From acts of citizenship to transnational lived citizenship: potential and pitfalls of subversive readings of citizenship

ABSTRACT

I interrogate the emancipatory potential of the activist turn in the study of citizenship, ranging from the conceptualisation of citizenship as everyday practices and/or resistance to exclusionary nation-state practices to forms of transnational lived citizenship that have become ever more prevalent with globalisation. I argue that such an activist understanding has the potential to advance the well-being of populations that lack legal status. It can also foster rights-based claims for inclusion and create allegiances with different societal actors, locally, nationally, as well as globally. At the same time, such a partly subversive definition of citizenship as practice risks being unduly romanticised in its emancipatory potential. I conclude that activist citizenship as a category of analysis and practice is at its most emancipatory when focusing on new subjectivities that emerge in mobile transnational lives, often literally in the geographical space of the city.

KEYWORDS:

• Transnationalism
• solidarity
• subversion
• emancipation
• exclusion
• city-zenship

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

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Tanja R. Müller

Tanja R. Müller is Professor of Political Sociology at the Global Development Institute, University of Manchester. She has published on conceptions of transnational lived citizenship, conviviality and everyday humanitarianism in leading journals. Tanja is currently the Principal Investigator of an ESRC-funded research project on transnational lived citizenship and political belonging among diasporas in the Horn of Africa.