Plato and the Theodosian Code

The codification project initiated in 429 ad that resulted in the Theodosian Code was originally designed to integrate three types of law: one, imperial constitutions since Constantine; two, the legal material collected in the tetrarchic Codices Gregorianus and Hermogenianus; and three, a florilegium of juristic writings and responsa. The ultimate aim was to condense all this in a single comprehensive law book that would govern the entire life of the empire and its subjects. As this paper shows, such a project had no precedent in Roman legal history and in fact ran counter to the traditional multiplicity of legal sources in Rome. This prompts a question: from where did the intellectual fathers of the codification project drew inspiration for such a revolutionary idea? In the paper's second part, I argue that one important model for the codification project of 429 could have been the legal code Plato designed for the ideal state of the Laws.     

New spaces of citizenship? Rethinking gendered participation and empowerment in South Africa

This paper draws on empirical research in South Africa to explore questions about the exclusionary nature of citizenship, the problems and possibilities of participatory citizenship and its potential reconceptualisation through the lens of gender. The paper examines some of the major debates and policies in South Africa around issues of citizenship, participation and gender and explores why the discursive accommodation of gender equity by the South African government is not fully realised in its attempts to construct substantive and participatory citizenship. It explores some of the emergent spaces of radical citizenship that marginalized groups and black women, in particular, are shaping in response. Findings suggest that whilst there are possibilities for creating alternative, more radical citizenship spaces, these can also be problematic and exclusionary. The paper draws on recent feminist writing to examine the possibilities for rethinking citizenship as an ethical, non-instrumental social status, distinct from both political participation and economic independence. This reframing of citizenship moves beyond notions of ‘impasse’ or ‘hollowness’, challenges the public/private distinction that still frames many debates about citizenship and considers the emancipatory potential of gendered subjectivity. The paper argues that citizenship is shaped by differing social, political and cultural contexts and this brings into sharp focus the problematic assumption of the universal applicability of western concepts and theories.     

Pain,Personhood and the Collective: Dalit Life Narratives

Dalit life narratives have gained prominence in the last two decades in line with the increasing visibility of Dalits in the Indian public sphere and their vociferous demands for a more just political and social order. This can be productively situated not just in the contemporary global context of the proliferation of narratives and testimonios of human rights violations in other parts of the world, but also in the context of an emerging conversation on the nature of “Dalit personhood” in the Indian public sphere, a category infinitely more complex than legal subjectivity and abstract citizenship. The Dalit narratives analysed here are rich illustrations of this double movement: they witness on behalf of a suffering community and keep alive the singular, non-universal nature of Dalit pain through an aesthetic that is not wholly translatable into the lexicon of rights and justice. By invoking the historical and rhetorical force of two prose fictional genres, the Bildungsroman and the picaresque, the analysis has sought to recast the testimonio less as a proxy for the legal witnessing and amelioration of Dalit pain than as a rich and expressive medium of Dalit personhood. This way of reading Dalit lives accords India's ex-untouchables a stature beyond that of victims at the mercy of the capricious sentimentality of upper-caste solidarity.     

Engendered/endangered: women,tuberculosis, and the project of citizenship

The anti-tuberculosis campaign of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was an unprecedented display of medical authority and public health purview. With accumulating evidence that the disease disproportionately struck the poor, tuberculosis by the early decades of the century was perceived epidemiologically as embedded in individual practices including hygiene and domestic order. Tuberculosis was in a sense a trope for national degeneration, and as such it became the vehicle for a self-conscious thrust towards national renewal and moral regeneration. This paper uses a feminist Foucauldian framework in its analysis of the anti-tuberculosis campaign. In the case of San Francisco, efforts to combat tuberculosis centred in part on women in their roles as wives and mothers. Women were the gatekeepers of health because they were responsible for keeping the home clean and bacillus free. Not only did this focus become a medical legitimization of women's domestic duties, but it also became a discourse of citizenship. Whether explicitly or implicitly, physicians concentrated their attention on white middle class women in their messages of health maintenance. Within sanatoria, a primary agenda of tuberculosis treatment was the inculcation of middle class behaviour into the working class patients. The anti-tuberculosis campaign was thus a part of the early-twentieth-century project of nationhood where citizenship was largely calculated through the lens of class and race.     

From imperial inclusion to national exclusion: citizenship in the Habsburg monarchy and in Austria 1867–1923

This paper examines the development of citizenship in Austria-Hungary between 1867 and the 1920s. At the beginning, the paper analyses the reform of citizenship laws in both Austria and Hungary after the Settlement of 1867. Whilst the Austrian citizenship law maintained legal traditions stretching back into the first half of the nineteenth century, the new Hungarian citizenship law of 1878 emulated the laws in effect in Wilhelmine Germany. The basis of Hungarian citizenship law was, however, much broader than German law, in order to allow for the effective integration of the non-Magyar population. An evaluation of applications for Austrian naturalisation illustrates the remarkable capacity of Austrian citizenship law to integrate and to uphold a concept of nationality independent from ethnicity, religious denomination, class or gender. Only during, and above all after, the First World War did the inclusive practice of the Cisleithanian bureaucracy give way to the more exclusive policy of the new German-Austrian Republic, as civil servants now introduced the vague notion of ‘race’ as a criterion for naturalisation. In contrast to Tsarist Russia and the Second German Empire, both of which introduced similar agendas for nationalisation in the latter part of the nineteenth century linking citizenship to ethnic and religious identity, the Habsburg Monarchy remained basically untouched by such tendencies and with the constitutionally guaranteed principle of ‘national equality’ upheld its early modern tradition of ethnic and religious tolerance well into the later Imperial period.     

The right to be heard: Citizenship and language

In this paper we address the importance and contestation of language in terms of citizenship and the development of political communities by focusing on the example of a minority language – British Sign Language. Language is crucial to debates about citizenship and belonging because the State has to rely on language for its very functioning, indeed political practice itself is a form of communicative action. For individuals language is deeply implicated in their ability to claim and maintain their rights and in their affective connections with others and sense of identification. The paper therefore begins by identifying that Deaf people's legal entitlements (e.g. to vote) are an abstract form of citizenship because as sign language users they have difficulties understanding both political and wider civil institutions and practices, and so lack the cultural proficiencies necessary to exercise citizenship in a substantive sense. We then go onto consider citizenship in the broader sense of how groups are included or situated in the public sphere, and in doing so to consider the extent to which Deaf people might be understood to have a liveable place in an oral society. The final section examines how the sense of injustice which flows from Deaf people's experiences of marginalisation in the public realm means that they are developing alternative forms of political commitment predicated on non-state spaces of belonging – where they can live their language – at both local and transnational scales. The paper concludes by reflecting on the notion of differentiated citizenship and the implications of Deaf people's claims to language rights.     

Public and private: national identities in a Scottish Borders community*

Abstract. This paper is an exploration of national identities among sports people in a community in the Scottish Borders. This group experiences a split in their identities. Publicly, they are ascribed an ambiguous national identity by the surrounding national communities. Privately, and among fellow community members, they unambiguously assert national identity. This paper examines the way this split is managed, arguing that the performance of public ambiguity is expected, but is supported by the private performance of nationality. National identity is analysed specifically as a performance, and sport is the context in which this performance takes place.     

Coping with deviance: Swiss nationhood in the long nineteenth century

ABSTRACT. This article highlights two processes that shaped Swiss nationhood in the long nineteenth century. The first concerns the competition between different nation‐states and the nationalist visions these contests engendered. In a Europe dominated by the norm of the culturally and ethnically homogenous nation, the Swiss authorities, public intellectuals and various political representatives were desperate to display an image of national authenticity to the outside world. The result was a nationalism that combined voluntaristic and organic elements. In the second and main part of this article, the focus turns on citizenship; it is conceived not only as a social and legal institution, but also as a cognitive prism through which people defined their membership in the national community. Remarkably, the authority in granting national citizenship to foreign nationals remained firmly in the hands of the cantons and, above all, the Swiss municipalities. In practical terms, this meant that the Gemeinde provided the institutional and cognitive frame through which nationhood was primarily experienced, imagined and defined. While Switzerland represents a particularly strong case of a communalist polity, it should not be treated as unique. Instead, it should alert us to a potentially fertile yet little‐explored area of research: what might be called the communal embededdness of the national(ist) imagination.     

Experiencing Displacement: The Transformation of Women's Spaces in (Former) East Germany

Based on a comparison of two different research projects carried out in (former) East Germany, this paper analyses the effects of German (re)unification and postsocialist transformation as a specific, gendered form of displacement. We show how new divisions between "public" and "private" have affected women's sense of self and identity, cautioning against the notion that geographical restructuring will inevitably result in an empowering dissolution of fixed, placebound identities. Instead, we emphasise that places are connected to identities through relations of power and social practices that create unequal conditions for engagement in the (re)production of space. Feminist approaches to citizenship are discussed as one way of challenging the current marginalisation of East German women in unified Germany.     

Family stories,public silence: Irish identity construction amongst the second‐generation Irish in England

Formal narratives of history, especially that of colonial oppression, have been central to the construction of national identities in Ireland. But the Irish diasporic community in Britain has been cut off from the reproduction of these narratives, most notably by their absence from the curriculum of Catholic schools, as result of the unofficial ‘denationalisation’ pact agreed by the Church in the 19th century (Hickman, 1995). The reproduction of Irish identities is largely a private matter, carried out within the home through family accounts of local connections, often reinforced by extended visits to parent/s ‘home’ areas. Recapturing a public dimension has often become a personal quest in adulthood, ‘filling in the gaps’. This paper explores constructions of narratives of nation by a key diasporic population, those with one or two Irish‐born parents. It places particular emphasis on varying regional/national contexts within which such constructions take place, drawing on focus group discussions and interviews for the ESRC‐funded Irish 2 Project in five locations — London, Glasgow, Manchester, Coventry and Banbury.     

Transnational ways of seeing: sexual and national belonging in Hedwig and the Angry Inch

I argue that transnational ways of seeing help us apprehend the histories of globalization, immigration and imperialism that frame and make legible cultural productions. Focusing on John Cameron Mitchell's 2001 film Hedwig and the Angry Inch, which has been almost universally received as being about transsexuality, this essay argues that the film is equally about transnationality and specifically about how queer identifications and identities are produced in relation to the nation-state. Hedwig explores the limits of national belonging and the pleasures of US popular culture through the lens of sexual and gender identity, with the ambiguity of the Hedwig's body embodying confusion about legal, political and cultural citizenship. The film identifies and critiques the violences of heteronormative national belonging, yet by reading Hedwig alongside the political and legal histories that make its narrative legible, it becomes apparent that the film's popular reception frequently erases the transnational and imperial histories that undergird and produce sexual identities and identification. I argue that cultural practices do not simply reflect national or queer identifications but also produce them. The fissures between the cultural work of the film itself and of its circulation illustrate how despite the mutual imbrication of sexuality and nationality, transsexuality is sometimes more readily apprehended than is transnationality.     

Madrid's Retiro Park as publicly-private space and the spatial problems of spatial theory

The scholarly focus on the production of space necessitates a thorough reassessment of the static categories employed in the analysis of spatial processes. Emphasizing space as a process, this essay calls attention to the recent implication of Madrid's Retiro Park in larger processes of capital accumulation. At the same time, it highlights the insufficiency of the tempting yet problematic distinction between public and private space that obtains in easy solutions to the struggles over city-space. As many critics have pointed out, there is design flaw in the idea of public space—it can never explain how a given space, such as a park, comes to be free of the ‘private’ (personal and structural) interests operating throughout its societal context. The story of the Retiro ultimately foregrounds the pivotal role of city-space in the drive for capitalist intercity-competition and suggests that the latter process is insufficiently confronted by idealized notions of the role truly ‘public’ spaces might play in radical democracy and citizenship.     

Being Canadian: Dual Citizenship in Historical Perspective

Why do states configure their citizenship laws in certain ways? Why do they allow or prohibit dual citizenship? Why was it only in 1946 that Canada decided to enact its first citizenship law which prohibited multiple national allegiances? Why was a similar proposal abandoned in 1931? And why was this citizenship law changed in 1977 to allow dual citizenship? A common answer is that citizenship reflects the national “identity” of each nation-state. Through a perusal of the debates regarding citizenship laws in Canada, I locate the particular motivation for introducing those laws. I argue that although the symbolic element of citizenship laws is significant, citizenship laws are enacted as a political instrument to achieve immediate and specific goals. In particular, accepting dual citizenship in Canada should be seen as a one of the strategies political elites tried in order to incorporate English and French speakers under the same flag.     

When the personal becomes political: using legal reform to combat violence against women in Ethiopia

This article focuses on Ethiopia's first civil society organisation, the Ethiopian Women Lawyers Association (EWLA), which has been campaigning for legal reform to secure women's rights and address violence against women. Implementing legal changes to benefit women in Ethiopia is impeded by difficulties in using the formal legal system, by poverty and deeply embedded gender inequalities, by plural legal systems, and by entrenched cultural norms. However, the article argues that the most significant challenge is the increasing degree of authoritarianism in Ethiopian state politics, that this is crucial in determining the space for activism, and that this shapes the successful implementation of legal change. The research shows how women's activism around personal rights challenges public/private and personal/political boundaries and can be seen as a political threat by governments in contexts where democracy and rule of the law are not embedded, leading to repression of women's activism and hindering the implementation of measures to protect women's rights when states become more authoritarian. Little is known empirically about the impact of democratisation on the implementation of measures to protect women's rights in Africa. This article shows how the emergence of democracy and legal reform intersects with the emergence of women's rights, especially with respect to gender-based violence. It shows how trying to secure women's personal right to be free from violence through the law is profoundly political and argues that the nature of democratisation really matters in terms of the implementation of measures such as legal changes designed to protect women's rights.     

Abolition and Imperial Law, 1790–1820

Historians have represented the movement for the abolition of the slave trade as a turning point in international law, either characterising the formation of mixed commissions to adjudicate slave ship captures as elements of early human rights law or interpreting the treaty regime supporting the ban on the slave trade as marking a decisive shift towards positivism in international law. A closer look at the legal history of abolition suggests that such perspectives omit an important dimension: the ties between abolition and imperial legal consolidation. In exploring such ties, the article first examines prize law and its direct and indirect influence on calls for intra-imperial regulation of the slave trade, especially its effective criminalisation. Across the empire, efforts to ban the slave trade reflected and reinforced pressures to strengthen imperial legal authority by regulating and restricting planter legal prerogatives.     

Negotiating Post‐Socialist Property and State: Struggles over Forests in Albania and Romania

Since the demise of socialism, countries of Central and Eastern Europe have experienced intense negotiations over access and property. This article uses four case studies on struggles over forest in Albania and Romania to examine how these negotiations intersect with processes constituting authority. The cases demonstrate significant variations in the configurations of property and authority regarding forest, but they also reflect the influence of national politics in the two countries. In Albania, custom not only competes with the state as an institution sanctioning rights to forest but actually emerges as an alternative politico‐legal institution contesting state authority more broadly. In Romania, local struggles over forests play out the contestations between personalized and law‐based exercises of state authority at the national level. These insights suggest that due to their radical nature and simultaneous occurrence, negotiations over property and authority have challenged the position of post‐socialist states as primary politico‐legal institutions and have generated different exercises of state authority.     

Public reason and private passion

Distinctions between ‘public’ and ‘private’ dimensions of human life have traditionally been associated with philosophical distinctions between Reason and other, supposedly lesser, mental traits, such as passions and desires. This paper examines the ways in which these associations have affected character ideals associated with citizenship and our understanding of sexual difference. It discusses, in particular, Hegel's idea, in The Phenomenology of Spirit, that female consciousness is constituted through the exclusion of women from the public domain, and relates it to earlier interconnections between the male‐female and public‐private distinctions in Rousseau, Hume and Kant.     

HEGEMONY,IMPERIALISM, AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF RELIGION IN EAST AND SOUTHEAST ASIA1

Edward Said's concept of Orientalism portrays the high tide of nineteenth‐century imperialism as the defining moment in the establishment of a global discursive hegemony, in which European attitudes and concepts gained a universal validity. The idea of “religion” was central to the civilizing mission of imperialism, and was shaped by the interests of a number of colonial actors in a way that remains visibly relevant today. In East and Southeast Asia, however, many of the concerns that statecraft, law, scholarship, and conversion had for religion transcended the European impact. Both before and after the period of European imperialism, states used religion to engineer social ethics and legitimate rule, scholars elaborated and enforced state theologies, and the missionary faithful voiced the need for and nature of religious conversion. The real impact of this period was to integrate pre‐existing concerns into larger discourses, transforming them in the process. The ideals of national citizenship and of legal and scholarly impartiality recast the state and its institutions with a modernist sacrality, which had the effect of banishing the religious from the public space. At the same time, the missionary discourse of transformative conversion located it in the very personal realm of sincerity and belief. The evolution of colonial‐era discourses of religion and society in Asia since the departure of European imperial power demonstrates both their lasting power and the degree of agency that remains implicit in the idea of hegemony.