Beyond the civic–ethnic dichotomy: investigating the structure of citizenship concepts across thirty‐three countries

ABSTRACT. The traditional distinction between civic and ethnic citizenship continues to dominate the study of citizenship concepts. In recent years, various authors have questioned the dichotomous character of these concepts. In this article, we empirically investigate the applicability of this dichotomy based on an analysis of International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) survey data across thirty‐three societies. The analysis demonstrates that this dichotomous structure can indeed be detected and therefore the theoretical dichotomy can be considered as empirically valid. While ethnic citizenship refers most strongly to having national ancestry, for civic citizenship the most important criterion seems to be to obey national laws. However, the ethnic concept of citizenship can also be defined in a negative manner: for ethnic citizenship, obeying the national laws is clearly not a sufficient condition. Further analysis also reveals that the measurement of both concepts is not equivalent cross‐nationally, so that findings on civic and ethnic citizenship are difficult to compare across societies.     

The implications of information and communication technologies for sexualities and sexualised violences: Contradictions of sexual citizenships

A key aspect of globalisation, glocalisation and transnationalisation is the development of information and communication technologies (ICTs). Such technologies have major implications for sexualities and sexualised violences, and raise profound implications, contradictions and challenges for sexual citizenship. These implications include the affirmation of sexual citizenship, with the creation of new forms of sexual communities; and the denial of sexual citizenship, with the production of new opportunities for pornography, prostitution, sexual exploitation and sexual violences. The article goes on to focus particularly on the contradictory implications of ICTs for sexual citizenship. These include the simultaneous development of more democratic and diverse sexual communities, and sexual work and sexually violent work; movements beyond the exploiter/exploited dichotomy; complex relations of non-exploitative and sexual exploitation, commercialisation of sex, and enforcement of dominant sexual practices; blurring of the social, sexual–social, sexual and sexually violent, and of the sexually ‘real’ and sexually ‘representational’; closer association of sex with the ‘visual’ and the ‘representational’; increasing domination of the virtual as the mode(l) for non-virtual, proximate sociality, and possible impacts of the virtual on increased non-virtual, proximate sociality, even greater possibilities for ‘pure relationships’; shifts in sexual space and sexual place; development of new forms of transnational sexual citizenship, within shifting transpatriarchies. Contradictions between the scale of global material sex economies and the representation and reproduction of the sexual through ICTs appear to be increasing.     

Why Indians Vote: Reflections on Rights,Citizenship, and Democracy from a Tamil Nadu Village

This paper contributes to an empirical and theoretical understanding of democracy and political participation in India through an ethnographic study of the meanings attached to voting in rural Tamil Nadu. Based on a study of voting in a rural constituency during the 2009 national elections, the paper explores the variety of motivations that compel people to vote. It explores how voting is informed by popular understandings of rights and duties as citizens, programmatic policies and their local implementation, commitment to caste and party loyalties, and authority of charismatic leaders. The paper explores the roots of the political consciousness and rights awareness that underpin high levels of electoral participation. It suggests that elections form unique moments that allow ordinary people to experience an individual sense of citizenship and of democracy itself while at the same time allowing them to pursue projects of recognition, respect and assertion as members of communities. It is precisely this dual feature that makes voting so enduringly attractive to India's contemporary electorate.     

“The Old Man is Dead”: Hip Hop and the Arts of Citizenship of Senegalese Youth

The 2012 Senegalese presidential elections engulfed the country in unprecedented controversy, violence, and protest. Urban youth in Dakar animated the massive opposition movement that eventually led to the incumbent's defeat through voter registration, public critique, and mass mobilization. Two prominent factors fomenting youth action were the direct engagement of a host of well known rappers and the pervasive power of hip hop culture. This article probes the valence of the globalized art form of hip hop as a medium of political identity formation and a language of resistance in these elections through considering the spatial practices and imaginaries of rappers and their followers. It argues that hip hop fosters new geographies of citizenship inspiring urban youth to transgress prescribed boundaries in allowed speech and political behavior to make new claims on their city and nation. Insight is drawn for understanding youth politics, the power of music, and questions of urban citizenship.     

The ‘secular’ settlement and Australian political thought

This paper challenges the tendency among contemporary historians and political scientists to read secularism and religion in Australian political history in binary terms. It is argued that this framework is anachronistic, creating a barrier to a proper appreciation of religion in Australian political history. In keeping with much British Enlightenment thinking, religion through much of Australia’s history was deemed to have great social utility and its promotion was of central secular significance. This understanding framed the education debates of the second half of the nineteenth century as well as the social welfare reforms and institution building around the Federation period. Such developments cast doubt on claims that secularism of an exclusionary kind is a key element of the now widely invoked category of the Australian settlement.     

Victories from Insurgency: Re‐Negotiating Housing,Community Control,and Citizenship at the Margins

This article considers how insurgent campaigns for housing the poor in New York City and Chicago succeeded in engaging the local state, non‐profits and financial institutions in the creation of community land trusts. These campaigns had long arcs in which victories and losses built from each other, neither as permanent as they initially seemed. The campaigns moved iteratively between spaces of “invited citizenship” (courtrooms, planning committees) and “invented” spaces of collective action (property takeovers). They found their greatest success when, exploiting state incapacity to defend abandoned property, they elicited a degree of complicity from local governments in their takeovers of housing and land. The article thus contests dichotomised accounts of social movements that oppose losses to victories, cooptation to resistance, and movements to institutions. Instead, we call for situated and dynamic accounts of insurgent practice, capable of theorising the long, messy, co‐constituted evolution of political contexts and popular struggle.     

Private Mark Graham,un/known soldier: not just any body can be a citizen

On 4 September 2006, Private Mark Anthony Graham, a 33-year-old black Canadian, was killed in Afghanistan in a so-called friendly fire incident. An elite athlete prior to his military career, Graham, who was born in Jamaica and grew up in Hamilton, Ontario, had also been a member of the Canadian 4 × 400-metre relay team that competed in the 1992 Olympic games. This article examines the mainstream television and print media accounts that emerged following Private Graham's death to explore the connections between race, masculinity and discourses of national belonging. For example, media narratives emphasized Graham's physicality and track and field career, rather than his status as a citizen-soldier who died in the service of his country. I argue that the prominence ascribed to Graham's corporeality signals his racial alterity, a delineation which facilitates his exclusion from white settler society. Moreover, beyond revealing the enduring legacy of Canada's history of anti-black racism, I suggest that the media's treatment of Private Mark Graham is indicative of the reconfiguration of white cultural nationalism in post-9/11 narratives of citizenship and Canadian identity and efforts to reinstate white men as the true embodiment of masculine heroism and patriotism.     

‘The Republic is lived with an uncovered face’ (and a skirt): (un)dressing French citizens

The title of this article refers to the campaign carried out by the French government, in April and May 2011, to publicize and promote the law banning the full veil from public spaces, ‘la République se vit à visage découvert.’ The article examines ways in which political discourses, during the 2009–2012 period over which this law was first discussed, and then applied, used specific norms of female dress in order to establish a certain understanding of citizenship. Drawing on Rancière's notion of the ‘police’ and Dikeç's theorization of ‘aesthetic regimes,’ the article discusses the entanglements of female dress with French republicanism. These are illustrated through controversial representations of ‘Marianne,’ the female embodiment of the Republic, which raise the issue of color, in a country where race remains taboo. Turning more specifically to the report produced by a Parliamentary committee prior to the discussion of the burqa ban, the article discusses the paradoxical promotion of skirts as the epitome of French femininity, and shows how the discussion of women's right to wear skirts challenged ideas about the location of sexism, and the subject of politics, in French society.     

Concepts of citizenship in France during the long eighteenth century

François Furet famously described the French Revolution as ’the first experiment with democracy’, and modern French citizenship is often seen as having emerged during this period. Universal male suffrage was practised for the first time in 1792 and the Revolution also witnessed debate over such issues as: the rights of citizens; the extension of the franchise to poorer inhabitants and black slaves; and even whether women should be given political rights. Yet, the modern idea of citizenship did not emerge from nowhere in 1789. Rather it was the product of more than a century of debate. This article examines the different understandings of citizenship that were competing for dominance in France during the long eighteenth century: the ancient conception; the Bodinian understanding and the rights-based approach. Not only does it demonstrate the contribution of these approaches (and in particular the last) to revolutionary understandings of citizenship, but it also highlights how the tensions of the eighteenth-century debates, and the ambiguities inherent in the rights-based conception, sparked some of the key controversies of the Revolution.     

Constructions of cosmopolitanism in teenage citizenship in Singapore

This study aims to uncover the geographies of places informing teenagers' understanding of cosmopolitanism and citizenship. Children and young people (CYP) in Singapore are becoming more internationally mobile and growing up in highly globalised Singapore. There are three overall arguments in this paper. First, the local is the actual place to situate studies on cosmopolitanism and that cosmopolitanism should be considered as a dimension of deterritorialised citizenship amongst CYP growing up in highly globalised nation-states. There are ‘roots and routes’ approaches to citizenship and my second argument is that the ‘routes approach’ to citizenship has ingrained cosmopolitan experiences into young people's life-worlds and is arguably the stronger approach of the two for young Singaporeans. Finally, this study demonstrates that the experiences of CYP in geographies of education [Holloway, S. L., P. Hubbard, H. Jöns, H. Pimlott-Wilson. 2010. “Geographies of Education and the Significance of Children, Youth and Families.” Progress in Human Geography 34 (5)] are credible yet neglected life-worlds that can help reconstitute frameworks for understanding cosmopolitanism and citizenship [Harvey, D. 2000. “Cosmopolitanism and the Banality of Geographical Evils.” Public Culture 12 (2)].