Routledge handbook of global citizenship studies

Routledge Handbook of Global
Citizenship Studies

Citizenship studies is at a crucial moment of globalizing as a field. What used to be mainly a
European, North American, and Australian field has now expanded to major contributions featuring scholarship from Latin America, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.
The Routledge Handbook of Global Citizenship Studies takes into account this globalizing
moment. At the same time, it considers how the global perspective exposes the strains and
discords in the concept of ‘citizenship’ as it is understood today. With over fifty contributions from international, interdisciplinary experts, the Handbook features state-of-the-art analyses of the practices and enactments of citizenship across broad continental regions (Africas,
Americas, Asias, and Europes) as well as deterritorialized forms of citizenship (Diasporicity and
Indigeneity). Through these analyses, it provides a deeper understanding of citizenship in both
empirical and theoretical terms.
This volume sets a new agenda for scholarly investigations of citizenship. Its wide-ranging
contributions and clear, accessible style make it essential reading for students and scholars working on citizenship issues across the humanities and social sciences.
Engin F. Isin is Professor of Citizenship in the Department of Politics and International Studies
at the Open University, UK. He currently serves as Co-Chief Editor of Citizenship Studies, and
is widely published within the field itself.
Peter Nyers is Associate Professor of the Politics of Citizenship and Intercultural Relations in
the Department of Political Science at McMaster University, Canada. He is Co-Chief Editor of
Citizenship Studies, and has made many other contributions to the field of citizenship studies.


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Routledge Handbook of
Global Citizenship Studies

Edited by Engin F. Isin and
Peter Nyers

First published 2014
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2014 selection and editorial material Engin F. Isin and Peter Nyers;
individual chapters, the contributors
The right of the editors to be identified as the authors of the editorial
material, and of the contributors for their individual chapters, has been
asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or
other means, now known or hereafter invented, including
photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval
system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Routledge handbook of global citizenship studies / edited by Engin Isin
and Peter Nyers.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. World citizenship. 2. Citizenship. I. Isin, Engin F. (Engin Fahri),
1959- II. Nyers, Peter.

JZ1320.4.R68 2014
323.6–dc23
2013043537
ISBN: 978-0-415-51972-4 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-203-10201-5 (ebk)
Typeset in Bembo
by Cenveo Publisher Services


Contents

Contributors
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Globalizing citizenship studies
Engin F. Isin and Peter Nyers
Navigating global citizenship studies
Jack Harrington

xi
xxii
1

12

PART I

Struggles for citizenship

21

1

Contested citizenship of the Arab Spring and beyond
Gal Levy

23

2

Genealogies of autonomous mobility
Martina Martignoni and Dimitris Papadopoulos

38

3

Global citizenship in an insurrectional era
Nevzat Soguk

49

4

In life through death: transgressive citizenship at the border
Kim Rygiel

62

PART II

Positioning citizenships

73

5

75

Decolonizing global citizenship
Charles T. Lee

v


Contents

6 Practising citizenship from the ordinary to the activist
Catherine Neveu

86

7 Sexual citizenship and cultural imperialism
Leticia Sabsay

96

8 Topologies of citizenship
Kate Hepworth

110

9 Citizenship beyond state sovereignty
Aoileann Ní Mhurchú

119

10 A post-Marshallian conception of global social citizenship
Hartley Dean

128

11 Can there be a global historiography of citizenship?
Kathryn L. Wegner

139

12 Regimes of citizenship
Xavier Guillaume

150

PART III

Africas

159

13 Citizenship in Africa: the politics of belonging
Sara Rich Dorman

161

14 Trends in citizenship law and politics in Africa since the colonial era
Bronwen Manby

172

15 Activist citizens and the politics of mobility in Osire Refugee Camp
Suzan Ilcan

186

16 Struggles of citizenship in Sudan
Munzoul A. M. Assal

196

17 Transformations of nationality legislation in North Africa
Laura van Waas and Zahra Albarazi

205

vi


Contents

18 Conviviality and negotiations with belonging in urban Africa
Francis B. Nyamnjoh and Ingrid Brudvig

217

19 Citizenship struggles in the Maghreb
Delphine Perrin

230

20 Struggles for citizenship in South Africa
Daniel Conway

240

PART IV

Americas

251

21 Transformations in imaginings and practices of citizenship
in Latin America
Judy Meltzer and Cristina Rojas

253

22 Ecological citizenship in Latin America
Alex Latta and Hannah Wittman

265

23 Citizenship and foreignness in Canada

Yasmeen Abu-Laban

274

24 Performances of citizenship in the Caribbean
Mimi Sheller

284

25 Non-citizen citizenship in Canada and the United States
Thomas Swerts

295

PART V

Asias

305

26 Emerging forms of citizenship in the Arab world
Dina Kiwan

307

27 The invention of citizenship in Palestine
Lauren E. Banko

317

28 Orientalism and the construction of the apolitical Buddhist subject
Ian Anthony Morrison

325
vii


Contents

29 Citizenship in Central Asia
Vanessa Ruget

335

30 Gender, religion and the politics of citizenship in modern Iran
Shirin Saeidi

344

31 Trajectories of citizenship in South Korea
Seungsook Moon

355

32 Translating Chinese citizenship
Zhonghua Guo

366

33 The category mismatch and struggles over citizenship in Japan

Reiko Shindo

376

34 Urbanizing India: contestations and citizenship in Indian cities
Romola Sanyal

388

35 Indian citizenship: a century of disagreement
Niraja Gopal Jayal

397

PART VI

Europes

407

36 European Union citizenship in retrospect and prospect
Willem Maas

409

37 Migration, security and European citizenship
Elspeth Guild

418

38 European Union citizenship rights and duties: civil, political,
and social
Dora Kostakopoulou
39 How European citizenship produces a differential political space
Teresa Pullano

viii

427

437


Contents

40 Experiences of EU citizenship at the sub-national level
Katherine E. Tonkiss

446

41 Contested citizenship in Bosnia and Herzegovina
Elena Cirkovic

455

42 Citizenship and objection to military service in Turkey
Hilâl Alkan and Sezai Ozan Zeybek

466

43 The Romani perspective: experiences and acts of citizenship
across Europe
Peter Vermeersch

477

PART VII

Diasporicity

487

44 Post-territorial citizenship in post-communist Europe
Francesco Ragazzi

489

45 Imperial citizenship in a British world
Anne Spry Rush and Charles V. Reed

498

46 Global gods and local rights:Venezuelan immigrants in Barcelona
Roger Canals

508

47 Vietnamese diasporic citizenship
Claire Sutherland

522

PART VIII

Indigeneity

533

48 Beyond biopolitics? Ecologies of indigenous citizenship
Sarah Marie Wiebe

535

49 African indigenous citizenship
Noah Tamarkin and Rachel F. Giraudo

545

ix


Contents

50 Indigeneity and citizenship in Australia
Maggie Walter

557

51 The Aboriginal Tent Embassy and Australian citizenship
Edwina Howell and Andrew Schaap

568

EPILOGUE

581

Citizenship: East, west, or global?
Bryan S. Turner

583

Index

599

x


Contributors

Yasmeen Abu-Laban is Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of

Alberta. She has published widely on issues relating to the Canadian and comparative dimensions of gender, ethnicity and racialization processes, border and migration policies, and citizenship theory. She is the co-editor of Surveillance and control in Israel/Palestine: population, territory,
and power (2011), co-editor of Politics in North America: redefining continental relations (2008), and
editor of Gendering the nation-state: Canadian and comparative perspectives (2008). She is also the
co-author (with Christina Gabriel) of Selling diversity: immigration, multiculturalism, employment
equity and globalization (2002).
Zahra Albarazi is a Researcher at the Statelessness Programme, an initiative of Tilburg Law

School in the Netherlands. Her area of research and expertise has been the understanding of
statelessness and nationality in the MENA region. She coordinated the 2011–2012 MENA
Nationality project and was the principal researcher for a project looking at the link between
statelessness and gender discrimination in the region. She has engaged in various trainings and
outreach events on statelessness and holds an LLM in International Law from the University of
Leeds.
Hilâl Alkan received her BA and MA at Boğaziçi University, Istanbul. Her PhD at the Open

University, UK, focused on Islamic charitable organizations as the loci of social citizenship and
civic gift-giving. She was awarded her degree in 2013 and now teaches at a number of Istanbul
universities. She is active in the Women for Peace Initiative, which tries to establish a longlasting and gender-aware peace in Turkey. She is especially interested in issues of citizenship, the
sources and articulation of rights, and the paradoxes of gift- and care-giving relationships.
Munzoul A.M. Assal is Associate Professor of Social Anthropology and Deputy Director of the

Peace Research Institute at the University of Khartoum. Prior to his current position he was the
Director of Graduate Affairs at the same university. His research focuses on refugees, internal
displacement, and citizenship. His major publications include Sticky labels or rich ambiguities?
Diaspora and challenges of homemaking for Somalis and Sudanese in Norway, (2004), Diaspora within
and without Africa: homogeneity, heterogeneity, variation (2006), and An annotated bibliography of social
research in Darfur (2006).
Lauren E. Banko is a Senior Teaching Fellow in the Department of History, School of Oriental

and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. She received her PhD in 2013. Her research
focuses on the history of the modern Arab Middle East and in particular, nationality, citizenship,

xi


Contributors

and popular politics under the Palestine Mandate. She is also interested in the history of the
Palestinian Arab diaspora and Arab politics during the interwar era.
Ingrid Brudvig is a graduate student in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University

of Cape Town. Her research focuses on transnationalism, Somali diaspora, and the role of
micro-entrepreneurship on networks of conviviality and conceptualizations of global
citizenship.
Roger Canals works as a Researcher and Professor at the Department of Anthropology of the
University of Barcelona. He holds a PhD in Social and Cultural Anthropology from the École
des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris) and the University of Barcelona. He has published numerous articles on Afro-American religions – mainly on the cult of María Lionza in
Venezuela – as well as the book L’image nomade (Éditions Universitaires Européennes, 2010). A
specialist on visual anthropology, he has made several ethnographic films, mainly on popular
religiosity in Venezuela, Puerto Rico, and Barcelona. He has been invited to be a research
fellow at the University of Manchester.
Elena Cirkovic is an External Fellow with the York University Centre for International and

Security Studies. She was previously a Visiting Scholar with the Bonn University North
American Studies Program. She obtained her PhD at the Osgoode Hall Law School of York
University. Her MA degree is from the Political Science Department, University of Toronto. She
has published on the topics of international human rights law, transnational law, self-determination,
and legal pluralism in the German Law Journal and American Indian Law Review.
Daniel Conway, PhD, is Lecturer in Politics and International Studies at the Open University.
He recently published Masculinities, militarisation and the End Conscription Campaign: war resistance
in apartheid South Africa (2012) and is currently working on a project exploring the history, lives,
and identities of the British in South Africa.
Hartley Dean is currently Professor of Social Policy at the London School of Economics and
Political Science. His 25 years in academia were preceded by a 12-year career as a welfare rights
worker in one of London’s most deprived multicultural neighbourhoods. His principal research
interests stem from concerns with poverty, social justice, and welfare rights. Among his more
recently published books are Welfare rights and social policy (2002), Social policy (2006 and 2012),

and Understanding human need (2010). He was previously an editor of the Journal of Social Policy.
Sara Rich Dorman, PhD has degrees in Political Science from Memorial University in Canada

and the University of Oxford in the UK. She currently teaches at the University of Edinburgh
and is a past editor of African Affairs. She has a particular interest in African Politics, with an
emphasis on post-liberation states, and conducted research in Zimbabwe and Eritrea. She has
published on the politics of NGOs, churches, elections, and state-society relations, as well as the
politics of nationalism, citizenship, and nation- and state-building in Africa, especially in the
Horn of Africa and southern Africa.
Rachel F. Giraudo is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the California State University,
Northridge. She received her PhD in Anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley
in 2011. Her interests include indigeneity and identity politics in southern Africa, cultural heritage, tourism, and development.
xii


Contributors

Elspeth Guild, Jean Monnet Professor ad personam Radboud University, Nijmegen and Queen

Mary, University of London, and associate senior research fellow at the Centre for European
Policy Studies, Brussels, has specialized in EU borders and immigration law for more than 20
years. She coordinates the European Commission’s Network of Experts on Free Movement of
Workers which the Radboud University manages, bringing together academic experts from the
27 Member States providing national reports annually on the implementation of EU law in the
Member States, thematic reports, regional conferences, and a national conference each year. She
is also co-editor of the European Journal of Migration and Law and Free Movement of Workers (the
European Commission’s online journal) and on the editorial board of the journal International
Political Sociology. She is co-editor of the book series Immigration and asylum law and policy in
Europe published by Martinus Nijhoff.
Xavier Guillaume is Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Edinburgh. He

recently published International relations and identity (2011) and has edited, with Jef Huysmans,
Citizenship and security (2013).
Zhonghua Guo is Professor of Politics at the Department of Politics, Sun Yat-Sen University,
China. He was previously Visiting Professor at the University of Sheffield, UK and Guest
Professor at Umea University, Sweden. His recent publications include Citizenship in the context
of modern politics (2010), with Xiao Bin and Guo Taihui, and Citizenship in changing societies
(2011). He has also edited two special volumes on citizenship studies for the Political Review of
Sun Yat-Sen University (vol. 6, 2011) and the Annual Review of Chinese Political Science (vol. 2,
2013).
Jack Harrington is currently preparing a monograph on citizenship in the French and British
empires. He has been a European Research Council funded Research Associate at the Open
University, has taught at the universities of St Andrews and Edinburgh and been a Visiting
Fellow at the University of Mainz. He holds a PhD from the University of Edinburgh. He has
a background in volunteering policy.
Kate Hepworth is a Research Associate at the Institute for Culture and Society, University of

Western Sydney. She was awarded her PhD from the University of Technology, Sydney in
2012.
Edwina Howell is an activist and academic who works on the Foley Collection at Moondani
Balluk,Victoria University. In 2005 she was admitted as a barrister and solicitor to the Supreme
Court of Victoria. She was awarded a PhD from Monash University in 2013 for her thesis on
anthropology and the Black Power Movement in Australia. With Dr Andrew Schaap and Dr
Gary Foley she recently edited The Aboriginal Tent Embassy: sovereignty, black power, land rights and
the state (2013).
Suzan Ilcan is Professor of Sociology at the University of Waterloo and Balsillie School of

International Affairs in Waterloo, Canada. Her research focuses on global governance and international organizations in the context of humanitarian and development aid, social justice and
citizenship, and migrant activism. She is the author of Longing in belonging: the cultural politics of
settlement (2002), co-author of Issues in social justice: citizenship and transnational struggles (2013) and

Governing the poor: exercises of poverty reduction, practices of global aid (2011), and editor of Mobilities,
knowledge, and social justice (2013).
xiii


Contributors

Engin F. Isin is Professor of Politics in the Department of Politics and International Studies

(POLIS) at the Open University, UK. He is the author of Cities without citizens (1992), Being
political (2002), and Citizens without frontiers (2012), and is one of the Chief Editors of the journal
Citizenship Studies.
Niraja Gopal Jayal is Professor at the Centre for the Study of Law and Governance. She is the
author of Citizenship and its discontents: an Indian history (2013), Representing India: ethnic diversity
and the governance of public institutions (2006) and Democracy and the state: welfare, secularism and
development in contemporary India (1999). Among the publications she has edited, co-edited or
co-authored are The Oxford companion to politics in India (2010), Democracy in India (2001), Local
governance in India: decentralization and beyond (2005), and Drought, policy and politics in India
(1993).
Dina Kiwan, PhD, has been Associate Professor at the American University of Beirut, since

September 2012. Educated at the Universities of Oxford, Harvard, and London, she was previously Senior Lecturer in Citizenship Studies at Birkbeck College, University of London, and
Co-Director of the International Centre for Education for Democratic Citizenship (ICEDC).
Publications include Education for inclusive citizenship and as editor, Naturalization policies, education
and citizenship: Multicultural and multination societies in international perspective (2013).
Dora Kostakopoulou is a Professor of European Union Law, European Integration and Public

Policy at the University of Warwick. Formerly, she was Jean Monnet Professor in European
Law and European Integration and Co-Director of the Institute of Law, Economy, and Global
Governance at the University of Manchester (2005–2011) and Professor of European Union

Law and Director of the Centre for European Law at the University of Southampton (2011–
2012). She is the author of Citizenship, identity and immigration in the European Union: between past
and future (2001) and The future governance of citizenship (2008).
Alex Latta is Associate Professor of Global Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University and in the

Balsillie School of International Affairs in Waterloo, Canada. His research explores citizenship
and socio-ecological conflict in Latin America, focusing on the politics of water, energy policy,
and hydroelectric development in Chile. He has published work in Environmental Politics,
Citizenship Studies, Latin American Perspectives, Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies, and
Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment. Latta and Wittman’s co-edited Environment
and citizenship in Latin America: natures, subjects and struggles (2012) examines intersections of
environment and citizenship from various geographic and disciplinary perspectives.
Charles T. Lee is Assistant Professor in the School of Social Transformation, Arizona State

University. He works at the interface of critical social and political thought, cultural and postcolonial theory, and critical citizenship studies. His current research focuses on the cultural
politics of everyday at the margins of liberal social life, involving a book-length study that investigates the quotidian practices and discourses of abject subjects such as migrant domestic workers, global sex workers, transgender people, and suicide bombers as alternative performances/
improvisations of ‘citizenship’, and their implications for rethinking agency, resistance, and
social justice in the capitalist circuits of neoliberal globalization.
Gal Levy, BA, MA, (Tel Aviv University), PhD (LSE), is a senior member of the teaching
faculty at the Open University, Israel, and the founding academic director of NYU Tel Aviv.
xiv


Contributors

He has published locally and internationally on the interrelationships between citizenship,
education, ethnicity, urbanism, and class. He is co-chair of a research group on alternative
Arab education in Israel (supported by ISF 217/09). Most recently he has published in
Citizenship Studies, British Journal of the Sociology of Education, and Educational Review. He is
currently working on a book tentatively entitled Thriving for citizenship: struggling for citizenship

beyond rights.
Willem Maas is Jean Monnet Chair and Associate Professor at Glendon College, York
University, Toronto. He is the author of Creating European citizens (2007), the Historical dictionary
of the European Union (2014), and editor of Multilevel citizenship (2013), Democratic citizenship and
the free movement of people (2013), and Sixty years of European governance (2014).
Bronwen Manby, is a Senior Adviser in the Africa Regional Office of the Open Society

Foundations, responsible among other things for coordinating the work of the foundations in
Africa on the right to a nationality. She was previously Deputy Director of the Africa Division
of Human Rights Watch. She has written widely on citizenship rights, including Struggles for
citizenship in Africa (2009) and Citizenship laws in Africa: a comparative study (2nd edition, 2010),
as well as studies on Kenya, Zimbabwe, Sudan, and other countries.
Martina Martignoni is a Researcher at the School of Management, University of Leicester. She

is currently working on a project on postcolonial organizing, in particular on the practices and
forms of self-organization of Eritrean migrants in Milan. A historian by training, she has previously worked and published on the genealogy of cultural and postcolonial studies (Saperi in
polvere. Una introduzione agli studi culturali e postcoloniali. Collettivo Bartleby, Eds, (2012). Verona:
Ombre corte) and on the concept of nation inside the French and Italian communist parties (in
Diacronie. Studi di Storia Contemporanea).
Judy Meltzer holds a doctorate in Political Science from Carleton University, Canada. Her
research interests include citizenship, critical development studies, and social theory. She was
previously senior analyst for the Andean region at the Canadian Foundation for the Americas.
Her recent publications appear in Post-neoliberalism in the Americas (Macdonald and Ruckert
2009), the International studies encyclopedia (2010), and Environment and citizenship in Latin America
(Latta and Wittman 2012). She is co-editor of a Special Issue of Citizenship Studies on Narratives
of Citizenship in Latin America (2013) and Elusive peace: international, national and local dimensions
of conflict in Colombia (2005).
Aoileann Ní Mhurchú is a Lecturer in International Politics in the School of Social Sciences at
the University of Manchester. Her research is located at the intersection of three areas: critical
citizenship studies, international migration, and questions of time and space in political and

philosophical thought. Her main interest is in exploring various experiences of multinational
belonging – in terms, for example, of fluidity, lack, or exclusion – and investigating how these
challenge traditional spatio-temporal statist understandings of political subjectivity. She has published in Citizenship Studies, and Alternatives: Local, Global, Political and has a forthcoming monograph with Edinburgh University Press.
Seungsook Moon is Professor of Sociology at Vassar College where she served as Chair of the
department and Director of Asian Studies Program. She is the author of Militarized modernity and
gendered citizenship in South Korea (Duke University Press, 2005, reprinted 2007), Kunsajuŭie
xv


Contributors

kach’in kŭndae: kungminmandŭlgi, simindoegi, kŭrigo sŏngŭi chŏngch’i, (Seoul: Alternative Culture
Publication, 2007), and co-editor of, and a contributor to, Over there: living with the U.S. military
empire from World War II to the present (Duke University Press, 2010). As a political and cultural
sociologist and scholar of gender studies, she has published numerous articles on such topics as
citizenship, military service, civil society and social movements, collective memories, and globalization and food. She is a recipient of the Fulbright Scholar Award and the Korea Book
Review Editor of the Journal of Asian Studies.
Ian Anthony Morrison is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the American University in

Cairo. His publications include articles in Citizenship Studies and The Review of European and
Russian Affairs, as well as several chapters in edited volumes. His research interests include continental, social and political thought, the sociology of religion, and citizenship and nationalism
studies.
Catherine Neveu is a CNRS Senior Researcher at IIAC (TRAM), Paris. Working at the junction of anthropology and political science, she has directed several international and national
research programmes in France on citizenship processes. With John Clarke, Kathleen Coll and
Evelina Dagnino, she recently published a co-written book: Disputing citizenship (2014).
Francis B. Nyamnjoh is Professor of Social Anthropology at UCT, South Africa, which he
joined in August 2009 from the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in
Africa (CODESRIA) in Dakar, Senegal. He has researched and taught at universities in
Cameroon and Botswana.
Peter Nyers is Associate Professor of the Politics of Citizenship and Intercultural Relations in

the Department of Political Science at McMaster University, Canada. His research focuses on
the political struggles of non-status refugees and migrants, in particular their campaigns against
deportation and detention and for regularization and global mobility rights. He has published
widely on these themes, including authoring the book Rethinking refugees: beyond states of
emergency (Routledge 2006), and is one of the Chief Editors of the journal Citizenship Studies.
Dimitris Papadopoulos is Professor of Sociology and Organization in the School of
Management, University of Leicester. His work on labour and transnational migration, on
politics and technoscience, and on experience and subjectivity has appeared in numerous journals and in several monographs, including Escape routes: Control and subversion in the 21st Century
(Pluto Press 2008), Analysing everyday experience: social research and political change (Palgrave 2006),
and Lev Vygotsky: work and reception (2nd ed., Lehmanns Media 2010). He is currently completing Crafting politics. Technoscience, organization and material culture (forthcoming with Duke UP), a
study of autonomous politics, materialism, and alternative interventions in technoscientific
culture.
Delphine Perrin has been granted an EU Marie Curie Fellowship to conduct a 2-year research

project (2013–2015) on lawmaking in the domain of migration in the Maghreb
(MIGRINTERACT), at Aix-Marseille University. She was previously a Research Fellow at
the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence. She is Associate Researcher at IREMAM
(Institute for Research and Studies on the Arab and Muslim World) in Aix-en-Provence and at
the Centre Jacques Berque in Rabat. Her research interests include comparative law and policy
on asylum, migration, and citizenship in North Africa and in the European Union.
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Contributors

Teresa Pullano is Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre of Political Theory (CTP) at
the Université Libre de Bruxelles and teaching fellow at Sciences Po, Paris. She recently published L’espace de la citoyenneté en Europe (Presses de Sciences Po, 2014). Her research focuses on
the restructuring of statehood in Europe, studying EU state space within processes of regionalization and globalization and reconceptualizing European citizenship. She holds a PhD from
Sciences Po, Paris and was Fulbright-Schuman fellow at the Department of Political Science,
Columbia University, New York.

Francesco Ragazzi is Lecturer in International Relations at Leiden University, and Associate

Researcher at the Centre for International Studies and Research (CERI / Sciences Po, Paris).
He obtained his PhD in political science from Sciences Po, Paris and Northwestern University,
Chicago. Prior to his appointment at Leiden University, he was a Research Fellow at the School
of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London (2008–2009). He is member of the editorial
board of the journal Cultures & Conflits.
Charles V. Reed, a historian of modern Britain and the British Empire, is an Assistant Professor
of History at Elizabeth City State University, the University of North Carolina. He is completing work on a book on nineteenth-century royal tours of empire and British imperial culture,
tentatively titled Royal subjects, imperial citizens: the royal tour and the making of British imperial culture,
1860–1911. He is also the List Editor and Book Review Editor for H-Empire, the H-Net listserv dedicated to the study of empires and colonialism.
Cristina Rojas is Professor at the department of Political Science at Carleton University, Canada.

Her research focuses on decolonizing global governance, critical development, and emancipatory practices of citizenship. Her current research is on indigenous women and the decolonization of the patriarchal state in Bolivia. Her most recent articles are published in Citizenship
Studies, Globalizations, and Third World Quarterly. She is the author of Civilization and violence:
regimes of representation in nineteenth-century Colombia (2002) and co-editor of Elusive peace: international, national and local dimensions of conflict in Colombia (2005).
Vanessa Ruget is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Salem State University, Massachusetts.
In the past, she taught political science at the American University – Central Asia and at the
OSCE Academy in Bishkek, both located in Kyrgyzstan. She received her PhD in 2000 from
the University of Bordeaux. Her current research focuses on citizenship, migration, and democracy in Kyrgyzstan. It has appeared in Problems of Post-Communism, Citizenship Studies, Communist
and Post-Communist Studies, and Central Asian Survey.
Anne Spry Rush is a Lecturer in British and Empire History at the University of Maryland,
College Park. Her interests include identity, status, and culture in Britain and its empire, with
an emphasis on colonials in the twentieth-century Caribbean and British Isles. She is the author
of Bonds of empire. West Indians and Britishness from Victoria to decolonization (2011), which explores
British imperial identity through a focus on war, radio, voluntary organizations, education, and
royalty.
Kim Rygiel is Assistant Professor of Political Science, teaches in the graduate program at the
Balsillie School of International Affairs and is Research Associate with the International
Migration Research Centre at Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada. She is the author of

Globalizing citizenship (UBC Press 2010) and co-editor (with Peter Nyers) of Citizenship,
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Contributors

migrant activism and the politics of movement (Routledge 2012). Her work has appeared in the
journals Citizenship Studies and Review of Constitutional Studies and as several book chapters
including ‘The securitized citizen’ in Recasting the social in citizenship, edited by E. F. Isin
(2008).
Leticia Sabsay is a Research Associate at the Department of Politics and International Studies at
the Open University, appointed to the ‘Oecumene – Citizenship after Orientalism’ ERC project. Until she left Argentina in 2002, she was Assistant Professor of Communications at the
University of Buenos Aires. Since then she has continued to collaborate with this University as
a faculty member of the Gino Germani Research Institute for the Social Sciences. She has
authored Las normas del deseo. Imaginario sexual y comunicación (Cátedra 2009), Fronteras sexuales.
Espacio urbano, cuerpos y ciudadanía (Paidos 2011), and The political imaginary of sexual freedom
(Palgrave forthcoming).
Shirin Saeidi researches on gender, sexuality, and nation-building in the Middle East, with a

particular focus on post-1979 Iran. She completed her BA in government and politics at the
University of Maryland, College Park and her MA in political science at George Mason
University. In 2012, she was awarded a PhD degree from the University of Cambridge. She has
been the recipient of several research awards at Cambridge, and her 2010 paper in the journal
Citizenship Studies was selected as the editor’s choice article for the edition.
Romola Sanyal is a Lecturer in Urban Geography at the London School of Economics and

Political Science. She has previously taught at University College London, Newcastle University
and Rice University, Houston, Texas. She received her PhD in 2008 from the University of
California, Berkeley. Her co-edited book, Urbanizing citizenship: contested spaces in Indian cities
(with Dr Renu Desai) was published in 2011.

Andrew Schaap teaches politics at the University of Exeter. He is the author of Political reconciliation (2005) and editor of Law and agonistic politics (2009). He is co-editor (with Danielle
Celermajer and Vrasidas Karalis) of Power, judgment and political evil: in conversation with Hannah
Arendt (2010) and (with Gary Foley and Edwina Howell) of The Aboriginal Tent Embassy: sovereignty, black power, land rights and the state (2013).
Mimi Sheller is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Center for Mobilities Research and
Policy at Drexel University, Philadelphia. She has published extensively in the fields of Caribbean
Studies and Mobilities Research. She is the author of Democracy after slavery (2000), Consuming
the Caribbean (2003), Citizenship from below: erotic agency and Caribbean freedom (2012), and
Aluminum dreams: lightness, speed, modernity (2014). She is founding co-editor of the journal
Mobilities, Associate Editor of Transfers, and co-editor with John Urry of Mobile technologies of the
city (2006) and Tourism mobilities (2004).
Reiko Shindo is an Assistant Professor at the Graduate Program on Human Security at the

University of Tokyo. Her research areas include the politics of claiming citizenship, the concept
of borders, and the role of language in migration. Her articles appear in Citizenship Studies
(2009), International Political Sociology (2012) and Third World Quarterly (2012). In 2011, she
worked as a programme adviser at the PKO office in the Cabinet office, Japan. She was awarded
a PhD by Aberystwyth University in 2013.

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Contributors

Nevzat Soguk is Professor of Political Science at the University of Hawai’i Manoa and Adjunct

Professor of Global Politics at RMIT University, Australia. He is author of two books: States and
strangers: refugees and displacements of statecraft, (University of Minnesota Press 1999) and Globalization
and Islamism: beyond fundamentalism (Rowman and Littlefield Publishers 2010). He is also the coeditor of Arab revolutions and world transformations, (Routledge 2013) and International global governance, (Sage Publications 2013). His research is guided by an interest in international relations
theory and global political and cultural transversality. He has presented his work at conferences
around the world, including Indonesia, Thailand, Austria, France, Hungary, Canada, the UK,

Mexico, and the USA. He was formerly Deputy Director of the Global Cities Institute at RMIT
University, Australia.
Claire Sutherland lectures in Southeast Asian politics at Durham University in the UK. Her core

research interests are nationalist ideology and nation-building, with a comparative focus on
European and Southeast Asian cases, and she has a developing interest in museum representations
of the nation, migration, and citizenship. Publications include Soldered states: nation-building in
Germany and Vietnam (2010) and Nationalism in the twenty-first century: challenges and responses (2012).
Thomas Swerts is a PhD Candidate in Sociology at the University of Chicago. He previously

received his Master’s degree in Political Science at the University of Leuven. His research
interests include irregular migration, citizenship studies, social movements, and political theory.
He recently published on transnational environmental activism in India (2013). For his dissertation research, he is currently conducting a comparative ethnographic study of the political
mobilization of undocumented migrants in Chicago and Brussels. He also serves as a manuscript reviewer for the American Journal of Sociology and the International Journal of Urban and
Regional Research.
Noah Tamarkin is Assistant Professor of Comparative Studies at the Ohio State University. He
was a 2012–2013 Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Penn
Humanities Forum. He received his PhD in Cultural Anthropology from the University of
California Santa Cruz in 2011. His work has appeared in The Annals of the American Academy of
Political and Social Science and is fourthcoming in Cultural Anthropology. He is currently completing a book entitled Jewish blood, African bones: The Afterlives of Gentic Ancestry.
Katherine E. Tonkiss is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the School of Government and

Society, University of Birmingham, where she was also awarded her PhD in 2012. She recently
published her first monograph, Migration and identity in a postnational world, with Palgrave
Macmillan, and has also published a range of journal articles on subjects including migration
ethics, postnationalism, European citizenship, and national identity.
Bryan S. Turner is the Presidential Professor of Sociology at the Graduate Center, the City
University of New York. He is a Professorial fellow at the Australian Catholic University,
Melbourne, Autralia. He recently published Rights and Virtues (2008) and Religion and Modern
Society: Citizenship, Secularization and the State (2011). He is one of the chief editors of the journal Citizenship Studies. He was awarded a Doctor of Letters by Cambridge University in 2009.

Peter Vermeersch is a Professor of Politics at the University of Leuven in Belgium (KU

Leuven), where he is affiliated with the Institute for International and European Policy and the

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Contributors

Centre for Research on Peace and Development. In 2007 and 2008, he was a visiting scholar at
the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, Harvard University. He is the author of
The Romani movement: minority politics and ethnic mobilization in contemporary Central Europe (2006)
and Het vredesfront (‘The peace front’, 2011).
Laura van Waas, PhD, is Senior Researcher and Manager of the Statelessness Programme of

Tilburg Law School in the Netherlands. She is the author of Nationality matters – statelessness
under international law (2008), an in-depth analysis of the international normative framework
relating to statelessness, in addition to numerous other academic publications on nationality and
statelessness. She has worked for UNHCR on several successive statelessness projects, drafting
public information materials, developing training programmes and delivering training on statelessness, and undertaking comparative regional research on statelessness situations. She has also
been commissioned to undertake research or provide training for a number of other international organizations.
Maggie Walter, PhD, a descendant of the Trawlwoolway people from north-eastern Tasmania,

is a sociologist at the University of Tasmania. Her other roles include: Deputy Director of the
National Indigenous Researcher and Knowledges Network, editorial board member of
the journal Native American and Indigenous Studies, and long-term steering committee member of
the national Longitudinal Study of Indigenous Children. Recent publications include Indigenous
statistics: a quantitative research methodology (2013) and The globalizing era and citizenship for indigenous Australian women (2010).
Kathryn L. Wegner is a College Research Associate at Clare College, the University of
Cambridge. A historian of education, she earned a PhD from the University of Illinois at

Chicago in 2010, and is working on a book, Progressive citizenships: schooling youth in immigrant
Chicago, 1900–1940.
Sarah Marie Wiebe is an Assistant Teaching Professor at the University of Victoria. Her dis-

sertation Anatomy of place: ecological citizenship in Canada’s Chemical Valley examined struggles for
environmental and reproductive justice and the impact of pollution on the Aamjiwnaang First
Nation. She has several forthcoming publications on the politics of reproductive justice and
ecologies of indigenous citizenship. At the nexus of citizenship, biopolitics, and environmental
politics, her research interests focus on the role of the body in citizen protest, mobilization, and
struggles for knowledge. In addition to researching and writing on these topics, she has also
published on critical methodologies and is currently working on several projects emphasizing
visual research methods. As a collaborative researcher, she assisted indigenous youth with the
production of a documentary film, Indian givers, which is publicly available online.
Hannah Wittman is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Land and Food Systems at the

University of British Columbia in Vancouver. She conducts collaborative research on food
sovereignty, local food systems, and agrarian citizenship with peasant and farming networks in
Brazil, Guatemala, and Canada. Latta and Wittman’s co-edited volume Environment and citizenship in Latin America: natures, subjects and struggles (2012) examines intersections of environment
and citizenship from various geographic and disciplinary perspectives. Her work also appears in
the Journal of Rural Studies, Journal of Peasant Studies, Agriculture and Human Values, Canadian
Journal of Development Studies, and Human Organization.

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Contributors

Sezai Ozan Zeybek is an Assistant Professor at Bilgi University in Istanbul. He had tried to

avoid military service as long he could, worked the system, and finally got a letter of exemption.

His piece in this book with Hilâl Alkan is partly a review of that three-year-long struggle. Since
then, he has taught on postcolonial thought and political ecology in Turkey and published essays
on urban ecology, militarism, and provincial towns. In the summer of 2013, he took part in the
Turkish Occupy Movement for Gezi Park – a hopeful new avenue for Citizenship Studies.

xxi


Acknowledgements

We knew from the start that we wanted this Handbook to both shape a critical agenda for the
field of citizenship studies and at the same time provide a glimpse of what people who are doing
research in the field thought was important, vital, and relevant. To balance these two admittedly
challenging aims, we combined an open call for contributions with carefully selected invitations
to those whose work we find impressive. The very high number of submissions to our call for
contributions and the enthusiastic response to our invitations were evidence of the vitality and
variety of the field. We are immensely grateful to those who took the time to submit a proposal and all who accepted our invitations. To all the contributors to the Handbook we express
our thanks for writing such rich, challenging, and politically incisive chapters. The high level
of professionalism that each author demonstrated in meeting deadlines and responding to our
successive comments was truly edifying. We learned so much from the chapters and we think
readers of this Handbook will share our enthusiasm in reading them.
We believe that the global scope of the Handbook as well as the conceptual depth and empirical richness of the individual chapters demonstrates the creativity, commitment, and intellectual
courage that characterize citizenship studies today.
Our greatest thanks go to Jack Harrington, who served as the managing editor of the
Handbook. In addition to his formidable administrative and organizational skills that kept everyone and everything on track, Jack emerged as a challenging intellectual interlocutor whose
ideas and contributions helped shape our thinking about globalizing citizenship studies. We are
immensely grateful to him and very pleased that he accepted our invitation to write the introductory guide to the volume.
We received invaluable support for this project from Lisa Pilgram and Radha Ray at the
Open University. Our editor at Routledge, Gerhard Boomgaarden, with Emily Briggs and
Emma Hart, have been extremely supportive of the project from day one. Thanks also to

Nick Holdstock and Donald Watt for their expert copy-editing skills and to Sue Usborne for
Meticulous proofreading.
Engin Isin would also like to acknowledge that this project has received funding from the
European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme
(FP7/2007–2013) / ERC grant agreement n° 249379. Peter Nyers acknowledges the financial
and institutional support given by the Institute of Globalization and the Human Condition at
McMaster University.
Finally, we thank, as always, our partners and families: Evelyn, Oona, Géza, and Bea.
Without their edifying presence in our lives a project such as this would neither be possible nor
perhaps even a sensible endeavour.

xxii


Introduction
Globalizing citizenship studies
Engin F. Isin and Peter Nyers

The field of citizenship: legality and performativity
There are various ways of defining citizenship and, as we have witnessed in the interdisciplinary field of citizenship studies, each falls short of a satisfactory clarity or comprehensiveness.
Whether citizenship is defined as membership, status, practice, or even performance, it carries
an already assumed conception of politics, culture, spatiality, temporality, and sociality. To say,
for example, that ‘citizenship is membership of the nation-state’ assumes so much and leaves
so much out that it becomes an analytically pointless statement. Ironically, it is also the most
common definition offered today. Similarly, to say that ‘citizenship is performance’ leaves as
much unsaid as said about the way in which it comes into being and functions.
Is there a wide-ranging approach that can capture something essential about citizenship
without making too many assumptions about what it involves? Is there a definition that leaves
plenty of room for questions but still provides a focused perspective? Our best offer is to define citizenship as an ‘institution’ mediating rights between the subjects of politics and the polity to which these subjects belong. There are several things of note in this minimalist yet broad-ranging definition. First,
‘institution’ here should obviously not imply a narrow conception of organization. It implies

a broader conception of processes through which something is enacted, created, and rendered
relatively durable and stable but still contestable, surprising, and inventive. Second, we use the
term ‘polity’ to move away from the idea that the state is the sole source of authority for recognizing and legislating rights. There are international polities such as the European Union or the
United Nations as well as many other covenants, agreements and charters that constitute polities
other than the state. Third, note that we suggest using ‘political subjects’ rather than ‘citizens’
as the agents of the mediation in hand. This is because not all political subjects will have the
designation of citizens. This also clarifies our use of ‘belongs’, which we take to include official
and non-official forms, legal and extra-legal belongings. Note also that we use ‘subjects’ in the
plural because citizenship involves collective mediations and not just the relationship individuals
have with their polity. Either way, whether certain political subjects can make claims to being,
or constitute themselves as, citizens is an important aspect of the politics of citizenship or politics
for citizenship. Finally, note the double meaning of ‘political subjects’. Just now we used it to
signify those people who have constituted themselves as subjects of politics in the sense that they
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Engin F. Isin and Peter Nyers

act as political subjects. But ‘political subjects’ can also mean those issues that are the topic of discussion under the designation ‘political’. In other words, the topics that come under discussion
during the mediation of rights between political subjects and polities are themselves a political
subject. So when we say ‘mediation between the subjects of politics and the polity to which
they belong’, we mean that politics for citizenship involves both where and how this mediation
occurs, who becomes implicated in these rights, and what rights are the focus of mediation.
Yet this wide-ranging but focused statement still belies the fact that the citizen of a polity
almost never belongs only to that polity but to several nested, if not overlapping and conflicting, series of polities ranging from the city, region, the state, and the international. Clearly, in
the contemporary world the dominant polity is the state, but even its dominance is now implicated in various international and regional polities evinced by international covenants (e.g. the
European Convention on Human Rights), multilateral agreements (e.g. the North American
Free Trade Agreement), supranational bodies (e.g. the European Union) and shared sovereignty
arrangements (e.g. Scotland or Quebec). This is further complicated by the fact that many citizens (and non-citizens) in the contemporary world do not reside in their birthplace but in their
adopted countries. All this places a citizen in a web of rights and duties through which he or

she is called upon to performatively negotiate a particular combination that is always a complex
relationship.
For these reasons it is misleading to begin thinking about citizenship as a unified (or unifying) and static relationship. A Chinese government cannot have a unified and singular relation
with its citizens, since their lives are mediated not only through their rights from, and duties
to, the Chinese state but also through human rights, environmental or cultural discourses to
international politics beyond its borders. Similarly, a British government cannot have exclusive
relations with British citizens, as their lives are implicated in, and interdependent with, the
European Union as a supranational polity, the European Convention on Human Rights, and
myriad other mutual rights and duties toward other polities. Even in the area of national security –
long the domain of the sovereign, often in exceptionalist forms – private corporations have
emerged as competitors in the emerging market for providing protection to citizens, militaries,
individuals, and neighbourhoods. Whilst still dominant, the state, therefore, cannot be said to
have an exclusive claim over its members.
How do we then approach citizenship in the contemporary world? If indeed it is a negotiated
and dynamic institution mediating rights between political subjects and their polities, two key
dimensions require emphasizing. One is the combination of rights and duties that defines citizenship in a polity. The other is the performance of citizenship. Research in citizenship studies
tends to follow parallel lines with scholars adopting or favouring one dimension over the other.
We consider both dimensions to be indispensable for understanding how citizenship mediates
rights between citizens and the polity to which he or she belongs.
The combination of rights and duties is always an outcome of social struggles that finds
expression in political and legal institutions. Traditionally, in modern state societies, three types
of rights (civil, political, and social) and three types of duties (conscription, taxation, and participation) defined the relationship between the citizen and the state. Civil rights include the right
to free speech, to conscience, and to dignity; political rights include franchise and standing for
office; and, social rights include unemployment insurance, universal health care, and welfare.
Although conscription is rapidly disappearing as a citizenship duty, taxation is as strong as ever
and jury duty, even as it is increasingly challenged under certain circumstances, still serves a fundamental role. Moreover, new rights have appeared such as sexual, cultural, and environmental
rights with varying degrees of success of institutionalization (e.g. witness the struggles over
same-sex marriage in the United States and Europe). Again, as we have mentioned, whether
2