Reflections on citizenship: between promise and practice

ABSTRACT

This piece reflects on my work and its relationship to the study of citizenship. Throughout my career, I have studied citizenship from various vantage points – including the regimes that extend/restrict rights; the movements that seek to deepen citizenship; the organizations that can upend it; and the states that are necessary to protect it. As a whole, my scholarship speaks to the inherent tension between inclusion and exclusion as well as between promise and practice. In this context, my work features the importance of social movements struggling to contest (and advance) the boundaries of citizenship (and often human rights) – expanding who is included and the rights this affords.

KEYWORDS:

• Citizenship
• democracy
• ethnicity
• violence
• social movements
• latin america

Acknowledgments

I thank Engin Isin and Leah Bassel for their excellent feedback on this piece. Of course, all errors are my own.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. The first book partially focused on a short-lived democratic decade in Guatemala (1944–1954) – a period that extended suffrage and other rights but did so on different terms for Indigenous people who prior to 1944 had been subject to land inequality, debt peonage, and vagrancy laws; subsequently in the 1970s-1980s, they were the target of genocide. During the interim marked by the mid-century democratic decade (the ten years of spring), Indigenous people were granted partial inclusion alongside ‘modernizing’ and “assimilationist messages that encouraged them to assume more western practices while remaining committed to agricultural production for the country (Yashar 1997: see especially chapter 4). The nationalist effort sought to ‘incorporate them’ as peasants and Guatemalan nationals and to reframe ethnicity as historic folklore – assimilationist and paternalistic patterns that I noted in this first book and explored comparatively in later work.

2. See Falleti (2020) for an overview of political science’s oversight. Other political scientists also started to engage, with critical interventions by Brysk (2000), Van Cott (2000, 2005), Sieder (2002); Lucero (2008), Eisenstadt (2011), Madrid (2012), Trejo (2012), Eisenstadt and West (2019), Falleti and Riofrancos (2018), Riofrancos (2020), and Carter (2020). Within Latin America, the multidisciplinary scholarship beyond political science is expansive and arguably too long to list here.

3. I borrow the term ‘erasure’ from Volpp (2015). It is not a term that I used when I wrote my 2005 book.

4. In Audra Simpson’s (2014) powerful analysis, she analyzes a politics of refusal among the Mohawks of Kahnawá:ke.

5. For one such debate, see Academic Forum for the New Constitution in Chile (2022).

6. Latin American has experienced significant swings between authoritarian and democratic regimes. The third wave of democratization started in Southern Europe in the mid-1970s; Latin American military regimes (of various stripes) also transitioned to democratic regimes (of varying quality) starting in the late 1970s through the rest of the century, followed by regime changes in other regions of the world. This temporal and global regime shift is commonly referred to as ‘the third wave.’

7. I had analyzed states in my prior work but did so along different dimensions: how different kinds of states emerged alongside different kinds of political economies (Yashar (1997); and how uneven state penetration enabled Indigenous communities to sustain communal autonomy even when states tried to incorporate them (Yashar (2005). So too in Centeno, Kohli, and Yashar (2017) we analyzed states and state performance in the developing world in terms of their ability to address development, order, and inclusion. But in Yashar (2018), I centrally focused on state capacity for law and order, doing so along multiple dimensions (for example, in terms of territorial penetration, governance, corruption, and complicity).

8. The lack of formal political rights to vote has not prevented children from assuming an active role in protest movements. In recent years, children have been at the forefront of climate activism and gun control movements. Historically, students have also played a critical role in mobilizing against authoritarian governments and seeking to deepen democracy (in places as diverse as Guatemala and Chile).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Deborah J. Yashar

Deborah J. Yashar is the Donald E. Stokes Professor of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, the Director of Princeton’s Institute for International and Regional Studies (PIIRS), and former editor of World Politics. Her scholarly work has focused on a range of topics, including regime politics, citizenship, social movements, ethnic politics; state capacity and violence. Among her various publications, she has authored three books: Homicidal Ecologies: Illicit Economies and Complicit States in Latin America; Contesting Citizenship in Latin America: The Rise of Indigenous Movements and the Postliberal Challenge; and Demanding Democracy: Reform and Reaction in Costa Rica and Guatemala. She is also the coeditor of four volumes, the latest of which is The Inclusionary Turn in Latin America (coedited with Diana Kapizewski and Steve Levitsky).