Refugees, repatriation and liberal citizenship

This article considers the meanings attached to refugeehood, repatriation and liberal citizenship in the twentieth century. Refugees are those who have been unjustly expelled from their political community. Their physical displacement is above all symbolic of a deeper political separation from the state and the citizenry. ‘Solving’ refugees’ exile is therefore not a question of halting refugees’ flight and reversing their movement, but requires political action restoring citizenship.All three ‘durable solutions’ developed by the international community in the twentieth century - repatriation, resettlement and local integration - are intended to restore a refugee's access to citizenship, and through citizenship the protection and expression of their fundamental human rights. Yet repatriation poses particular challenges for liberal political thought. The logic of repatriation reinforces the organization of political space into bounded nation-state territories. However, it is the exclusionary consequences of national controls over political membership - and through this of access to citizenship rights - that prompt mass refugee flows. Can a framework for repatriation be developed which balances national state order and liberal citizenship rights?This article argues that using the social contract model to consider the different obligations and pacts between citizens, societies and states can provide a theoretical framework through which the liberal idea of citizenship and national controls on membership can be reconciled.Historical evidence suggests that the connections in practice between ideas of citizenship and repatriation have been far more complex. In particular, debate between Western liberal and Soviet authoritarian/collectivist understandings of the relationship between citizen and state played a key role in shaping the refugee protection regime that emerged after World War II and remains in place today. Repatriation - or more accurately liberal resistance to non-voluntary refugee repatriation - became an important tool of Cold War politics and retains an important value for states interested in projecting and reaffirming the primacy of liberal citizenship values. Yet the contradictions in post-Cold War operational use of repatriation to ‘solve’ displacement, and a growing reliance on ‘state-building’ exercises to validate refugees’ returns demonstrates that tension remains between national state interests and the universal distribution of liberal rights, as is particularly evident when considering Western donor states’ contemporary policies on refugees and asylum. For both intellectual and humanitarian reasons there is therefore an urgent need for the political theory underpinning refugee protection to be closely examined, in order that citizenship can be placed at the centre of refugees’ ‘solutions’.     

The image of the city in modern literature

This article considers the meanings attached to refugeehood, repatriation and liberal citizenship in the twentieth century. Refugees are those who have been unjustly expelled from their political community. Their physical displacement is above all symbolic of a deeper political separation from the state and the citizenry. ‘Solving’ refugees’ exile is therefore not a question of halting refugees’ flight and reversing their movement, but requires political action restoring citizenship.

All three ‘durable solutions’ developed by the international community in the twentieth century – repatriation, resettlement and local integration – are intended to restore a refugee's access to citizenship, and through citizenship the protection and expression of their fundamental human rights. Yet repatriation poses particular challenges for liberal political thought. The logic of repatriation reinforces the organization of political space into bounded nation–state territories. However, it is the exclusionary consequences of national controls over political membership – and through this of access to citizenship rights – that prompt mass refugee flows. Can a framework for repatriation be developed which balances national state order and liberal citizenship rights?

This article argues that using the social contract model to consider the different obligations and pacts between citizens, societies and states can provide a theoretical framework through which the liberal idea of citizenship and national controls on membership can be reconciled.

Historical evidence suggests that the connections in practice between ideas of citizenship and repatriation have been far more complex. In particular, debate between Western liberal and Soviet authoritarian/collectivist understandings of the relationship between citizen and state played a key role in shaping the refugee protection regime that emerged after World War II and remains in place today. Repatriation – or more accurately liberal resistance to non-voluntary refugee repatriation – became an important tool of Cold War politics and retains an important value for states interested in projecting and reaffirming the primacy of liberal citizenship values. Yet the contradictions in post-Cold War operational use of repatriation to ‘solve’ displacement, and a growing reliance on ‘state-building’ exercises to validate refugees’ returns demonstrates that tension remains between national state interests and the universal distribution of liberal rights, as is particularly evident when considering Western donor states’ contemporary policies on refugees and asylum. For both intellectual and humanitarian reasons there is therefore an urgent need for the political theory underpinning refugee protection to be closely examined, in order that citizenship can be placed at the centre of refugees’ ‘solutions’.     

Anti‐corporate Campaigning and Corporate “Social” Responsibility: Towards Alternative Spaces of Citizenship?1

This paper seeks to bring together debates on anti‐corporate protest with discussions on the nature of corporate responsibility. It does so in order to examine the implications of this interaction between conflicting social forces for the constitution of citizenship on the one hand, and for an understanding of the corporation on the other. I first identify the significance of anti‐corporate activism within the current anti‐globalisation movement. The proclaimed emergence of an era of corporate citizenship is then examined. The spaces of engagement between anti‐corporate activism and corporate social responsibility are constructed through a variety of means, including ethical trading initiatives and corporate codes of conduct. In interpreting these engagements, I identify three contrasting perspectives on the spaces of citizenship that might result. These stress in turn the turbulence of a global civil society, the re‐definition of the national state, and the spatial discontinuities of democracy. I also situate corporate social responsibility practices as part of the discursive narrative of the corporate form, enabling a consideration of the extent to which it is potentially possible to de‐centre the corporation.     

Locating strangers: multiculturalism, citizenship and nationhood in Australia

Questions over identity politics, difference, and associated claims of authenticity, now occupy centre-stage in many countries. In this paper we focus on the nature of multiculturalism, citizenship and identity politics as they are emerging in Australian society. Essentially, we argue that the demands of political recognition of cultural particularity by specific groups are presenting complex challenges to the public institutions of contemporary liberalism that rest on the neutrality of the public sphere in its treatment of free and equal citizens regardless of race, gender or ethnicity. The ideas of nationhood and national consciousness still present themselves as essential aspects of contemporary political life, even though many questions concerning a re-conceptualization of nation and citizenship abound. This is the context through which the paper examines nationhood in Australia, particularly the points of tension arising from contrasting notions of citizenship and national culture. Our intention is to provide a glimpse of Australian society in the face of these changes and to draw some theoretical and analytical conclusions concerning the challenges to state and civil society.     

Decentralization,the State and Conflicts over Local Boundaries in Northern Ghana

Decentralization projects, such as that initiated by the Rawlings government in Ghana at the end of the 1980s, create a political space in which the relations between local political communities and the state are re‐negotiated. In many cases, the devolution of power intensifies special‐interest politics and political mobilization aiming at securing a ‘larger share of the national cake’, that is, more state funds, infrastructure and posts for the locality. To legitimate their claims vis‐à‐vis the state, civic associations (‘hometown’ unions), traditional rulers and other non‐state institutions often invoke some form of ‘natural’ solidarity, and decentralization projects thus become arenas of debate over the boundaries of community and the relationship between ‘local’ and national citizenship. This article analyses one such debate, in the former Lawra District of Ghana's Upper West Region, where the creation of new districts provoked protracted discussions, among the local political elite as well as the peasants and labour migrants, about the connections between land ownership and political authority, the relations between the local ethnic groups (Dagara and Sisala), and the relevance of ethnic versus territorial criteria in defining local citizenship.     

Welfare Warriors: Towards a Genealogy of the Soldier Citizen in Canada

Over the past few decades, new forms of citizenship have emerged in the context of a globalizing and urbanizing world. The government of citizens and economies, it is argued, is increasingly trans‐, supra‐, or sub‐national in scale, and characterized by the eclipse of Keynesian welfarism and rights‐based citizenship. Scholars have documented the emergence of targeted, risk‐based, and workfarist governmentalities and political economies at various spatial scales, and have even described emergent forms of citizenship as "post‐national". And yet, in many countries we are concurrently confronted with massive symbolic and fiscal reinvestment in national militaries, particularly in the welfare of personnel. Given this, and the longstanding relationships between the nation‐state and military service, it is curious that the soldier has hardly figured in recent discussions about citizenship. This paper provides a genealogy of the soldier‐citizen in Canada, from iconic national worker‐citizen in the post‐World War II period to its recent anxious positioning at the intersection of "domestic", entrepreneurial, workfarist citizenship, and the widespread re‐emergence of militarism and national security. It demonstrates that the military citizen has at key times been a template for innovations in social forms of national government, and argues that the soldier has been a crucial figure in their re‐engineering in recent years. Situated amidst transformations in work and worker‐citizenship, and at the intersections of political struggles in both the domestic and international spheres, the soldier provides a unique lens on questions of the national and the social. Through an engagement with the labour of social citizenship, and the war work that initiated many of its governing techniques, the military citizen emerges as a critical figure in the contemporary neoliberal nation.     

The Unyielding Boundaries of Citizenship: The Emancipation of 'Non-Citizens' in Romania, 1866–1918

This article attempts to contribute historical data to studies of the emergence and development of the institution of citizenship in Romania. Designed as an overview of Romanian citizenship legislation between 1866 and 1918, the article focuses on the contradiction between claims for the universality of bourgeois-democratic liberal ideology and the hierarchic and illiberal citizenship practice, which disenfranchised a considerable number of men, denied women substantive civic and political rights and excluded from state citizenship significant ethnic and religious minorities. Special attention is devoted to the legal status of these categories of 'non-citizens,' to their strategies of emancipation and their relationship with the Romanian national ideology.     

Patriotism,nationalism and modernity: the patriotic societies in the Danish conglomerate state, 1769–1814

ABSTRACT. This article investigates sixty‐three patriotic societies established in the Danish conglomerate state during the Age of Enlightenment, since they can throw light on the pre‐national collective identities. It explains how the patriotic societies had both an external function in regard to society and an internal function among their members. It analyses how the members comprehended patriotism and how they propagated ideas of solidarity and good citizenship to a wider audience. The patriotism of the eighteenth century is also compared with the nationalism of the nineteenth century, and the way they reflect two different understandings of core concepts such as state, language and folk culture is explained. However, both ideologies correlate to modernity, since they reflect the same dialectic tension in the relationship between the individual, the social community and the modern state.     

Designing the model European—Liberal and republican concepts of citizenship in Europe in the 1860s: The Association Internationale pour le Progrès des Sciences Sociales

The formation of citizenship as a concept to define the rights of participation in the formation processes of modern territorial states is well known. But the transnational dimensions of defining citizenship and how to combine national legislations with enlightened universal and natural law rules in the mid-19th century is not very well known. The article aims to explore the transnational discourses on the political, economic and moral rights and duties of the citizen in the pan—European liberal Association Internationale pour le Progrès des Sciences Sociales. During the 1860s, its congresses should serve as a vast commission of enquiry and should eventually lead to a general definition of citizenship in Europe which could be implemented in national legislations. The article shows how the Association Internationale tried to deduce universal moral rules from national legislations and peculiarities by the means of moral or positive social science. In combining moral unity with national and regional diversities, the Association Internationale tried to give an elastic framework for a European civil society in which national subjects should become active citizens.     

Weber and Marshall on the State

The conventional understanding of Weber's discussion of state legitimacy and Marshall's treatment of citizenship and social class are partial and distorted. Rather than endorse the view that the modern state is based on legal‐rational legitimacy Weber's analysis shows that the state in class society is without legitimacy and that its political domination is based on coercion and manipulation. While Marshall does argue that the expansion of citizenship rights tend to reduce aspects of class inequality he also shows that the working class can use the legal and other advantages of ‘industrial citizenship’ to improve the conditions of its struggle with capital. Our understanding of state mediation is improved by an appreciation of Weber's and Marshall's full contributions to a consideration of these matters, even though their positions do contain certain limitations.     

Direct Taxation and State–Society Relations in Lagos,Nigeria

Existing research suggests that external sources of finance, such as foreign aid and natural resource rents, allow states to generate revenue independently of their societies, disincentivizing them from forming close links with their citizens and severely problematizing the notion of a social contract. In Lagos, Nigeria's commercial capital, a series of personal income tax reforms have seen an increase in taxpayer compliance. Considering Lagosians’ perceptions of their relation with the state government, this study examines whether the state had to ‘earn’ its revenue by developing a closer relationship with its citizens, and whether citizens responded through a greater willingness to pay tax. It explores how citizens understand this relationship, what role they perceive themselves to fulfil, and what their expectations are for the future of state–society relations. The study shows how, through efforts to visibly link tax to service delivery, a social contract is emerging between Lagos State and its citizens — but that this relationship differs among groups, in that it is shaped by pre‐existing concepts of public organization and modes of political engagement.     

VISUALIZING FINLAND: POSTAGE STAMPS AS POLITICAL MESSENGERS

ABSTRACT. Postage stamps are a very political, territorially grounded and yet overlooked part of visual culture. We argue that the mundane omnipresence of stamps gives them considerable nation-building power and makes them exemplary tools of what Michael Billig calls 'banal nationalism.' By focusing on the socially constructed visual qualities of stamps, we argue that their 'reading' as political, socioculturally and territorially specific texts offers valuable insights into the evolution and outlook of the issuing state and the 'imagined community' within its boundaries. Our examination of 1 457 stamps issued in continental Finland between 1917 and 2000 shows how the desired visual representation of the Finnish state, nation and society has evolved over time, along with the changing outlook of the national elite, its relationship with ordinary citizens and the country's geopolitical context. The stamps illustrate how the state's focus shifted from war to peace, Finland's economy diversified and specialized, and the Finns reached a relatively high level of social welfare and equality. The myth of Finland's cultural homogeneity remained strikingly strong despite dramatic changes in Finland's cultural make-up, suggesting that not only presence but also absence of a narrative from a visual scene can be strongly meaningful. Over the course of the twentieth century, Finnish nationalism grew increasingly 'banal' and inclusive in character, but the stamps maintained their central role in citizenship education. Our findings promote the use of postage stamps in the teaching and research of political geography and identity-political iconographies.     

‘Building Kachin’: Youth and Everyday Action in one of Myanmar's Ethnic States

In 2011, Myanmar started its political transition after decades of military rule. In Kachin State this coincided with the breaking of a 17‐year ceasefire between the Kachin Independence Organization/Army (KIO/A) and the state army, the Tatmadaw. For youth living in Kachin State, this meant that opportunities for civic and political participation opened up while at the same time their context remained volatile and uncertain. Using citizenship theory and the concept of the ‘everyday’, this article analyses how youth in Kachin State connect the challenges they experience to their sense of citizenship, and how this informs everyday forms of youth action as well as youth participation in policy processes. The article argues that young people act out of moral and political reasons to ‘build Kachin’, in response to deeply historically rooted experiences of discrimination and state repression. While the agency of young people living in conflict settings is often believed to be limited to tactical agency for individual and immediate survival, an analysis of youth's experiences of citizenship shows that they also act strategically to advance the interests of their society.     

State Power,Civic Participation and the Urban Frontier: The Politics of the Commons in Karachi

Abstract: A martial state's neoliberal policies opened the nation's frontiers to new forms of globalization. This article investigates the political process that undergirded the military and global capital's sequestration of common land in Karachi and the concomitant contestation by a key civil society organization. Using Foucault's conception of sovereignty and government as an assemblage of authority and strategies of rationalization, this paper analyses the role of state and non‐state actors and changing power configurations in a conflict that surrounded the enclosure of a common and its transformation into a securitized zone of consumption in Karachi's Civil Lines. The conflict highlights the nature of the politics of space and citizenship in Pakistan's primary metropolis.     

Justice Unbound? Globalization,States and the Transformation of the Social Bond

Conventional accounts of justice suppose the presence of a stable political society, stable identities, and a Westphalian cartography of clear lines of authority–usually a state–where justice can be realized. They also assume a stable social bond. But what if, in an age of globalization, the territorial boundaries of politics unbundle and a stable social bond deteriorates? Can there be justice in a world where that bond is constantly being disrupted or transformed by globalization? This article thus argues that we need to think about the relationship between globalization, governance and justice. It does so in three stages: first, it explains how, under conditions of globalization, assumptions made about the social bond are changing; second, it demonstrates how strains on the social bond within states give rise to a search for newer forms of global political theory and organization, and the emergence of new global (non-state actors) which contest with states over the policy agendas emanating from globalization; and third, despite the new forms of activity identified in the second stage, the article concludes that the prospects for a satisfactory synthesis of a liberal economic theory of globalization, a normative political theory of the global public domain, and a new social bond are remote.     

Brands of youth citizenship and the politics of scale: National Citizen Service in the United Kingdom

This paper explores the politics of scale in the context of youth citizenship. We propose the concept of ‘brands of youth citizenship’ to understand recent shifts in the state promotion of citizenship formations for young people, and demonstrate how scale is crucial to that agenda. As such, we push forward debates on the scaling of citizenship more broadly through an examination of the imaginative and institutional geographies of learning to be a citizen. The paper's empirical focus is a state-funded youth programme in the UK – National Citizen Service – launched in 2011 and now reaching tens of thousands of 15–17 year olds. We demonstrate the ‘branding’ of youth citizenship, cast here in terms of social action and designed to create a particular type of citizen-subject. Original research with key architects, delivery providers and young people demonstrates two key points of interest. First, that the scales of youth citizenship embedded in NCS promote engagement at the local scale, as part of a national collective, whilst the global scale is curiously absent. Second, that discourses of youth citizenship are increasingly mobilised alongside ideas of Britishness yet fractured by the geographies of devolution. Overall, the paper explores the scalar politics and performance of youth citizenship, the tensions therein, and the wider implications of this study for both political geographers and society more broadly at a time of heated debate about youthful politics in the United Kingdom and beyond.     

The Intersection of Citizenship Status,STEM Education,and Expected Labor Market Participation in Gulf Cooperation Council Countries

Citizenship status influences the impact of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education on the youth labor market participation in the Arabian Gulf. This research examines the relationship between citizenship status, STEM education, and expected labor market participation in Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries, and examines the intervening effects of information and communication technology (ICT) based instruction, specifically. The 2011 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) provides both labor market expectations and STEM education data from all participating GCC countries, including Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates. Results suggest that ICT‐enhanced STEM education differently influences the human capital development of Gulf national and expatriate youth. For example, GCC nationals do not emphasize STEM education as an avenue for employment, while expatriate youth do. In particular, as Gulf national youths' parents' education level increases, students are less likely to think they need to do well in science to get the job they want. This is indicative of a broader trend in the Gulf nations to rely more on non‐education‐related factors such as family influence or connections for social, economic, and political mobility. In contrast, results also suggest that while STEM education contributes to potential private sector labor market participation among Gulf national youth, expatriate youth are more likely to expect to need or use STEM in the labor market.     

An unholy alliance: Swiss citizenship between local legal tradition,federal laissez-faire,and ethno-national rejection of foreigners 1848–1933

This article traces the development of the federal structure of Swiss citizenship between the founding of the federal state in 1848 and the entrenchment of a restrictive naturalisation and establishment policy in the interwar period. Considering the difficult integration of foreign residents through naturalisation in the past and present in Switzerland, the author examines the causes for the granting and refusal of Swiss citizenship. She shows that the development of and arrangements for access to Swiss citizenship cannot be reduced only to notions about the Swiss nation or national interests. They are the result of a permanent process of political negotiation and coordination between the federation, cantons and local authorities; owing to its importance in social assistance matters, local citizenship constituted an impediment to naturalisation until well into the twentieth century. In contrast, the federation and certain cantons like Zurich, Basle and Geneva had sought since the 1880s to reduce the strongly increasing number of foreign residents by liberalising naturalisation. The outbreak of the Second World War put an end to these endeavours. With the rise of a ‘new right’ since 1900, the setting up of the Central Office of the Foreign Police in 1917, and the institutionalisation of the authorities' ‘fight against foreign infiltration’, Swiss nationality law became ethnicised. Cultural ‘assimilation’ into the ‘particularity of Swiss society’ was now regarded as a precondition for becoming a Swiss citizen. The new federal rejection of foreigners thus joined with the traditionally restrictive policy of local authorities in an unholy alliance that began to breach only in the 1980s.     

Marxist Critiques of the Developmental State and the Fetishism of National Development

The developmental state has been heavily discussed in various disciplines and across diverse political spectrums. However, the statist notion formulated by institutionalists that the developmental state is autonomous from society and therefore effective in achieving “national development” has more often been taken for granted than problematised. The statist notion of the developmental state has also been accepted and reproduced or challenged merely inadequately by Marxist critics. By analysing how and why currently available Marxist assessments of the developmental state fail to challenge statism, this article offers an alternative theory of the developmental state by drawing on both social form critique and world system analysis. It then locates the origins of statism itself in the dynamics of global capitalism, in which the totality of capitalist social relations (understood as global from its inception) are hierarchically and unevenly constituted. From this it extends Marx's critique of commodity fetishism to the question of the international (the relationship between the nation state and world market) and criticises the statist notion of the developmental state from the perspective of a critique of the fetishism of national development.     

A Matter of Judgment: Politics,Law and the Trial of Bishop Thomas Watson

Thomas Watson's controversial expulsion from the bishopric of St David's – and hence from the house of lords – after a long and bitterly‐fought series of legal actions, raised fundamental and difficult questions about the right to control membership of the house of lords and about the relationship between politics and the law, as well as between church and state. This article explores both the local and the national political contexts that prompted Watson's ordeal, suggesting that subsequent demonisation by Gilbert Burnet has obscured the extent to which Watson was the casualty of William III's determination to cow his political opponents. It concludes that Watson was marked out for opprobrium precisely because, like Sir John Fenwick, his political and social insignificance enabled him to be victimised without risking a backlash of opposition from the social and political elite.