Political geographies of citizenship

Introduction

This special issue on political geographies of citizenship originates from the Norwegian Research Network in Political Geography (based at the University of Oslo), which includes geographers working within a broad array of research topics, approaches and contexts. Thematically, it reflects the increased interests in spatiality in citizenship studies and the parallel attention paid to citizenship within political geography (e.g. Kofman 1995; Painter 2002; Rasmussen & Brown 2002; Barnett & Low 2004; Desforges et al. 2005; Staeheli 2010). The present special issue explores the notion of citizenship as a potential convergence point for geographical research in migration, development, democratization, social movement and labour studies concerned with questions about power, agency and spatiality in state–society relations. Our proposition is that citizenship may provide an integral framework for common concerns among human geographers regarding cultural, juridical, social and political inclusion – in other words, cultural identity and recognition, legal status and protection, social rights and redistribution, and political participation and representation. This general agenda is discussed in more detail in Stokke’s (2017) article in this special issue. We thus limit this guest editorial to a brief review of the core arguments and how they are addressed in the thematic articles in this issue.

Core arguments

A basic premise for our integrative agenda is that citizenship should be conceived in a broad manner, both in terms of its constituent elements and the spaces in which citizenship is realized (Smith 1995; Isin & Wood 1999; Staeheli 2010). This conception is in contrast to the conventional view that foregrounds the juridical status of individuals within a territorial state as the pivot of citizenship. The contributing authors in this issue share a view of citizenship as inherently multidimensional, and especially foreground four interrelated processes that define the meaning and substance of citizenship: cultural inclusion in communities of citizens, juridical inclusion through acquisition of formal citizenship, social inclusion through citizens’ rights, and political inclusion through participation and representation. Likewise, citizenship is studied with reference to multiple territories, places, scales and spatial networks. It is also seen as being constituted within different domains of power: the state, the market economy and civil society. Thus, although citizenship is not limited to the territorial state, we also recognize that in most cases it is constituted in one way or another in relation to a state (Staeheli 2010). This distinction between a narrow and a broad conception of citizenship is also acknowledged by Isin & Wood (1999), who similarly argue for an integrated approach to what they describe as the legal and sociological dimensions of citizenship.

It follows from our broad notion of citizenship that the constitutive dimensions are closely interwoven in multiple and contextual ways rather than being organized in a fixed hierarchical or sequential order of expanding citizenship (Kivisto & Faist 2007). This also means that individuals and groups may enjoy different degrees of cultural, juridical, social and political protection and inclusion. The meaning of citizenship is thus partial and stratified, despite its assumed universality and equality. In this regard, cultural protection and inclusion serves as an example. On the one hand, citizenship may be mobilized by the state with regard to the naturalization of new citizens through citizenship tests, and on the other hand be mobilized by ethnic minorities in their struggles for cultural identities. Such processes are always geographically contextual, whether the key actors are recognized as the state, particular interest groups, or individual citizens. Hence, at a general level, it makes sense to think in terms of varieties of citizenship rather than a given and universal model of citizenship (Isin & Nyers 2014).

Another core theme in this issue is that citizenship is understood as being inherently political in the sense that, to paraphrase Jessop (1990), it is a product, an arena and a source of political strategies. This means that the form and content of citizenship, in all its dimensions, are matters of contentious politics with multiple actors and agendas (van der Heijden 2014). Constructing formal rights and procedures for inclusion may be merely a strategy for hegemony pursued by dominant actors, but such institutional arrangements nevertheless provide political spaces for non-dominant actors and strategies (Hiariej & Stokke 2017). Whilst states or nation states are not the only loci for citizenship, as citizenship operates within and through a range of differing scales, territories and places, we acknowledge the continued importance of the nation-state system for institutionalized models and practices of citizenship in many contexts.

In this special issue, Stokke (2017) argues that citizenship is produced and transformed through popular struggles against injustice. Politics of citizenship is thus used as a shorthand reference to collective demands for legal protection, social redistribution, cultural recognition and political representation (Fraser 2010). These struggles may aim either at correcting problems of injustice without restructuring the system or at transforming the underlying structural framework. Such demands are typically pursued through engagement with the state, but citizenship politics may also confront corporations or communities, or employ strategies of disengagement and autonomous forms of citizenship (Holston 2009). However, a common finding is that such struggles are fragmented across different sectors and subject positions, reflecting the diversity of injustices and subject positions in society, but also being shaped by divisive dynamics in the political, economic or social fields in which citizenship claims are made. This complexity in the politics of citizenship reiterates the earlier observation about contextual varieties of citizenship (Isin & Nyers 2014).

Finally, we contend that citizenship is not only multidimensional and political, but also inherently spatial. The institutional and procedural arrangements for citizenship as well as the politics of citizenship are constituted within territories and places and through spatial and scalar relations. Desforges et al. (2005) observe that the conventional model of citizenship rests on assumptions about territorially bounded nations and states. This territorial model of citizenship has come under pressure, not the least due to various forms of globalization (Staeheli 1999). While economic globalization has challenged the sovereignty of the state and contributed to the emergence of multiscale forms of governance and citizenship, neoliberalization of governance means that citizenship rights and participation are also defined by citizens’ relations to the market and civil society, as well as to the state. Moreover, increased international mobility has produced a growing number of people who are resident non-citizens or have dual citizenship, thereby challenging the territorial model of citizenship.

Thus, citizenship has become increasingly complex in geographical terms and the substance of membership, rights and participation has come to be defined through multiple and relational scales, territories and places (Desforges et al. 2005). Such spatial transformations in citizenship are paralleled by changes in citizenship politics. Tendencies towards ‘destatization’ and denationalization of citizenship have been accompanied by broadened citizenship politics with increased attention to multiscale and ‘trans-territorial’ strategies. This does not imply an end to territorial or place-based citizenship politics, only that political contention over citizenship has become increasingly complex in geographical terms, in some cases even resulting in renationalization trends. The following articles examine selected themes, approaches and cases within these complex political geographies of citizenship.

The articles in this special issue

This issue contains six articles that examine theoretical and contextual questions related to citizenship politics and human geography. It starts with a theory-oriented article by co-editor Kristian Stokke (2017), who discusses the meaning of citizenship politics. He advocates a broad and integral conception of citizenship, and argues that the form, substance and transformation of citizenship reflect contextual power relations and political contentions. Based on an identification of four core dimensions of citizenship, the article defines politics of citizenship as contentious interactions relating to the institutionalization and realization of substantive membership, legal status, rights and participation. Popular politics of citizenship can thus be understood as claims to justice, whereby the broad sociological conception of citizenship draws special attention to interrelated struggles for cultural recognition, social redistribution and political representation.

The above-mentioned themes and arguments are addressed in specific and in-depth ways in the remaining five articles. The first two of these are primarily concerned with the links and tensions between belonging and citizenship status, especially in the context of migration and displacement. Marta Bivand Erdal and Tove Heggli Sagmo (2017) discuss the tensions and possible alignment between principles of citizenship and realities of migrant transnationalism and dual citizenship. Their article observes that the dominant principles of citizenship – descent (jus sanguinis) and birthplace (jus soli) – build on fixed conceptions of belonging as rooted in one place only. These principles are challenged by international migration, but they fail to provide adequate answers to how naturalization can be justified as anything other than an exception. The authors thus draw attention to residence as an alternative genealogy of belonging and jus domicile as an additional principle of citizenship. This leads to their conclusion that citizenship should be based on complementary genealogies of belonging, including descent, birthplace and residence, in order to strengthen the potential for realizing equal citizenship in diverse societies.

Cathrine Brun, Anita Häuserman Fábos and Oroub El-Abed (2017) examine simultaneous and contradictory processes of inclusion and exclusion among displaced populations who held – or were given – the citizenship of their refugee country. Based on their studies of displacement in Georgia, Jordan and Sudan, the authors highlight the complex and contradictory effects of humanitarian and policy categories on citizenship for displaced persons. They argue that this situation is best captured by the notions of ‘abjection’ and ‘abject citizenship’, referring to how categories of displacement form a basis for state exclusion, yet over time may also become a source of social and political identity and belonging. The authors thus conclude that citizenship for displaced persons is first and foremost ambiguous, stemming from the formation of social categories and their links to governmentality and participation.

The remaining three articles, too, examine the links between categorical identities and political citizenship, but with a stronger emphasis on popular movements and their spaces, capacities and strategies for claiming cultural recognition, social redistribution and political representation. Marielle Stigum Gleiss (2017) observes that citizenship is a focal point for political struggles and that such mobilizations take place within context-specific configurations of opportunities and restrictions. Her article thus examines the meaning of political space, and illustrates its utility through a case study of the strategies pursued by Chinese labour non-governmental organizations. She reviews the conception of political space in social movement theory, and proposes a reconceptualization that sees political space as a discursive and dynamic space for citizenship struggles. Political space is discursive in the sense that citizenship struggles are enabled or constrained by discourses that fix the meaning of issues, actors and strategies. It is also dynamic because discourses are never fixed but may be changed as different actors articulate meaning in new ways. Analysing citizenship politics thus requires attention to how meaning is constructed, reproduced and transformed.

David Jordhus-Lier (2017) uses a case study of a domestic workers’ movement in Indonesia to examine and rethink the concept of industrial citizenship. His starting point is the assumption that the realization of workers’ rights is contingent upon mutually constitutive dynamics between class-based solidarity and political mobilization. Although the Indonesian case supports this argument, the focus on informal workers in the Global South demonstrates the need for critical rethinking of industrial citizenship as an analytical concept. The article especially points to the importance of recognition for domestic workers as workers, as a precondition for claiming workers’ rights. It also demonstrates how the domestic workers’ movement faces political challenges within contextual political spaces as well as its inability to construct mutually constitutive scales of organizing between urban neighbourhoods and national level policy-making.

Marianne Millstein’s article contributes to theorizing on urban citizenship by analysing the everyday politics of citizenship struggles. Based on extensive ethnographic research in Cape Town, she examines the construction, meaning and experiences of urban citizenship in a situation in which it is precarious and contested. Her article shows that experiences of urban citizenship are closely linked to categorical identities. This is especially clear in how housing rights and policies are mediated through racial identities, residential status and notions of community belonging. The author uses these findings to re-examine urban citizenship and concludes that studies of everyday citizenship politics should pay close attention to the reconstructions of political subjectivities through state–society relations, the implications of differentiated subjectivities for how urban citizenship is perceived and claimed, and practices of citizenship that are seen as expressions of political agency.

Although the articles included in this special issue cover a broad range of themes, theories and contexts, they all lend support to our core arguments about the multidimensional, political and spatial character of citizenship. They also illustrate the value of citizenship politics as an integral analytical lens for research on inclusion and justice. Arguably, it is precisely through the connection of differing geographical contexts, thematic foci, and theoretical interests, that an in-depth investigation of the nature of citizenship is possible. This is important because although citizenship as such may not be understood as universally equal, but rather as partial and varied, there is nonetheless good reason to bring together analyses of citizenship from contexts across Asia, Africa and Europe, in order to tease out core themes that do cut across geographical divides. Finally, we also claim that this collection of articles demonstrates that political geographical scholarship may make valuable conceptual and contextual contributions to this broad field and conception of citizenship studies.