Citizenship as cultural: Towards a theory of cultural citizenship

Traditional notions of citizenship have focused on formal membership, including access to rights, in a national community. More recent scholarship has expanded this definition beyond citizenship as a legal status to focus on struggles for societal inclusion of and justice for marginalized populations, citizenship as both a social and symbolic boundary of exclusion, and post‐colonial and post‐national citizenship. In this article, I review conceptions of citizenship that involve more than legal rights. After reviewing this scholarship, I discuss the theoretical framework of cultural citizenship – a move to center the cultural underpinnings of modern citizenship in analyses of citizenship as a boundary of inclusion and exclusion. I use the example of France as one site to locate the connections between citizenship and culture and the cultural underpinnings and implications of citizenship more broadly.     

Theorizing and Analyzing Citizenship in Multicultural Societies

I argue that sociologists have directed insufficient attention to the study of citizenship. When citizenship is studied, sociologists tend to concentrate on just one facet: rights. I elaborate four conceptual facets of citizenship. I link two—citizenship as rights and belonging—to theoretical elaborations of multiculturalism. Considering multiculturalism as a state discourse and set of policies, rather than a political or normative theory, I outline linkages between multiculturalism and two additional facets of citizenship: legal status and participation. Over the last 15 years, the idea of multiculturalism has come under withering criticism, especially in Europe, in part because it is claimed that multiculturalism undermines common citizenship. Yet countries with more multicultural policies and a stronger discourse of pluralism and recognition are places where immigrants are more likely to become citizens, more trusting of political institutions, and more attached to the national identity. There is also little evidence that multicultural policies fuel majority backlash, and some modest evidence that such policies enlarge conceptions of inclusive membership. By studying claims‐making and the equality of immigrant‐origin groups, we see that the participatory aspect of citizenship needs to take center stage in future work in political sociology, social theory, social movements, immigration, and race/ethnicity.     

Citizenship Beyond Borders: A Cross‐National Study of Dual Citizenship*

As global integration increases, the implications for state boundaries and citizens’ identity grow more significant. Some scholars suggest that the recognition of dual citizenship reveals the extent to which cross‐national immigration requires states to formally recognize a multiplicity of national identities through dual citizenship ( Aleinikoff and Klusmeyer 2002 ; Castles and Davidson 2000 ; Falk 1994 ). We propose that scholars need to additionally consider citizenship identity as a source of national assimilation of the international community and postnational citizenship in world culture ( Brubaker 1992a ; Faist 2004 ; Soysal 1994 ; Turner 2001 ). We use logistic regression to evaluate this argument by examining factors that lead states to enact legislation recognizing dual citizenship. The resulting analysis suggests that the recognition of dual citizenship reflects national, ex‐colonial, and postnational cultural identities rather than the presence of cross‐national immigration.     

Naming Regulations and Indigenous Rights in Argentina

In Argentina, parents must register their children at the Civil Registry to receive a national identification card, choosing their child's name from a list maintained by provincial Civil Registry offices. This process regulates all citizens, but it is particularly onerous for indigenous parents who wish to give their child an indigenous name. In tracing the letter and practice of the law and responses to the law, I argue that the regulation of names is a political process with racial and gender assumptions built into it. These assumptions translate into exclusionary implications for membership in national identity. For indigenous people in Argentina, this is particularly problematic, as they are already largely invisible to the national body. Although indigenous people are challenging aspects of the law they are not challenging the very premise of the law—that the state has the right to control their access to citizenship through a law regulating children's names. Finally, the successes of indigenous parents in using an indigenous name has the unintended consequence of turning indigenous names into cultural commodities, thus diminishing the validity of indigenous political critiques of the law.     

Rights and controls in the management of migration: the case of Germany

In May 1999 Germany took a significant step away from its reliance on blood based belonging, revising its nationality law to introduce an element of territory ( jus soli ) in the designation of citizenship. This paper offers Germany as a case study in the management of migration through a hierarchical system for the granting of rights, and considers the likely impact of the new law on the legal structures of inclusion and exclusion. It is argued that alongside the enhanced recognition of the original guestworker population a set of contradictory pressures now dominate the politics of migration – the recognition of human rights, the management of the labour market and the protection of welfare resources. These pressures are mediated by the granting and withholding of rights as part of a system of selection, surveillance, deterrence and control which has broader implications for our thinking about citizenship.     

Naturalising,Neutralising Women's Bodies: The “Headscarf Affair” and the Politics of Representation

The recent “headscarf affair” has created a divisive national crisis in several European countries. Like Turkey, France and Germany have introduced legislation prohibiting “conspicuous” religious symbols in government institutions. The article argues that interpretations of ‘Muslim’ female head covering as a sign of oppression ignore their resemblance to European symbols of ideal womanhood. The question of the ‘ethnicity’ of the symbol is thus elusive, and the assertion of categorical difference can be challenged on the level of citizenship law. Recent amendments to German citizenship law based on jus sanguinis have eased immigrants' adoption of citizenship, diminishing the contrast with the French jus soli. Thus, in Germany there has been a shift from the emphasis on the transmission of substance toward display of cultural competence through other forms of embodiment. In both Germany and France, in key social locations of state reproduction, national belonging and loyalty to the state must be demonstrated through linguistic competence and modes of bodily performance that mainly focus on women.     

Managing Contradiction: Civic Stratification and Migrants'Rights1

Political and academic interest in cross‐national migration has generated two very different and potentially polarized positions. One perspective emphasizes the continuing power of the nation state, while the other sees migration, and more specifically migrants' rights, as the manifestation of an emergent ‘post‐national’ society. This article offers a conceptual framework which addresses this polarization through the concept of civic stratification (Lockwood, 1996). In illustrating its application, the study shows how such an approach goes beyond a traditional citizenship framework (e.g., Marshall, 1950) in considering degrees of partial membership, but remains cautious with respect to claims about universal, transnational rights.     

Optional citizenship; articulation of interests and identities in naturalisations

Citizenship should be understood as a bundle of rights rather than as a legal expression of national membership. The citizenship status of immigrants is characterised by their human rights, their rights of external citizenship provided by sending countries, and their rights as resident aliens provided by receiving states. In this perspective naturalisation is only one amongst several options open to migrants to change and improve their legal position. The normative aspect of citizenship implies that general and basic rights should be distributed equally and universally within society. Raising the standard of alien rights, allowing for dual citizenship and conceiving of naturalisation as an individual option rather than as an obligation or as a discretionary decision of the receiving state would contribute to a more equal distribution of rights within societies of immigration. A model for explaining individual decision to naturalise is presented which is based on a combined analysis of interests and identities. The main factors that enter the model are rules applied by state authorities, social positions occupied by immigrants, the cost/benefit balance of rights in the transition to internal citizenship, and affiliations to different communities in the sending and the receiving state. The combination of rules, rights and social positions makes it possible to distinguish an objective value of internal citizenship for immigrants from transaction prices and subjective utilities. The main theoretical argument is that decisions can be influenced both by a perception of rational individual interests and by communal identities.     

Freighting English law: interpreting maritime spaces,law and the Armenian strategies in the Indian Ocean

In this article, I examine the formation of the English East India Company's legal regime in the Indian Ocean between the mid‐eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. I look at how this process affected maritime trade and space from the vantage point of Armenian merchants' interactions with the colonial regime in the courts of law. The productive tensions arising from the colonial regime's new protocols and the merchants' leveraging tactics make for a complex story of Anglo‐Armenian dialogue. I argue that indigenous agency in the colonial courts complicated the binary colonial/indigenous structure. The idea of legal pluralism that emerges from the article suggests that the identity of an imperial subject or the definition of law was neither a given nor simply imposed through colonial coercion but was a complex product of a long‐term dialogue and rationalization.     

Institutional Pluralism,Organizations, and Actors: A Review

The institutional logics perspective holds the promise of delivering where neo‐institutionalist theory has disappointed – the ability to address key societal problems such as inequality, social discrimination, and economic insecurity – a promise that, as of yet, has been unrealized. In this review, I provide an overview of the body of work within the institutional logics perspective that addresses the co‐existence of multiple institutional logics influencing identities, values, cognitive frameworks, and practices – institutional pluralism. I demonstrate how pluralism diverges from conventional neo‐institutionalist theory in its view of institutional fields as heterogeneous spaces. I then review the implications for organizations and social actors responding to multiple logics in the institutional environment. In the discussion section, I argue that the study of pluralism, in acknowledging human agency, politics, and collective mobilization, opens the door for creative resolutions to societal problems hitherto overlooked in neo‐institutional theory. Despite the promise, I address key research areas that remain unresolved or under‐addressed in the institutional pluralism perspective.     

The relationality of law and culture: Dominant approaches and new directions for cultural sociologists

Much of the cultural sociological research in law and culture falls into one of the following approaches: (1) law as a structure that enables and constrains culture; (2) culture as a structure that enables and constrains law; and (3) law as a cultural toolkit or repertoire upon which actors draw to orient strategies for action. This article briefly reviews these approaches, then, drawing from the generative socio‐legal tradition in law as culture, highlights a fourth approach. While law and culture are often analyzed as autonomous forces in ongoing contention, negotiation, and reconciliation, the socio‐legal approach conceptualizes the relationality of law and culture as constituted by ongoing contention. I argue that this relational approach may offer cultural sociologists who do not study law a framework for better analyzing how power undergirds, enables and constrains cultural meaning. I offer examples to illustrate the utility of this research agenda through three areas of interest for cultural sociologists: (1) embodiment; (2) emotions; and (3) political culture. Such an approach encourages a two‐way bridge between cultural sociology and socio‐legal studies conceptualizing culture as a dynamic system of power relations.     

State carnivals and the subvention of multiculturalism in Singapore

Increasing attention is being paid to the specificities of Asian multiculturalism in relation to ethnic pluralism, citizenship and developmental state formation. This article examines these relationships by analysing three carnival events in colonial and postcolonial Singapore that were organized by the state to promote its official multiculturalism. Through its cultural logics of horizontal racial segmentation, cascading symbolic authority from the state to co-opted communal representatives and multi-modal ritual iteration, the 1937 King George VI coronation celebrations proffered an imperial multiculturalism based on mediating plural groups and procedural norms. Adopting the same cultural logics in the 1970s, the newly-independent nation-state revived and transformed Chingay, a creole Chinese religious procession, into an annual parade celebrating the nation as comprising racially plural groups bound together by the modern ethos of progress the developmental state exemplified. In the 2000s, Chingay has been turned into an international spectacle celebrating Singapore as a cosmopolitan global city of hybridizing multiculturalism. But indicative of new racial-class segmentation, the old nation-building pluralism is promoted by Racial Harmony Day carnivals held in suburban public housing neighborhoods. This bifurcated multiculturalism reflects the developmental state's attempts to deal with new citizenship trends as they grind against the old ethnic pluralism. While faced with the same issues globalization brings, this postcolonial multiculturalism is distinctively different from liberal multiculturalism, not least because the subvention of multiculturalism is achieved through the state appropriation of vernacular cultural practices through its carnivals.     

Crafting the Neoliberal State: Workfare,Prisonfare, and Social Insecurity1

In Punishing the Poor, I show that the ascent of the penal state in the United States and other advanced societies over the past quarter‐century is a response to rising social insecurity, not criminal insecurity; that changes in welfare and justice policies are interlinked, as restrictive “workfare” and expansive “prisonfare” are coupled into a single organizational contraption to discipline the precarious fractions of the postindustrial working class; and that a diligent carceral system is not a deviation from, but a constituent component of, the neoliberal Leviathan. In this article, I draw out the theoretical implications of this diagnosis of the emerging government of social insecurity. I deploy Bourdieu’s concept of “bureaucratic field” to revise Piven and Cloward’s classic thesis on the regulation of poverty via public assistance, and contrast the model of penalization as technique for the management of urban marginality to Michel Foucault’s vision of the “disciplinary society,” David Garland’s account of the “culture of control,” and David Harvey’s characterization of neoliberal politics. Against the thin economic conception of neoliberalism as market rule, I propose a thick sociological specification entailing supervisory workfare, a proactive penal state, and the cultural trope of “individual responsibility.” This suggests that we must theorize the prison not as a technical implement for law enforcement, but as a core political capacity whose selective and aggressive deployment in the lower regions of social space violates the ideals of democratic citizenship.     

STATEHOOD EXPERIENCE,LEGAL TRADITIONS,AND CLIMATE CHANGE POLICIES

This study investigates how the implementation of modern climate change policies is related to former colonies' length of state history and their legal heritage. We argue that countries with longer statehood experience around the time of colonization were better equipped to implement the legal philosophies transplanted by their colonial powers. Therefore, the implications of receiving British common law versus French civil law should be particularly important in countries with a greater accumulated history of statehood. Using a cross‐section of up to 78 former colonies, our results provide support for this hypothesis. In particular, our estimates demonstrate that common law countries have weaker modern climate change policies than civil law countries and the difference is inflated by a longer statehood experience, measured by the length of state history from 1 to 1800 AD. Legal origin has no effect in areas which, by the time of colonization, had no statehood experience. Finally, we report similar results for the pattern of labor market regulations. (JEL K15, K31, K32, O44, Q54, Q58)     

National Identity and Citizenship in the People's Republic of China and the Republic of Korea

Abstract  This paper points out the limitations of culturalist approaches to the PRC and the ROK and deals with factors that contribute to the legal definition of citizenship in those two counties. The understanding of political and economic interests, rather than cultural aspects, is important in explaining the changes of the definition of citizenship there. China institutionalized a state-centered national identity, while Korea constructed an ethnic-centered national identity as they became integrated into the international order as nation-states. However, both the PRC and ROK made important changes in their legal definitions of citizenship regardless of their distinct national identities in China and Korea.     

Galas,biras, state funerals and the necropolitan imagination in re‐constructions of the Zimbabwean nation, 1980–2008

This study focuses on the regime of the spectacle as it is deployed by the postcolonial state to establish hegemony and claim legitimacy, with reference to Zimbabwe from 1980 up to the establishment of the Government of National Unity in 2008. This period is dominated by the ZANU–PF narrative of the nation, in which imagining the nation excludes and disposes of undesirable individuals and groups. The study is framed by Achille Mbembe’s critique of the postcolony with special reference to two key terms – metafiction and dramaturgy of the state’s magnificence – in order to analyse how spectacle creates and occludes meaning. Guy Debord’s concept of the ‘society of the spectacle’ has also been adapted here to extend Mbembe’s analysis of the spectacular in the postcolony. In the context of the Zimbabwean postcolony, this allows for a reading of post‐2000 legislative and bureaucratic manoeuvres as marking a surge in the mediatisation of politics to demonstrate state power using symbols, described here as symbolic capital, to forge national homogeneity. The state sought to re‐energise its patriotic metafiction through galas, biras, funerals, commemorations and other state rituals. A particular obsession with the cemetery defines the necropolitan imagination and underpins an aesthetics of heroism. This article explores the implications this has had in the production of vulgar materialism, violence and insecurities of citizenship and nationality.     

Transnational regimes of labor and statelessness: Intersections of citizenship regimes and local norms in East and Southeast Asia

This article offers a review of the literature on transnational labor regimes and statelessness to pursue further theorization from East and Southeast Asian contexts. The main focus is on how local norms (local sense of belonging, local moral code, and local hierarchies) are entangled with national‐level citizenship regimes to legitimate the discrimination of certain people to be statelessness and secure low‐wage migrant workers for the new global labor regime. First, traditional literature on citizenship and statelessness was reviewed; binary theoretical frameworks (including citizens/excluding non‐citizens) based on political recognition were indicated as the main limitations. Second, recent theories arguing for an intersection between national citizenship regimes and a new global labor regime were reviewed. Third, recent theories that illuminate the importance of local contexts in determining citizens' rights were reviewed based on formal exclusion and informal inclusion as well as formal inclusion and informal exclusion. Finally, it was concluded that further theorization is needed on how citizenship regimes and local norms intersect to produce statelessness, securing low‐wage migrant workers for the global labor regime through the global assemblages approach. Through the paper, East and Southeast Asia were illuminated as potentially fruitful research sites for further theorization on the topic.     

Labour,Legality and shifts in the Public/Private divide

This article discusses the changing role that work performed in private homes has played, and continues to play, in migration law in the Netherlands and at the EU level. It explores to what degree work performed in the home is defined as (exploitative) contractual labour or as inherent to family life, and what this means for claims to residence rights as a precursor to citizenship. It does this by reviewing case law of the European Court of Justice (CJEU) and of the European Court of Human Rights (EctHR) against the background of the Dutch case. It reveals tension between how citizenship is constructed and reproduced at the national level and how it is constructed and reproduced at the EU level. Following Adam McKeown, this article concludes that different perspectives on (reproductive) labour as a qualification for citizenship may reflect different perspectives on (reproductive) labour and the quality of citizenship.

Policy Implications

• Third Country Nationals must be allowed to reside in the EU with their EU children, to ensure the latter's effective enjoyment of fundamental rights.
• Policies to combat trafficking of domestic workers must respect family life.
• Family migration policies must allow individual family members enough scope to resist exploitation within families.
• Policies concerning labour protection, social protection and migration should no longer take the breadwinner‐citizen as point of departure, but the current reality of flexible labour relations in which the distinctions between home and work, and between employment and self‐employment, are no longer sharply defined.

     

Everyday Restriction: Central American Women and the State in the Mexico‐Guatemala Border City of Tapachula

Media coverage and emerging scholarship have brought increasing international attention to the urgent humanitarian crisis facing Central American transmigrants as they navigate landscapes of violence in Mexico. While stories of Central American immigrants who remain in Mexico are largely absent from this coverage, there is arguably a “Central Americanization” occurring on the southern border through this permanent settlement. Central Americans choosing to establish themselves in the border state of Chiapas do so in a socio‐spatial and political context defined by the introduction of “progressive” state‐ and national‐level migration policies on the one hand and the persistence of discrimination and violence on the other. We know little about the implementation of these policies on the ground, namely how they are applied and the impacts they have on the immigrant experience in Mexico. To begin to fill this gap, this paper focuses on the experiences of Central American immigrant women living in the Mexico‐Guatemala border city of Tapachula. Employing a feminist geopolitical lens, which encourages conducting research and analysis at diverse scales, it examines their everyday interactions with low‐ to mid‐level representatives of the Mexican state as they seek to avail themselves of their legal and social citizenship rights, and the impacts of these interactions on their livelihoods. This article argues that low‐ to mid‐level officials’ actions reveal the importance of a form of extra‐official, subtle, yet pervasive regulation through which immigrant women are denied rights they are entitled to, inducing negative impacts to their livelihoods, which I term everyday restriction.     

Women and citizenship post‐trafficking: the case of Nepal

This article analyses the relationship between gender, sexuality and citizenship embedded in models of citizenship in the Global South, specifically in South Asia, and the meanings associated with having – or not having – citizenship. It does this through an examination of women's access to citizenship in Nepal in the context of the construction of the emergent nation state in the ‘new’ Nepal ‘post‐conflict’. Our analysis explores gendered and sexualized constructions of citizenship in this context through a specific focus on women who have experienced trafficking, and are beginning to organize around rights to sustainable livelihoods and actively lobby for changes in citizenship rules which discriminate against women. Building from this, in the final section we consider important implications of this analysis of post‐trafficking experiences for debates about gender, sexuality and citizenship more broadly.