From Alien to Elector: Citizenship and Belonging in the Global City

Researchers have productively explored how global cities manage transnational processes, and in turn are transformed by them. Surprisingly, however, this scholarship stands mute on the question of the relationship of these cities to the institutions of the nation-state. This paper argues that by re-imbedding global cities within the institutional context of the nation-state, scholars can productively explore whether and how these cities may transform state sovereignty. I elaborate this argument by illustrating how the politics of citizenship within cities increasingly challenges the state's capacity to construct and maintain a political community. The paper presents case studies of four cities that have considered enfranchising immigrants. I find that although the politics of citizenship within global cities partially unbundles the institutional logic of citizenship and nationhood, state institutions nevertheless continue to shape the rights and opportunities of noncitizens. To explain observed differences between global cities, one must account for the state's continued ability to shape transnational politics.

Los investigadores han explorado productivamente la manera como las ciudades globales manejan los procesos transnacionales y a su vez han sido transformados por estos mismos. Sin embargo, sorprendentemente, esta investigación no tiene respuesta ante el interrogante sobre la relación entre estas ciudades y las instituciones de la nación-estado. Este artículo argumenta que con la reintegración de ciudades globales dentro del contexto de nación-estado, los académicos pueden explorar de una manera productiva si estas ciudades pueden transformar la soberanía estatal y en qué forma. Yo amplío este argumento ilustrando cómo la política de ciudadanía dentro de las ciudades reta cada vez más a la capacidad del estado de construir y mantener una comunidad política. El artículo presenta casos de estudio de cuatro ciudades que han considerado dar el derecho de sufragio a inmigrantes. Encuentro que a pesar de que la política de ciudadanía dentro de las ciudades globales separa parcialmente la lógica institucional entre ciudadanía y nacionalidad, las instituciones estatales, no obstante, continúan forjando los derechos y oportunidades de los no ciudadanos. Para explicar las diferencias respetadas entre ciudades globales, se debe contar con la habilidad continua del estado para forjar la política transnacional.     

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 on the margins: Citizenship,social work and social action

Drawing on a critical synthesis of the two main citizenship traditions, so as to construct citizenship as both a status and a practice, linked through the notion of human agency, the article explores citizenship's exclusionary and inclusionary sides within both a national and international framework. Within a national framework, the implications of citizenship's ‘false universalism’ are explored as the basis for a recasting of citizenship in a way that addresses the tension between universalism and particularity or difference. Within an international framework, a human rights perspective is introduced as a means of challenging citizenship's exclusion of nation state outsiders, most notably immigrants and asylum-seekers. This approach draws upon a multi-tiered conceptualisation of citizenship stretching from the local through to the global.

Some implications for social work practice and policy are then discussed in relation to support for active citizenship in deprived communities and anti-poverty action in which poor people themselves have a voice. This includes a brief consideration of political exclusion; the potential of self-help groups and community social work and development work; and user-involvement. The article concludes that citizenship offers social work a framework that embraces anti-poverty work, principles of partnership and anti-discriminatory practice and an inclusionary stance.     

Women's Changing Relations to the State and Citizenship: Caring and Intergenerational Relations in Globalizing Western Democracies*

En sociologie, l'évolution des rapports entre les femmes et l'État s'aborde sous trois points de vue: 1) les femmes et l'État‐providence; 2) le récent concept de citoyenneté; et 3) la cohésion sociale. La présente analyse repose sur les fondements suivants: le point jusqu'où l'État peut investir dans les droits des femmes ou leurs gains et les protéger dans le contexte où l'État lui‐même se rétrecit; la contradiction entre le rétrécissement des États‐providence, different pour les hommes et les femmes, et la phénoménale progression du travail rémunéré des femmes; enfin le degré de parallélisme existant entre la marginalisation croissante des femmes et les inquiétudes quant à la cohésion sociale. Les soins et les rapports entre les générations sont passés en revue pour certaines démocraties occidentales en voie de mondialisation. De nouvelles normativités de citoyenneté pour les femmes sont présentées. Women's changing relations to the state are addressed in three sociological literatures: 1) women and welfare states; 2) the new citizenship literature; and 3) social cohesion. The basis for this analysis: the degree to which the state can be protector and investor in women's rights or gains, if the state itself is shrinking; the contradiction between the gendered shrinking of welfare states and women's dramatic increases in paid work; and the degree to which deepening marginalization of women parallels growing concerns about social cohesion. Caring and intergenerational relations are examined in select globalizing Western democracies. New normativities of citizenship for women are delineated.     

Citizenship,Pluralism, and Modern Public Space

The article begins with the realist assumption in political science that posits that political violence and chaos occurs in the absence of the state, and that the international system is congenitally anarchic. Using the Y2K problem and the 11 September 2001 attack on the World Trade Center in New York as two instances of violent political phenomena within global modernity, this article examines notions of citizenship, pluralism, and their relationships with modern public space through the lens of 'public disaster' scenarios in which the breakdown of centralized systems of power tends to lead to chaos. However, public disasters also appear to create the opposite effect of bonding communities together in the face of adversity that leads to greater social cohesion rather than the breakdown of social institutions. The article tries to resolve this apparent enigma through several theories of public space, democracy, and civil society.     

Citizenship, poverty and the real will

The paper analyses the concept of citizenship in the work of Bernard and Helen Bosanquet against the backcloth of a broader intellectual and historical framework. The discussion then addresses three issues in relation to citizenship: class, markets and poverty. Each concept is introduced through the medium of T.H. Marshall's ideas on citizenship. Marshall's ideas are taken as broad markers for the discussion of the concept in the post 1945 era. The discussion of each concept is then analysed in relation to the Bosanquets’ theories. The basic conclusion is that many of the Bosanquets’ analyses and answers are both inappropriate and antique, however they do highlight certain intrinsic difficulties which are still very much part of twentieth century states.     

Civil Society Efficacy,Citizenship and Empowerment in Africa

This paper contributes to the debate on the limited efficacy of civil society in Africa. It examines the complex interface between notions of civil society and citizenship within the context of the postcolonial state in Africa. It argues that the bifurcated character of citizenship is implicated in the inefficacy of civil society. This is underlined by the limited achievements in social citizenship, aggravated by the economic crisis and neoliberal reforms of the 1980s and 1990s as well as the politics of regime sustenance. Political disengagement, drain on the moral content of public life and diminished collective orientation of citizens, aggravated conflicts within society, thereby, promoting a democratisation of disempowerment and a disorganised civil society.     

Transnationalisation,Public Communication and Active Citizenship. The Emergence of a Fragmented and Fluid European Public Sphere

This paper is focused on the emergence of the European public sphere debate. This discussion has become more and more prominent between scholars of European Studies who have given it both normative and empirical attention. This is due to a variety of reasons, but in particular the increase in research about the legitimacy of European integration, which has been the subject of a wide debate since at least the beginning of the 1990s. Firstly, the article critically assesses the normative arguments that have supported the development of the European public sphere, by focusing on the social, political and cultural dimensions of European integration. After having assessed this debate and underlined current challenges emerged in light of recent events (such as the euro‐crisis, the rise of euroscepticism and the rise in far right movements), the article then introduces the empirical research on the europeanisation of the public sphere, by looking at the development of an agenda that has more and more concentrated on the fragmentation and fluidity of such construct. This discussion is key to introduce the final part of the article, which focuses on the role of civil society in the broader European constituency and in the public sphere. The article highlights some of the ambiguities inherent to the current research agenda, by calling for a more comprehensive approach to study active citizenship in Europe that departs from a consideration of the NGOs activists as the main locus of analysis.     

业主委员会、准派系政治与基层治理——以一个上海街区为例

肇始于20世纪90年代的中国城市房产改革,以及随之而来的业主委员会的大量设立给基层政治带来了很大冲击。基于对上海一个居民区中所有业主委员会发展状况长达8年的深入跟踪调研,本文检视了此类新兴市民组织的运作机制及其对城市基层治理的影响。研究发现,虽然这些市民组织的建立源自国家启动的正式制度变迁,但社区非正式社会网络也对其实际运作产生重要影响。就外部影响来说,业主委员会为业主参与基层政治提供了机会和平台,有利于增强其利益表达和聚合能力,扩大社区自主权。但就内部效应而言,这些市民组织所面临的各种局限和制约,尤其是相关各方对关系网络的过度利用,又可能导致和加剧少数既得利益业主精英排斥大众参与的寡头统治和准派系政治,进而有损于基层治理和社区民主。     

Marginalizing the Self: A Study of Citizenship,Color, and Ethnoracial Identity in American Society

From 1870 to 1952, naturalization legislation in the United States of America restricted citizenship to “free white persons” and “persons of African nativity” or “African descent.” Individuals categorized as “members of the Mongolian race” or as of neither “free white” nor “African descent or nativity” were excluded from membership in the American political community and designated “aliens ineligible for citizenship in the United States.” Examination of the appellate and Supreme Court adjudications of these matters reveals a juridical rhetoric that functioned to marginalize all those declared ineligible for civic status. Although the reasoning process employed by the courts was not dissimilar from that arising whenever individual disparate aggregates must be classified according to a limited set of categories, in the situations under study, it produced and legitimated an invidious hierarchy of peoples, a race-prejudicial sense of vertical group position, and a fundamental departure from the universalistic and individualistic claims that defended America as a thoroughgoing civil society.