Genealogies of Citizenship: Markets, Statelessness, and the Right to have Rights (original) (raw)

"Toward a New Sociology of Rights: A Genealogy of 'Buried Bodies' of Citizenship and Human Rights"

Annual Review of Law and Social Science, 2008

Although a thriving social science literature in citizenship has emerged in the past two decades, to date there exists neither a sociology of rights nor a sociology of human rights. Theoretical obstacles include the association of rights with the philosophical discourse of normativity, the abstraction of universalism, and the individualism attributed to rights-bearers. Parallel historical obstacles dating from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) in 1948 include American exceptionalism and racism, cultural relativism, the institutional primacy of sovereignty, and the privileging of human rights over socioeconomic rights. Except in the United States, today civil rights discourse is the lingua franca of global struggles; building a sociology of rights as a collective project is now imperative. This article unearths and reconstructs 60 years of political clashes, intellectual debates, and struggles for inclusion and recognition surrounding human rights and citizenship-much of which has been hidden from history (especially African American human rights movements). We introduce a nascent but uncoordinated social science attention to rights and develop criteria for a new sociology of rights. At the nexus of human rights and citizenship rights we identify the public good of a "right to have rights," which expresses the institutional, social, and moral preconditions for human recognition and inclusion. The concept offers a promising avenue of social science inquiry.

Citizenship in an Unequal World

Perspectives on Politics, 2011

We inhabit a thoroughly globalized world. People are increasingly and visibly connected by a “World Wide Web,” by a world market, and by universalist discourses of human rights and democracy. At the same time, full citizenship in a political community—and the rights conferred by such citizenship—is an exclusive status that remains, remarkably, tied to accidents of birth and historical circumstance. And what one has a right to—gainful employment, education, health care, political voice, mere presence—is largely a function of whether one has the precious status of citizenship or is, alternatively, regarded as an alien. Ayelet Shachar's The Birthright Lottery: Citizenship and Global Inequality is a compelling account of the moral arbitrariness of this state of affairs. A study in “normative political theory,” it is a work of political science that incorporates legal theory, moral philosophy, political economy, and public policy. The author tackles issues of increasing global politi...

Citizenship Beyond the Nation: Building Human Rights Inclusivity in a World of Exclusions

Independent Bachelors Thesis , 2021

This paper explores possible solutions to the existing gap between human rights and citizenship and asks if society should replace citizenship with a more globalised or international form of "citizenship"? It further asks how society should aim to best eliminate the gap between human rights and citizenship? The paper uses an argumentative analysis to examine the theories of internationalism, global citizenship, and the democracy of demoi while considering cosmopolitan, agonistic, and anarchist viewpoints. In doing so showing the imperialist tendencies within global citizenship due to its need for universalism, and the possible alternative presented by the democracy of demoi as a pluralistic solution that accommodates agonistic views and anarchist notions of non-domination.

Citizenship and inequality in a global age

Although the notion of national citizenship has long held the promise of equal membership, it has proved less useful in a world of circulating cultures, people, and loyalties through money, media, and migration. The increasing mobility of capital and people across national borders compels us to conceptualize welfare and inequality at the global level. Although the enforcement of citizen rights remains within the purview of the nation‐state, the source of these rights can no longer be firmly placed within the national framework. From cosmopolitan imaginations to postnational research, contemporary configurations of citizenship trace their legitimacy to global discourses that increasingly challenge the national order of citizenship. Yet current transformations in citizenship also point to the possibility of new inequalities, particularly, when nation‐states are increasingly able to modulate the rights they make available to immigrants, and differentiate among refugees, professionals, and investors among many other categories of people.

Citizenship for Sale and the Neoliberal Political Economy of Belonging

International Studies Quarterly

Recent research views the proliferation of citizenship-by-investment schemes primarily as a manifestation of the commodification of citizenship by states succumbing to the logic of the market. I argue that these schemes exceed mere processes of commodification. They are part of a neoliberal political economy of belonging. This political economy prompts states to include and exclude migrants according to their endowment of human, financial, economic, and emotional capital. I show how the growing opportunities for wealthy and talented migrants to move across borders, the opening of humanitarian corridors for particularly vulnerable refugees, and the hardening of borders for "ordinary" refugees and undocumented migrants all stem from the same neoliberal rationality of government. In doing so, I challenge mainstream understandings of neoliberalism as a process of commodification characterized by the "retreat of the state" and "domination of the market." I approach neoliberalism as a process of economization, which disseminates the model of the market to all spheres of human activity, even where money is not at stake. Neoliberal economization turns states and individuals into entrepreneurial actors that attempt to maximize their value, not just in economic and financial but also in moral and emotional terms. This process, I conclude, undermines political notions of citizenship grounded in reciprocity, equality, and solidarity, not by replacing these principles with economic ones but by rewriting these principles in economic terms.

Building Just and Inclusive Societies: Reconceptualising Citizenship in Modern States

inter-disciplinary.net

The movement of people across borders has triggered the proliferation of plurinational states in which multiple ethnic groups have come to reside alongside each other. These circumstances challenge the nation-state model and the fundamental pillars on which the notion of citizenship depends. Historically based on notions of loyalty, contribution and national defence, the existing citizenship model is limited given that many immigrants have come to develop these sentiments towards their nation of residence.