Virtual Library

Between 1942 and 1944 the Germans sealed and completely emptied at least 38,000 Parisian apartments. The majority of the furnishings and other household items came from 'abandoned' Jewish apartments and were shipped to Germany. After the war, Holocaust survivors returned to Paris to discover their homes completely stripped of all personal possessions or occupied by new inhabitants. In 1945, the French provisional government established a Restitution Service to facilitate the return of goods to wartime looting victims. Though time-consuming, difficult, and often futile, thousands of people took part in these early restitution efforts. Stealing Home demonstrates that attempts to reclaim one's furnishings and personal possessions were key in efforts to rebuild Jewish political and social inclusion in the war's wake. Far from remaining silent, Jewish survivors sought recognition of their losses, played an active role in politics, and turned to both the government and each other for aid. Drawing on memoirs, oral histories, restitution claims, social workers' reports, newspapers, and government documents, Stealing Home provides a social history of the period that focuses on Jewish survivors' everyday lives during the lengthy process of restoring citizenship and property rights. It examines social rebirth through the prism of restitution and argues that the home was critical in shaping the postwar relationship between Jews and the state, and in the successes and failures associated with rebuilding Jewish lives in France after the Holocaust.

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.

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 framework requires a relational approach and attention to dynamics of recognition within contexts of structured agency. Immigrants and their children can make claims to modify the normative content of citizenship, affect recognition evaluations and change the allocation of status and rights. But they are also constrained by legal structures, a society's institutional practices, and prevailing public perceptions. Citizenship as claims-making may require a reassessment of boundary approaches and a turn to metaphors of positionality, as well as more serious commitment to mixed-methods research. The stakes of understanding citizenship's power, as practice and status, are especially high right now. Yet based on existing scholarship, it is not entirely clear how much citizenship matters, in what ways, for whom, or why. This is the challenge for future scholarship.

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. This vulnerability, something humans share amid the diversity of cultural beliefs and values that mark their differences, provides solid ground on which to construct a framework of human rights. Bryan Turner undertakes this task here, developing a sociology of rights from a sociology of the human body. His blending of empirical research with normative analysis constitutes an important step forward for the discipline of sociology. Like anthropology, sociology has traditionally eschewed the study of justice as beyond the limits of a discipline that pays homage to cultural relativism and the “value neutrality” of positivistic science. Turner’s expanded approach accordingly involves a truly interdisciplinary dialogue with the literature of economics, law, medicine, philosophy, political science, and religion.

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. In caricature, the argument says that rights of citizenship formed as bargains struck in the course of both sorts of struggle, first chiefly in defense against invasive state demands for the means of war, later in pursuit of much wider range of collective action and state intervention. Citizenship rights belong in principle to everyone who qualifies as full-fledged member of given state; membership in category suffices to qualify a person for enforceable claims. Citizens of European states now enjoy ipso facto rights to education, housing, health care, income, and a wide variety of political participation.