citizenship

the mass violence of the twentieth century’s two world wars—followed more recently by decentralized and privatized warfare, manifested in terrorism, ethnic cleansing, and other localized forms of killing—has led to a heightened awareness of human beings’ vulnerability and the precarious nature of the institutions they create to protect themselves from violence and exploitation.

In many Western countries, rights that once belonged solely to citizens are being extended to immigrants, a trend that challenges the nature and basis of citizenship at a time when nation-states are fortifying their boundaries through restirictive border controls and expressions of nationalist ideologies.

Genealogies of Citizenship is a remarkable rethinking of human rights and social justice. As global governance is increasingly driven by market fundamentalism, growing numbers of citizens have become socially excluded and internally stateless. Against this movement to organize society exclusively by market principles, Margaret Somers argues that socially inclusive democratic rights must be counter-balanced by the powers of a social state, a robust public sphere and a relationally-sturdy civil society.

There was a time when America’s poor faced a stark choice between access to social welfare and full civil rights—a predicament that forced them to forfeit their citizenship in exchange for economic relief. Over time, however, our welfare system improved dramatically. But as Chad Alan Goldberg here demonstrates, its legacy of disenfranchisement persisted. Indeed, from Reconstruction onward, welfare policies have remained a flashpoint for recurring struggles over the boundaries of citizenship.

Citizenship rights came into being because relatively organized members of the general population bargained with state authorities for several centuries, bargained first over the means of war, then over enforceable claims that would serve their interests outside of war. During the French Revolution, from the Declaration of the Rights of Man onward, bargaining that established citizenship rights took place right out in the open.

I advance a conceptual approach to citizenship as membership through claims-making. In this approach, citizenship is a relational process of making membership claims on polities, people and institutions, claims recognized or rejected within particular normative understandings of citizenship. Such a conceptual shift moves scholarship beyond typologizing—enumerating how citizenship is (or is not) about status, rights, participation and identity—to identifying the mechanisms through which claims on citizenship have power.

This article examines the disjuncture between the theory of international refugee protection, human rights and citizenship rights and their practice. Drawing on data from a sub-sample of 500 Zimbabwean migrants taken from a larger survey of 1000 Zimbabweans in South Africa and the UK, it explores the labour market and transnational lives of undocumented migrants and compares them with migrants with other immigration statuses. The article demonstrates that while the protection and rights frameworks exist, in reality undocumented migrants cannot access protection and/or rights.

The tradition of thinking behind the idea of citizenship, which has become a key concept of modern social theory, has given insufficient attention to either gender or sexuality. In this paper it is argued that claims to citizenship status, at least in the West, are closely associated with the institutionalisation of hetero-sexual, as well as male, privilege. This is demonstrated when the association of certain forms of citizenship status with heterosexuality, national identity for example, is threatened or challenged.

This article examines historical transformations of Japanese collective memory of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima by utilizing a theoretical framework that combines a model of reiterated problem solving and a theory of cultural trauma.

Although the study of citizenship has been an important development in contemporary sociology, the nature of rights has been largely ignored. The analysis of human rights presents a problem for sociology, in which cultural relativism and the fact-value distinction have largely destroyed the classical tradition of the natural-law basis for rights discourse. This critique of the idea of universal rights was prominent in the work of Marx, Durkheim and Weber.