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Abstract
This article argues that focussing on issues of citizenship highlights the relationality of North/South dynamics and that doing so through a ‘Southern lens’ reveals two complementary and otherwise neglected aspects of North/South relationality: the coloniality of the institution of citizenship, and the lasting impact that (de)colonial contestations and reinterpretations of citizenship rights have had on this institution from its emergence in the context of colonial empires until its most recent global reconfigurations. In order to show how the coloniality of citizenship has played out in a particular region of the Global South, the article focuses on the Caribbean as the region with the longest history of colonial entanglements with Europe and one that captures the very dialectics of modernity/coloniality today.
Acknowledgements
I thank the editors of this special issue, especially Sebastian Haug, for their detailed and helpful feedback at all stages of writing and the anonymous reviewers of Third World Quarterly for their constructive comments and suggestions. Special thanks go to Santiago Slabodsky for providing a complementary pair of decolonial eyes to my argument about the ‘Southern’ lens. All remaining errors and imprecisions are, of course, my own.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author
Notes
1 Schwarz, Policies of Belonging.
2 Kaltmeier, “Global South”; Rigg, Everyday Geography of the Global South; Rigg, “Global South.”
3 For a detailed engagement with and book-length application of a “Southern lens,” see Fiddian-Qasmiyeh and Daley, Routledge Handbook of South–South Relations.
4 It was the main site of the genocide of indigenous peoples and of the arrival of enslaved Africans, and it provided resources and labour to Europe through the plantation economy and later through labour migrants rebuilding postwar economies in the Global North.
5 Ndlovu-Gatsheni and Tafira.
6 Connell, Southern Theory.
7 de Sousa Santos, Epistemologies of the South.
8 Fiddian-Qasmiyeh and Daley, Routledge Handbook of South–South Relations.
9 Grovogui, “A Revolution Nonetheless,” 176.
10 De Sousa Santos, Epistemologies 19.
11 De Sousa Santos and Meneses, Knowledges Born in the Struggle, xxvi.
12 Levander and Mignolo, "Introduction: The Global South and World Dis/order," 4f.
13 Fiddian-Qasmiyeh and Daley, Routledge Handbook of South–South Relations.
14 Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs, 54ff; Quijano, “Colonialidad del poder,” 381n1.
15 Isin, “Citizenship after Orientalism”; Parsons, System of Modern Societies.
16 Turner and Hamilton, “General Commentary.”
17 Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany; Korzeniewicz and Moran, Unveiling Inequality; Shachar, Birthright Lottery.
18 Boatcă, Global Inequalities beyond Occidentalism; Boatcă, “Global Inequalities,” 17–8.
19 Boatcă and Roth, “Unequal and Gendered,” 194.
20 Blackburn, Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 198; Wallerstein, “Citizens All? Citizens Some!,” 653f; Boatcă and Roth, “Unequal and Gendered,” 194.
21 Blackburn, Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 183ff; Boatcă and Roth, “Unequal and Gendered,” 194.
22 Stam and Shohat, Race in Translation, 29.
23 Isin and Nielsen, Acts of Citizenship.
24 Trouillot, Silencing the Past.
25 Fischer, Modernity Disavowed, 233; Boatcă and Roth, “Unequal and Gendered,” 206.
26 Horne, Confronting Black Jacobins, 102; For a critique of the nationalism inherent in the generalization of blackness as a category, see Buck-Morss, “Hegel, Haiti and Universal History”, 145-146.
27 Ibid., 10.
28 Jones, Birthright Citizens, 37.
29 Lockward, The Black Church in the War Zone.
30 Shick, “Quantitative Analysis of Liberian Colonization,” 46.
31 Henry, “Underground Railroad.”
32 Jones, Birthright Citizens, 4.
33 Ibid, 128.
34 Federal Judicial Center, Civil Rights Act 1866.
35 Korzeniewicz and Moran, Unveiling Inequality, 41.
36 Turner and Hamilton, “General Commentary”; Parsons, System of Modern Societies, 79.
37 Kochenov, Citizenship, xi, xii.
38 Ibid., xii.
39 Jus sanguinis was only adopted in Haiti, where the post-revolutionary context required a different decolonial turn of citizenship rights. Jus sanguinis was implemented in order to explicitly give the right of residence to anyone with African or Native American blood and at the same time exclude all whites arrived in Haiti after the Revolution from both citizenship and the acquisition of property. See Shachar, Birthright Lottery, 114; Fischer, Modernity Disavowed, 238.
40 Schwarz, Policies of Belonging, 20 (my translation).
41 Mignolo, “Who Speaks for the ‘Human’ in Human Rights?”
42 Castro-Gómez, “The Social Sciences, Epistemic Violence, and the Problem of the ‘Invention of the Other.’”
43 Beatriz González Stephan, “On Citizenship: The Grammatology of the Body-Politic,” 387.
44 Ibid.
45 Castro-Gómez, “Social Sciences,” 149.
46 Boatcă and Roth, “Unequal and Gendered,” 199.
47 Quijano, “El movimiento indigena,” 199ff; Boatca˘ and Roth, “Unequal and Gendered,” 197.
48 Boatcă and Roth, “Women on the Fast Track?,” 166.
49 Boatcă, “Exclusion Through Citizenship”; Boatca˘ and Roth, “Unequal and Gendered.”
50 Meltzer and Rojas, “Transformations and Imaginings and Practices.”
51 Rush and Reed, “Imperial Citizenship in a British World,” 502.
52 BBC News, “Windrush Generation.”
53 Meltzer and Rojas, “Transformations”.
54 Canessa, “New Indigenous Citizenship in Bolivia,” 218.
55 Ibid.
56 Korzeniewicz and Moran, Unveiling Inequality.
57 Boatcă and Roth, “Unequal and Gendered,” 200.
58 See Haynes, Routledge Handbook (2012), where France is discussed as an example of a strong civil society, Haiti as a weak state, and processes of democratisation are treated by region.
59 World Bank, 2019, https://www.worldbank.org/en/country/haiti/overview
60 Fauriol, “Is Haiti a Failing State?”; Torgman, “Haiti: A Failed State?”; Casimir, “Haiti’s Need for a Great South,” 16.
61 Boatcă, “Global Inequalities,” 18.
62 van Amersfoort and van Niekerk, “Immigration as a Colonial Inheritance.”
63 Cervantes-Rodríguez, Grosfoguel, and Mielants, Caribbean Migration; Boatcă, “Global Inequalities,” 18.
64 Boatcă, Global Inequalities beyond Occidentalism; Boatcă, “Centrality of Race.”
65 Boatcă, Exclusion through Citizenship; Boatcă Global Inequalities beyond Occidentalism.
66 As discussed elsewhere, “their main beneficiaries have so far been Chinese, Russian, but also Lebanese, Egyptian and Syrian investors; see Boatcă and Roth, “Women on the Fast Track?,” 163. The number of billionaires in middle-income countries tripled in just six years despite the 2008 recession. See Arton Capital, A Shrinking World; Transparency International and Golden Witness, “European Getaway.” Between 2006 and 2012, Russia registered almost a threefold and China a 12-fold increase in the number of billionaires. The newest data show Asia recording the fastest rise in billionaire numbers in 2019. See Albrecht and Korzeniewicz Creative Destruction, 103.
67 Boatcă and Roth, “Women on the Fast Track?,” 164.
68 Boatcă, “Exclusion through Citizenship,” 126–7.
69 Boatcă and Roth, “Women on the Fast Track?,” 164.
70 Ibid.
71 Ibid.
72 Harpaz, Citizenship 2.0, 23.
73 Henley & Partners, “The Henley Passport Index.”
74 Böröcz and Sarkar, 2005; World Atlas, Dependencies. With the withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the EU in 2020, known as Brexit, 13 British overseas no longer form part of the EU’s overseas countries and territories.
75 Southern and Eastern European Union member states, from Hungary to Cyprus, Malta, Greece and Bulgaria have implemented investment citizenship or residence programmes in order to secure Chinese investment and promoted the launch of their investment residence programmes in China. In 2018, Romania’s eastern neighbour Moldova – not a EU member – introduced its own citizenship by investment programme by boasting that it is ‘ten times cheaper than Malta and also cheaper than St. Kitts and Grenada CBI [citizenship by investment] passports’. As hurricanes hit the Caribbean in 2017, independent Caribbean states providing citizenship by investment have slashed their prices in order to raise emergency funds for the damages incurred by the hurricanes. Their entry in the race to the bottom boasts the ‘magnetism of a Caribbean passport’ by specifying, just as in the case of Moldova, that the minimum entry threshold for a Caribbean programme is cheaper than Malta’s.
76 Boatcă, “Forgotten Europes.”
77 Sheller, “Performances of Citizenship in the Caribbean,” 284.
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Manuela Boatcă
Manuela Boatcă is Professor of sociology with a focus on social structure and globalisation and Head of School of the Global Studies Programme at the Albert-Ludwigs-University Freiburg, Germany. Her work deals with world-systems analysis, postcolonial and decolonial perspectives, gender in modernity/coloniality and the geopolitics of knowledge production in Eastern Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean. She is the author of Global Inequalities beyond Occidentalism (Routledge 2016) and of Laboratoare ale modernității. Europa de Est și America Latină în (co)relație (IDEA 2020) as well as co-editor (with Vilna Treitler) of “Dynamics of Inequalities in a Global Perspective” (Current Sociology 2016). Together with Anca Parvulescu, she has recently completed a book manuscript titled Creolizing the Modern. Transylvania Across Empires (forthcoming 2022).