not only as reflections as pre-existing socio-political realities, but also as constitutive elements in the production of meanings of the self and the Other. This special issue includes a number of articles that examine the articulations of gendered ethnic identities and of gendered citizenship as these are shaped in media production, media representations and media consumption."

In the 1990s, Canadian scholarship produced internationally accepted differentiations between minority nations and immigration-induced ethnic minorities. Charles Taylor's concept of Qubcois and First Nations' 'deep diversity' (versus other Canadians' 'first level' membership in the polity) and Will Kymlicka's liberal theory of 'multicultural citizenship' are just two of the most common examples. However, in these theories, as well as in much of the subsequent scholarship, the relations between different types of national and ethnic struggles for rights and recognition have remained unexplored. Drawing on the results of a study on Central Canadian English-language newspaper discourses during the 1990s, this article examines whether and how images of Qubcois minority nationalism affect legitimizations and delegitimizations of multiculturalism in the public space. The analysis thereby challenges the widespread assumption that the accommodation of historically grown national minorities and ethnic groups of more recent immigrant origin happens in hermetically closed 'silos' with little interaction. On the contrary, the article demonstrates that relations between different categories of groups and diversity accommodations are both theoretically plausible and empirically traceable.

The financial crisis which recently occurred is the epiphenomenon of a structural crisis of advanced capitalism. Although it referred to a very different context the diagnosis made by Habermas in his work Legitimationsprobleme des Spätkapitalismus, published in 1973, remains a very useful key in order to understand the irreducibility of social policy and the way the post-Fordist capitalism assumes the mediation between the economic and the social sphere - that is, how it deals with both the deficit of rationality and the deficit of legitimacy. Instead of being the political expression of social relations the neo-liberal system decouples labour and capital and, governed by financial markets, disconnects the social and the political rights and undermines the possibility of a true foundation of citizenship. In other words, the 'refeudalization' Habermas had reported as early as in Strukturwandel der Offentlichkeit (1962) remains quite topical.

"This article examines the role of poetry in illuminating and challenging the meaning of citizenship in the border region of Gilgit-Baltistan, which is located in the north of Pakistan and is internationally considered as forming part of Pakistani Kashmir. Ali discusses how poetic performances constitute a critical public arena for protesting political dispossession and for nurturing a postsectarian, religious harmony in the region. The article also complicates our understanding of the state, as several of the poets in Gilgit work for the local government. From this overlapping position as local inhabitants and state officials, they seek to create spaces of poetic reflection that can help reshape the state as well as society in Gilgit-Baltistan."

"This article documents the emergence of the Denotified Rights Action Group (DNG-RAG), a national social movement orchestrated to assert the citizenship rights of adivasi (indigenous) populations in India. It assesses the movement's efforts to engage the central Indian government in meaningful dialogue to accommodate the inclusion of marginalized adivasis in the democratic politics of the nation. In doing so, the DNT-RAG reasserts the primacy of the Indian state as the principal engine driving the project of nation building, and as such, the site that activists target to further an agenda of equitable development and democratic rights for those known as India's Denotified Tribes."

"Immigrant integration is currently a prominent issue in virtually all contemporary democracies, but countries in which the historic population itself is deeply divided - particularly those with substate nations and multiple political identities - present some interesting questions where integration is concerned. The existence of multiple and potentially competing political identities may complicate the integration process, particularly if the central government and the substate nation promote different conceptions of citizenship and different nation-building projects. What, then, are the implications of minority nationalism for immigrant integration? Are the added complexities a barrier to integration? Or do overlapping identities generate more points of contact between immigrants and their new home? This article addresses this question by probing immigrant and non-immigrant 'sense of belonging' in Canada, both inside and outside Quebec. Data come from Statistics Canada's Ethnic Diversity Study. Our results suggest that competing nation-building projects make the integration of newcomers more, rather than less, challenging."

For a little over a decade we have been witnessing a profusion of discourses on autochthony - that is, an original belonging to a group or territory - in many parts of the world. A global approach to this question first requires a look at the principle of autochthony and its genealogy. Starting from African examples, places of prolific expression of the phenomenon, this article shows how autochthony plays the role of capital that can be invested, valued and profited from. The structure of this capital carries within itself the seeds of conflict. The article analyses how the stabilization of its value requires the execution of specific strategies. Among these strategies, I will focus in greater depth on voting. The relationship between capital, autochthony and elections will thus bring us back to debates that animate political science: in new municipalities, autochthony as capital is at the heart of candidate selection, suffrage, political participation and citizenship.

This paper examines the relationship between the nation-state and migration through the activities of the International Organization for Migration (IOM). The IOM operates at the intersection of nation-states, international human rights regimes, and neo-liberal governance. We find that the IOM enforces the exclusions of asylum seekers and maintains the central role of nation-states in ordering global flows of migration. In addition, we argue that the IOM acts on behalf of nation-states by using the language of international human rights, as though working in the interests of migrants and refugees. In providing a geographic appraisal of the IOM alongside its image and presentation with an analysis of its activities on voluntary returns, we address the new spaces of 'networked' governance that control and order migratory flows in the interests of nation-states.

This article addresses the challenges and pathways of Holocaust education in post-communist countries through two case studies. I first examine historiographical, institutional and cultural obstacles to deep and meaningful treatments of the Holocaust within Latvian and Romanian schools. Drawing upon the unique experiences both countries had with partial or full 'dual occupation' of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, I present a rationale for constructing inquiry-based Holocaust education experiences. As Latvia, Romania and other countries have entered the European Union, the need for tolerant and open-minded citizens who have the ability to make informed and reasoned decisions for the common good has become more critical. Inquiry-oriented teaching of the Holocaust brings about essential democratic skills and dispositions, while simultaneously positioning students to investigate the complicated, nuanced and contested contours of the Holocaust, competing forms of propaganda and often spurious historiographical traditions. This kind of teaching is also responsive to the challenges these and other societies face when confronting other historical and contemporary controversial topics.

"This article argues that the status of migrant subjects is characterized by a loss of communication rights and locates the instances where this loss is most visible. It investigates the process of silencing and immobilization of migrants and the particular forms it takes for female migrants through the disenablement of communicative acts. In this process the detained migrant loses her status as an interlocutor, irrespectively of the instances and processes that allow her-or demand of her-to speak. The state of exceptionality assigned to detained migrants is supported in the criminalization of migration laws and securitization, which together with widespread policies of incarceration in the West have become the antipode of the fundamental principles of free movement and expression. Silence and immobilization constitute the 'standard' rather than exceptional conditions of people on the move that shadow them across every step of their way, geographically, politically, culturally, legislatively, socially."