Posthuman citizenship

ABSTRACT

Citizenship and the posthuman have not been often theorized together. In this paper, I want to think about their coalition both as a new episode in the efforts of politics for citizenship, including knowledge politics, and as a source of rebalancing power against governmental and corporate interests in citizenship politics. Here, I seek to address two questions: (1) What is posthuman citizenship? (2) What does posthuman citizenship bring to analysis of intersectional, complex, and multi-layered struggles of citizenship? Section I of the article addresses possible conceptual connections between citizenship and posthumanism at the posthuman political system level. Section II concentrates on a posthuman genealogy of citizenship to show why posthuman citizenship is a much-needed ontopolitical praxis. Section III details the main principles of posthuman citizenship with respect to mediation of rights, political agency, and political responsibility. The paper contributes to the understanding of politics of/for citizenship with two concepts: augmented political responsibility and posthuman deeds.

KEYWORDS:

• augmented political responsibility
• posthuman citizenship
• posthuman deeds
• posthuman genealogy
• posthuman political ecologies
• posthumanism

Introduction

Citizenship and the posthuman have not been often theorized together, except for a few brief attempts in literature and consumer research (Lai 2012; Nayar 2014). In this paper, I want to think about their coalition both as a new episode in the efforts of politics for citizenship, including knowledge politics, and as a source of rebalancing power against governments and corporations in citizenship politics, while the planet faces devastating issues such as climate change, industrial pollution, nuclear waste, and the exploitation and eradication of human and non-human life forms. Within this backdrop, this study arose from two interrelated concerns. Firstly, there is an urgent necessity to deconstruct citizenship and its persistent reference points, such as Christian, white, superior, rich, or able-bodied men, and to establish more inclusive politics of citizenship. This imperative has recently been addressed by various scholars (Gover 2017; Isin 2012b; Taylor 2013). However, none of them fully address the humanist character of citizenship that needs further questioning. Secondly, posthumanism, in its migration to other fields of social scientific inquiry, is reduced to either transhumanism that seeks to enhance humans (particularly, rich, upper-class ones) or new materialism, with its distinct ethical focus on matter. In fact, the posthuman is still an underdeveloped concept in most fields, including citizenship studies.

Within this context, scholars and activists have expressed concern about the applicability of more-than-human principles in politics. There have been various attempts towards this direction, including works by Latour (2004), Bennett (2010), Braun (2015), Salter (2015a, 2016), Honig (2017), Meiches (2019), and Lemke (2021). Critical citizenship studies have partially considered the posthuman as more-than-human, and this has been extended to other concepts such as ecological citizenship (Curtin 2002; Latta and Garside 2005; Reid and Taylor 2000; Dedeoglu and Ekmekcioglu 2020), sustainable citizenship (Bullen and Whitehead 2005), green citizenship (Gabrielson 2008; Scerri 2013), corporeal citizenship (Gabrielson and Parady 2010), insurgent citizenship (Latta 2014), feminist citizenship (MacGregor 2014), inclusive citizenship (Kymlicka and Sue 2017), lived citizenship (Kallio, Elisabeth Wood, and Häkli 2020), cyborg citizenship (Gray 2001; Haraway 1991), biological citizenship (Nayar 2012), data citizenship (Gabrys, Pritchard, and Barratt 2016), and digital citizenship (Isin and Ruppert 2020). However, there is currently no comprehensive work that attempts to propose a more complete conceptualization of posthuman citizenship to go beyond humanist approaches to citizenship and politics through citizens.

In this article, I aim to develop a posthuman perspective on citizenship that takes into account the intersectionality of struggles for citizenship and that acknowledges the ongoing multispecies resistance happening all around the world. I argue that posthuman citizenship can be seen as a challenge and alternative to the humanist account of citizenship, which historically emerged from a social contract among white, colonialist men and was mediated through a race war against Indigenous people (Moreton-Robinson 2009) and other more-than-human communities (Whyte 2018). To develop this argument, I propose that the posthuman political praxis can be built upon the notion of posthuman citizenship, which challenges both the traditional notions of citizenship based on the human as the primary political subject and the new materialist notion of matter that devalues responsibility in the posthuman landscape. I explore how the notion of posthuman can help us rethink the boundaries of the political community and what it means to be a responsible citizen in the posthuman era. In this way, this study contributes to my larger project of political posthumanism.

In the following three sections, I address two main questions: (1) What is posthuman citizenship? (2) What does posthuman citizenship bring to analysis of intersectional, complex, and multi-layered struggles of citizenship? In the first section, I start by defining citizenship operationally and then explore potential connections between citizenship and posthumanism. I provide an explanation of how the term ‘posthuman’ is used in the study. Building on this, I introduce the concept of posthuman citizenship placing it within a posthuman political system. In the second section, I reinterpret Engin Isin’s genealogy of citizenship from a posthuman perspective and discuss its significance in contemporary class formations. In the final section, I elaborate on the fundamental principles of posthuman citizenship. Some of these principles have been present in Indigenous philosophies but are new to Western scholars. In this section, I take up the vital materialism of Jane Bennett, as well as the critiques of new materialism as demonstrated by Sharon Krause and search for possible links between distributed agency and political responsibility as a possible foundation for posthuman citizenship. This part also highlights some examples of the ongoing legal-performative struggles aimed at addressing the question of how posthuman deeds of citizenship translates into politics.

New conceptual relations

Is citizenship a status? Is it a bundle of rights? Or a state mechanism for enforcing obligations? Is it a new type of global awareness? Or a desired end for solidarity movements? Is it a commodity with a price tag on it? Is it a dream to be realized in a country where a person was not born or will never live? Or a piece of paper (or an e-government profile) that has a huge role in geopolitical wars? What is citizenship in a time of globalization, neoliberalism, precarity, migration and border politics, racism, digital surveillance, drones, climate change, extinction, and viruses, among other things?

Citizenship is each and all of these, and perhaps more. Yet, we can, and should, because of its conceptual ambiguity, benefit from an operational definition. Thus, citizenship is ‘an “institution” mediating rights between the subjects of politics and the policy to which these subjects belong’ (Isin and Nyers 2014, 1). In this definition, ‘institution’ refers to processes beyond organizations themselves with its legal and performative aspects; ‘polity’ is understood beyond its state-centred meaning; the term ‘political subjects’ is preferred over ‘citizens’ as citizenship involves acts of both citizens and non-citizens and used in a plural sense as there are various subjectivities and multiple – overlapping and contradictory – ways of ‘belonging’. Concerns (and struggles to address these concerns) within the politics for/of citizenship include who benefits the most from the dominant way of institutionalization of citizenship; who is included and who is excluded in the process; and how citizenship can be rethought as a counter political institution against systemic injustices and vulnerabilities embedded within social systems in a posthuman era.

Citizenship and the posthuman

Wider scholarship around citizenship studies has blossomed in recent years, asking fresh questions of citizenship, and exploring innovative ways of addressing them. However, only a few works have paid enough attention to the posthuman as an ontopolitical praxis beyond the enlargement of the public sphere and/or the stretching of community to include non-humans (Alldred and Fox 2019; Häkli 2018; Hickey-Moody, Knight, and Florence 2021). To further this line of inquiry, I seek to develop the posthuman with a primary attention to citizenship. When ontopolitics is understood as ‘a new set of grounding ontological claims that form the basis of discussions about what it means to know, to govern and to be a human subject’ (Chandler 2018, xiii), the posthuman as an ontopolitical concept should be comprehended in radical terms that go beyond the limited ontological assumptions of the human subject to challenge discriminatory citizenship politics.

I employ the notion of posthuman in two distinct senses. Firstly, it refers to an earthly state of becoming that encompasses multiple species and various forms of matter. Secondly, it refers to an individual mode of existence characterized by more-than-human awareness and affinity (Dedeoglu and Zampaki 2023). This reflects a critical stance towards anthropocentrism, which relies on notions of human exceptionalism and exemptionalism. In addition to the critique of anthropocentrism, posthuman scholarship grapples with several other themes. These include the decentering and deconstruction of the human, understanding the world and worldlings (or assemblages) beyond Cartesian dualisms, critiquing the Enlightenment’s project of autonomous, rational individual (Braidotti 2013, 2018; Ferrando 2019), and responding to the more recent phenomenon of transhumanist colonialism, which is characterized by a neoliberal technologism (Dedeoglu and Zampaki 2023).

Based on this conceptual background, posthuman citizenship as a praxis serves two purposes: firstly, to acknowledge that more-than-humans are exposed to the posthuman predicament and secondly, to act urgently upon this knowledge. Posthuman citizenship understands the earth and its inhabitants as already-posthuman assemblages and defines citizenship as both a posthuman political-legal system and an assemblage of performative acts towards this system that respects and protects posthuman life. ‘Assemblages are emergent, non-linear, fractal-random processes, self-similar at different scales, and dynamically complex’ (Gullion 2018, 106), rendering any linear, fixed, and unidimensional analysis void. Various examples demonstrate the posthuman predicament, including the COVID-19 pandemic, wildfires in countries such as Australia and Canada, and 2023 earthquakes in Turkey and Syria. In these examples, different forms of matter act as posthuman agents (Hayles 2020), catalyzing events (Ronchi 2020) through homogenizing and differentiating tendencies within assemblages (Salter 2016), and exposing us to challenges that are difficult to ignore.

The 2023 earthquakes in Turkey and Syria, for instance, revealed the fragility of human-made systems that do not account for the complex, multiscale relationships between and among organic and inorganic forms of matter, e.g. humans and construction materials, humans and rescue tools and machines, and humans and animals and other life forms. This event highlighted how the idea of human life and dignity may be overlooked under authoritarian regimes focused primarily on economic growth (Burga 2023; BBC News 2023) and how anthropocentric biases manifest in rescue operations, with officials disregarding the value of non-human life (IFAW 2023; Euronews 2023). While there is a broader discussion in humanitarian politics that points out the complex entanglements of humans and non-humans, both as animals and technologies, in humanitarian efforts, the implications for citizenship politics are not fully discussed. Meiches (2019), for example, uses the concept of ‘non-human humanitarians’ to reinterpret the humanist humanitarianism. Using the examples of dogs, drones, and refuge camp diagrams, the author shows how more-than-human actants shape humanitarian environments and shaped by the politics in these environments. The dogs, drones, or other more-than-humans appear to be classified according to their benefits to humans and humanitarian efforts. However, the fate of animals in earthquake regions or other disaster areas becomes dependent on voluntary efforts. The question remains: how can we protect more-than-humans in such fragile environments and hold human actors accountable for the consequences they catalyze in such complexity?

Posthuman citizenship becomes a strong alternative for addressing these concerns based on its two interrelated meanings. First, it is the political-legal institution that mediates rights between posthuman subjects and the posthuman politics that they belong to. The meditation is already underway, albeit progressing slowly, through domestic and international policies at various levels of governance. Second, posthuman citizenship, as a performative institution, also encompasses any rights claims (and thus political responsibility/obligation demands) made against systemic injustices and vulnerabilities through various acts of performance, such as resistance, protest, strike, bargaining, citizen science, and forms of artistic expression. Posthuman deeds can and should assist us in uniting these demands for justice through stronger solidarity. Thus, posthuman citizenship is a plural institution of posthuman subjects for posthuman subjects by posthuman subjects. I will return to this point later in the final section.

A posthuman system-level approach to politics and citizenship

Posthuman citizenship, as well as politics for posthuman citizenship, should operate within a posthuman political system. In my attempt to do this, I concur with Braidotti’s view of politics and the political: ‘[p]olitics focuses on the management of civil society and its institutions, the political on the transformative experimentations with new arts of existence and ethical relations’ (Braidotti 2015, 30). Citizenship can be thought of both as a posthuman institutionalization in politics and as the political that works towards this goal. The institutionalization of posthuman citizenship has already been occurring within political systems that are embedded in broader zoe-geo-techno systems and has always been sympoietic.

Developments in microbiome research revitalized the symbiosis paradigm in the life sciences (Gilbert, Sapp, and Tauber 2012). This also led to new paths of thinking in the social sciences and humanities. Under this paradigm shift, we can read systems, particularly social systems, as symbiotic becomings. For example, Donna Haraway suggests sympoiesis as an alternative theory to Margulis’s theory of autopoiesis (Žukauskaitė 2020). According to Haraway’s natureculture view, ‘nothing makes itself; nothing is really autopoietic or self-organizing’ (Haraway 2016, 58) and systems and entities within them are always in ‘making-with’ others. We can observe the (post)human dimension of the natureculture as a sympoiesis in different modes today: species-in-common, species-in-biosymbiosis, and species-in-cybersymbiosis (Hayles 2020). While humans as species-in-common focuses on commonalities between humans beyond the categories of race, sex, or geopolitics, humans as species-in-biosymbiosis enables to imagine the human as a biological network that is connected with other biological networks by either hosting them or interacting with them. And humans as species-in-cybersymbiosis further complicates this biosymbiotic relationality by adding a technological-digital dimension into it.

Nevertheless, thinking about political systems in terms of species-in-common should not obscure the persistent politics of difference. As multiple stories about the COVID-19 pandemic indicate, ‘more-than-human encounters are shot through by power relations, inequalities, acts of border-making (between human and animal, nations, etc.), and broader politics of difference unfolding across different human and more-than-human communities alike’ (Lunstrum et al. 2021, 1504). In other words, a unique event, such as COVID-19, transverses systemic issues such as racial capitalism, environmental racism, and exploitation of animals. Under such intersectional regimes of vulnerability, species-in-common should be supplemented by species-in-difference. This mode is therefore particularly important for an inclusive posthuman political framework that reads the history of power relations and cultural forms without assimilating ‘racial discourse into species’ (Ahuja 2009, 557), queer discourse into heteronormativity, diverse and multi-scalar ecological problems into unidimensional climate change, or intersectionality of injustices into one hegemonic identity problem.

Lastly, if socio-political systems are always making with ‘zoe-geo-techno entities’ (Braidotti 2019, 1187) and other systems in the posthuman era, then polity and policy can (and should) also be thought of as symbiotic becomings. Assemblage thinking (Deleuze and Guattari 1988; DeLanda 2006) helps us further this conversation, as ‘the assemblage’s only unity is that of co-functioning: it is a symbiosis’ (Deleuze and Parnet 1987, 69). Thus, assemblage thinking is the way of thinking with life as sympoiesis. Thinking policy (and polity) through assemblages therefore corresponds to some ontopolitical choices such as ‘commitment to relationality over essentialism’, ‘concern with the capacities of both human and non-human matter’, and ‘a posthuman understanding of environment and sustainability’ (Fox and Alldred 2020, 270), as well as ‘complexifying modification of both “structure” and “relation”’ (Verran 2021). Approaching policy(−making) through assemblage thinking facilitates an understanding of policy not as something solely imposed by a polity but as something that is spatially and temporally made with various actants and particularities. As Fox and Alldred (2020) put it, an assemblage-thinking comparison of different climate policy approaches (the liberal environmentalist, UN sustainable development, green capitalism, and no growth) allows for the classification of different bundles of actants and particularities for each policy approach, such as humans, consumers, animals, land, or the atmosphere.

For this study, the policy as assemblage view has two immediate repercussions. First, policy as assemblage is persistent in all these approaches while having diverse entities. Second, and more importantly, if each polity has its own inclusion and exclusion mechanisms for policymaking, seeing policymaking through assemblage thinking is not enough to make politics more inclusive and to create caring policy options. In this respect, if assemblage thinking is the ‘onto-’ dimension of the ontopolitics, posthuman citizenship can be understood as the ‘political’ catalyst that makes the above-mentioned ontological dimension possible in politics by intervening politics and policymaking processes.

A posthuman genealogy of citizenship

In this section, I undertake a reinterpretation of Engin Isin’s citizenship genealogy using a posthuman lens. I explore evolving class structures and intersectional social struggles, aiming to clarify the necessity of posthuman citizenship. A genealogy of citizenship is necessarily partial and incomplete because it refuses to establish a comprehensive narrative of historical plot, as Isin (1997) argues. Despite these limitations, Isin provides a comprehensive genealogical account of the formation of citizenship in the West, highlighting the historical factors of class, capital, and territory. Citizens in this genealogy, such as the ‘warrior-citizen’, ‘peasant citizen’, ‘patrician-citizen’, ‘plebeian-citizen’, ‘artisan-citizen’, ‘bourgeois-citizen’, and ‘worker-citizen’, coincide with different historical episodes, with each being the result of class struggles at specific times (Isin 1997, 115). Isin further contends that the modern doctrine of citizenship is a phenomenon shaped by a particular class’s demands against another class: ‘The doctrine of the sovereign citizen capable of entering into contracts, pursuing his private interests, selling his labour power, and purchasing his sustenance, and capable of being governed, was the characteristic aspect of modern citizenship and reflected the demands made by the bourgeoisie on the landed aristocracy’ (Isin 1997, 127). Isin argues that the new citizen is not the owner of landed property (aristocracy) or industrial capital (bourgeoisie) but of cultural capital: ‘[t]he new class is based on ownership of knowledge and its accumulation as cultural capital’ (Isin 1997, 128). For Isin, the new citizens’ class positions do not show uniformity; neither do their (political) demands. Today, the absence of uniformity is even more pronounced, as citizenship struggles are intricately intertwined with a range of other issues, encompassing class, gender, race, as well as ecological and climate justice (Bassel and Isin 2022).

The genealogy of citizenship holds three key implications for the necessity of posthuman citizenship today. Firstly, if citizenship has historically involved various struggles and there is no guarantee of permanent citizenship rights and privileges, then it must be continuously defended and maintained. Secondly, if citizenship has always been a struggle between two or more classes, then there have always been outsiders, or third parties, in this struggle, who are typically disregarded in ongoing discussions. Thus, citizenship must be continuously challenged. Thirdly, citizenship is a dynamic process, which means that there is a need to work towards building new solidarities as activist (non)citizens, not just self-interested, active ones, to defend and challenge citizenship. These three implications can be viewed as three propositions for a posthuman citizenship.

In the current historical moment, which is marked by the possibility of species extinction and other existential threats, citizenship rights and privileges must also be reconsidered. It is conceivable that there will be no country or planet left to enjoy these rights and privileges in the future. Climate migration is one area where this is becoming evident (Bye et al. 2023; Manuvie 2023). However, the state-centered frameworks of citizenship that are used to address climate migration tend to operate through exclusionary mechanisms of classification based on race, gender, and species. As a result, both human and non-human populations are becoming invisible within these frameworks, and many are left to their fate. It is therefore necessary to move beyond the fetishism of species and demand justice for all forms of existence. Drawing on Colebrook (2018), this presents an opportunity to envision novel ontopolitical alternatives, grounded in (k)new principles of political transformation.

The second implication for posthuman citizenship is that it need not be based solely on the principles of scarcity and solidarity, as suggested by Turner (1997). Yet, Turner’s later focus on ‘human wants’ in addressing scarcity is significant. The primary issue lies not in the scarcity of resources but in the infinite nature of human desire (Turner and Rojek 2001). Instead of a problem of managing scarce resources, citizenship formation can be linked to the distribution of abundant resources. As demonstrated in Isin’s genealogy, the presence or absence of citizenship depends on whether rulers have absolute power over resources. Solidarity has also historically worked in both ways, as a revolutionary force against rulers and as a power consolidation that results in unequal distribution of resources. The Pauline ideal of citizenship, based on fraternity and brotherhood praxes, did not include everyone, as Isin (2012a) notes. This ideal was later transformed into the modern sovereign citizenship ideal created by political-military actors and their followers in the humanist enlightenment era. Earlier forms of exclusion were based on divisions such as civilized vs. barbarian, men vs. women, and landowner vs. slave. In later periods, affiliation with a religious sect (of Christianity) or a secular sect (of humanism) became the medium of inclusion.

Struggles and formations related to citizenship have continued throughout history, characterized by specific forms of inclusion and exclusion that have often marginalized non-human entities. For instance, water has consistently played a vital role in struggles related to citizenship, particularly in issues regarding water sanitation and other concerns. Additionally, the availability of water has significantly impacted the course of civilizations, serving as a transformative force. Despite this, the dominant approach to water has been human-centered and limited to a singular term of water, disregarding the plurality of waters such as rivers, which possess their own distinct and entangled ontologies. This overlooked understanding about water’s actant capacity in citizenship is not unlike from the overlooked understanding about passport’s actant capacity in Jewish people’s citizenship claims against the Nazi Germany, or that of electronic passports (Walters and Vanderlip 2015) and passport photos (Salter 2015b) in today’s citizenship assemblage. This underscores the necessity of posthuman citizenship as an ontopolitical intervention that transcends the conventional notions of agency and the traditional binary of resource scarcity and abundance. The subsequent discussion on political agency further contributes to this debate.

Nonetheless, the idea of economic citizenship based on scarcity persists even in ecological citizenship, which is the closest conceptualization to posthuman citizenship in the literature. Andrew Dobson, for instance, argues that ‘[p]olitical obligation between citizens is generated … by the requirements of justice under conditions of ecological space scarcity’ (Dobson 2006, 448). Dobson considers citizenship in terms of safeguarding the utility of the environment for everybody, as evidenced by the author’s views on ecological space scarcity. There is an imaginary allotted space for every citizen in the world, and some citizens occupy more than their share and benefit more from ecological ‘resources’ than other fellow citizens and the citizens of other countries. Apparently, ‘[c]ontemporary visions of ecological waste and scarcity as “limits to capital” reflect that ecocidal violence is more often narrated as a crisis of overconsumption than as a problem of enclosure or of racialized divisions of carbon privilege and waste effects’ (Ahuja 2015, 368–369).

However, most socio-ecological problems are caused by abundance rather than scarcity, which is described as ‘abundance curse’ (Acosta 2013). When there is an abundance of minerals, oil, or forestry in a particular place, e.g. Indigenous regions, ecocidal tendencies increase. Moreover, high levels of carbon emissions emerge from exploitative linkages between extractivist activities of states and corporations against the well-being of more-than-human communities. And ‘resource-rich’ regions are becoming the target for not only other states, but also the local government and its business partners within the country (Rodriguez 2020). This implies a more general problem with orthodox economics, as Tawney (1913) observed more than a century ago: ‘what thoughtful rich people call the problem of poverty, thoughtful poor people call with equal justice the problem of riches’.

The third proposition that can be derived from this genealogy of citizenship is the need to challenge the solidarities created in the forms of fraternity and/or brotherhood through activist solidarities, which correspond to acts of citizenship. The term ‘acts’ is defined by Isin (2008) as deeds that disrupt habitus, create new possibilities, claim rights, and impose obligations in emotionally charged tones, and shift established practices, status and order. While citizenship was regarded as a political-legal concept in the past, it has now become an area of sociological inquiry, with socio-ecological concerns that are also influenced by technological developments. Thus, there is a pressing need for posthuman deeds, both in terms of legal transfers or contracts, and acts of performance that disrupt, claim, and create towards sustainable political ecologies – the intersectional interfaces of natureculture – that are not always equally accessible to their more-than-human nodes in dominant citizenship regimes. Given that the sustainability of political ecologies requires unified action against the domination and exploitation of more-than-humans, solidarities against dominant citizenship regimes must have a posthuman character. In other words, climate activists, queer activists, Indigenous activists, human and animal rights activists, local communities, international solidarity groups, and artists must work together to create a posthuman resistance that merges the notions of species-in-common with species-in-difference. More importantly, posthuman resistance must incorporate a critical stance towards transhumanist colonialism, which is fueled by tech companies.

In a posthuman world where the boundaries between a system and its complex environment are blurred, it becomes challenging to make normative assumptions about systematic relations. This holds true for citizenship in two corresponding ways. First, the boundaries between different versions of capital are no longer clear.¹ And the blurred boundaries among different versions of capital correspond to blurred boundaries of class interests. In recent decades, the emergence of new entrepreneurial coalitions between industrial capital and cultural capital has given rise to a new ‘class’ of tech entrepreneurs. In addition to earlier formations of ‘bourgeoisie, working class, and propertied class’, a new ‘professional’ citizen, who owns information, has emerged in the late 20^th century (Isin 1997, 130). Today, tech companies are distinguishable from both the old industrial bourgeoisie and new professionals in terms of ‘class’ interests, as documented in US politics (Robertson 2022). Hence, it is imperative for initiatives aimed at advancing posthuman citizenship to exercise prudence in response to the emergence of these nascent coalitions operating within the context of surveillance capitalism.

These new coalitions promote technologies such as nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, or gene editing as transhumanist products to enhance human experience (Smart and Smart 2021). These products are incorporated into capitalist marketing strategies that prioritize the well-being of certain privileged humans. In this sense, transhumanist ideals and corporate marketing strategies converge around a single objective: selling the idea, product, or service. The success of these marketing strategies is partially dependent on the creation of a new transhuman consumer who seeks to maintain their privileges and live well, regardless of the costs. Posthumanists, on the other hand, point out the potential risks involved in this ‘anthropocentric wish fulfillment’, not only to humans but also to ‘our co-inhabitants of the world’ (Smart and Smart 2021, 204).

In this regard, posthuman citizenship should consider the risks associated with emerging technologies ranging from surveillance and privacy to ecological consequences of the Internet. Citizens should feel equally responsible for sustainable technologies, such as artificial intelligence, and technologies for sustainability (van Wynsberghe 2021). This dual responsibility is necessary to strengthen (non)citizens’ immunity against technological determinism and techno-solutionism, thereby increasing the chances for informed political ecological acts.

Finally, in a posthuman world, the boundaries between physical, biological, and digital spheres, as well as ecological and technological ones are blurred, which makes it difficult to make normative assumptions about systematic relations. This presents a challenge for posthuman citizenship, as it is increasingly defined by and against posthuman political ecologies. Tech companies and other corporations exploit vulnerable species communities and extract materials to maximize profits and minimize costs, making citizenship a tool for profit rather than a means for social progress. Therefore, it is crucial for material and immaterial circulations of affect to aim at an affirmative politics for citizenship that balances power against these ‘class’ interests and sustains posthuman political ecologies. This requires an understanding of posthuman ecologies as complex systems whose processual characters and complex relations are constituted by circulations of affect (Bignall and Braidotti 2019). Only by promoting a politics of sustainability that is determined to maintain balance between powers of nature and societal powers can citizenship move beyond its current limitations and contribute to a more just and equitable society.

Principles of posthuman citizenship

The previous sections have focused on situating posthuman citizenship within a posthuman political system and discussing its premises through a posthuman genealogy of citizenship. In this final section, I discuss the key principles that posthuman citizenship needs to function through. These principles are related to three institutional components of citizenship: mediation of rights, political agency, and political responsibility.

Mediation of rights

Posthuman citizenship is first and foremost an institutional consequence of the posthuman condition. Therefore, it mediates rights and obligations between posthuman subjects and posthuman polities. This mediation is based on the notion of posthuman sustainability and operates through posthuman body politic at multi-scalar levels.

Posthuman sustainability

The pressing issues of species extinction, climate change and its consequences such as climate migration, extreme weather events, and droughts, as well as their intersectionality with systemic injustices such as racism, sexism, or speciesism, make posthuman sustainability a major principle underlying right claims. For many scholars, sustainability has lost its activist mode and been reduced to a technocratic mechanism (Alaimo 2012). As an antidote to this, posthuman sustainability is an activist praxis to endure symbiotic naturecultures, instead of polluting, extracting, and exploiting governments and corporations. Moreover, the basis for posthuman sustainability is the notion of justice for all more-than-humans, not the endurance of planetary reserves to secure their consumption in the future (Cielemęcka and Daigle 2019). Lastly, there is the problem of the politics of knowledge, which is closely intertwined with posthuman citizenship as an ontopolitical alternative: what is to be endured is closely related to what is known about it and how. For instance, how human-animal histories (Swart 2018) or human-insect relations (Ahuja 2015) are narrated is deeply connected with the histories of colonialism, nationalism, and domination. Posthuman sustainability therefore works in tandem with critical genealogies, histographies, and cartographies. Within this context, posthuman sustainability demands a posthuman body politic.

Posthuman body politic

The wide range of problems, from environmental racism to chemical and nuclear toxicity to plastic pollution in oceans – in short, matters of life and death – point to intimate relations between diverse more-than-human bodies through material interactions (Ahuja 2015; Chen 2012). Therefore, we should imagine posthuman citizenship as an extension of posthuman body politic, not the state. Such a twist will function in two complementary ways. Firstly, posthuman citizenship assembles alternative resistance movements against the rhetoric of ‘pathology’ and ‘good citizenship’ that is used by governments in various contexts, e.g. against Indigenous people (Moreton-Robinson 2009). Secondly, it enables a posthuman sustainability position that goes beyond species-in-difference in citizenship claims and seeks justice for all. If the posthuman body hosts multiple ‘forms of interaction and boundary crossing, biological and artificial’ (Rasmussen and Brown 2005; see also Hayles 1999), and the posthuman body politic operates beyond the predefined boundaries of a human body, then pathology cannot be seen as an isolated problem of the host but rather as an intersectional, multi-layered problem of all. In this sense, both the posthuman body and its political ecological community, as well as the relevant spectrum of political choices, are deemed plural and transversal. In the post-pandemic era, such plurality and transversality in life – including political life – have become more obvious.

Posthuman political agency

The subjects of posthuman citizenship become politicized through their acts with more-than-human actants, and those acts of citizenship are both facilitated and restricted by various forms of matter and immaterial becomings. According to Jane Bennett, ‘[a]n actant is neither an object nor a subject but an “intervener”’ (Bennett 2010, 24). That is, the act of intervention is what makes the intervener, or actant, visible in the system, and the matter in various forms can be an intervener. This gives way to the idea of distributed agency. If actants are neither subjects nor objects, and humans are also actants among other actants, then the acts of citizenship should be reconsidered as distributed acts.

Bennett’s emphasis on thing-power and assemblage understanding of agency implies that diverse forms of matter may distort political order. In this way, Bennett’s vital materialism looks helpful for governing complexities of our world. However, it needs to be complemented with a more robust political-legal vision to guide decision-making during and after crisis moments. And since crises are the new normal in the posthuman era, Bennett’s ethical position needs a political one (Lemke 2018) to govern the posthuman world. In other words, distributed agency requires a political thinking before deciding who should be kept responsible in a specific event and according to which criteria.

Although I agree with the new materialist position at the ontological level, I believe we should be open to alternative motives of political acts – materialist or otherwise. The importance of such a plural ontopolitical stance can be recognized in Indigenous, Indian, or Abrahamic post-secular insurgencies against ecological crimes (Latta 2014). In various parts of the world, Indigenous people fight for what they consider sacred, as well as a part of their very existence, e.g. land, water, mountains, and animals. And these claims are marginalized by the state and its disciplinary citizenship practices (Moreton-Robinson 2009). The holistic Indigenous ontology is not easily grasped within the Western logocentrism and is instead reduced to dualisms such as mind-body, body-spirit, and material-immaterial. From the divided Western ontological position, a potluck ceremony (Hunt 2014), for instance, cannot be understood as a political, communal, and spiritual event, happening everywhere, involving everything, all at once.

Political responsibility

Political responsibility might be the most complicated aspect of citizenship. It is no different for posthuman citizenship. As also evident in the above discussion, ‘ethical theorizations that privilege a normative ground over the political field of power’ (Arroyo and Antonio 2016, ix) have recently been dominating socio-political inquiry. In this regard, it is critical to think of political responsibility as a response to ongoing relations of power (Arroyo and Antonio 2016). The genealogy demonstrated how deeply citizenship and power formations are connected and why the changing arrangements of class, capital, and territory should be responded to by a new politics of/for citizenship. Here, I argue that a posthuman understanding of distributed agency does not have to lead to a politically inert subjectivity. In fact, Indigenous understanding of life can help us produce a stronger principle of political responsibility. This can be examined through Indigenous ontologies, particularly the Anishinaabe² Bimaadiziwin (worldview). This worldview acknowledges that individuals possess a spirit, heart, mind, and body, which leads to connections, feelings, thoughts, and actions. This, in turn, promotes respect, relationship, reciprocity, and responsibility (4 R) towards all living things on the planet (Bell 2013). The universal Indigenous principles of 4Rs can serve as the foundation for an alternative social contract that is not rooted in colonial interests, but rather in the Earth itself. By viewing the human as a part of a larger circle, life is seen as a whole, and with this holistic perspective comes responsibility for its care and preservation.

I prefer to call this robust version of political responsibility ‘augmented political responsibility’, taking into consideration different meanings of ‘augment’, e.g. to amplify and increase something’s value. This also involves hacking the meaning of augmentation as popularized by a transhumanist marketing vision. Thus, the fact that humans, states, and corporations are ‘assemblaged’ entities with distributed agency should not reduce their responsibility for harm. Instead, they should be held more accountable for assimilating their co-actants’ agential capacities for the purposes of exploitation, extraction, and misuse.

I think this proposal can also be seen as a posthumanist alternative to Krause’s (2011) framing of agency, which stays within limitations of humanism and liberal democracy. I agree with Krause’s distinctions between self-hood and sovereignty and between agency and intentionality or control, even if they are made from a humanist ontopolitical position. At first glance, their proposition about reflexivity also seems plausible: ‘[t]he reflexivity implicit in the sense of selfhood also makes it possible for human beings to be responsive to norms in ways that inanimate objects cannot be’ (Krause 2011, 310). However, I see no reason not to use this proposition to justify increased political responsibility for human actants that perform their distributed agencies in or out of politics or other organizations. Today, we need a political-legal system that holds humans, who set norms for both humans and non-humans, more accountable.

Consider the act of killing. Killing involves the killer, the weapon, the environment, other humans, and non-humans in the scene, and those behind the scenes. Thus, one might say that distributed agency of actants produces killing. Distributed agency may help clarify (and govern) uncertainties in specific events, but it does not change the outcome of purposeful acts like killing. The weapon and other potential actants in the scene are assimilated by the killer as they act together. For instance, the wind being a major actant does not change the presence of responsibility. It may increase responsibilities though. Moreover, in countries like the US, easy access to firearms and weak regulations might well lead some people to consider murder. In this event, the killer’s free will is haunted by the weapon’s capabilities because this capability depends on various actants, the main one being the weapon. However, politicians who conceal their harm to society bear greater political responsibility.

This example can also be applied to ecocide. When a company builds a power plant in a forest ecosystem, local humans, trees, and other ecological community members will be involved. Water and other organic and inorganic matter should be also added to the list. Water is a major actant in the company’s decision to build and maintain the power plant there. As discussed earlier, water played a similar role in ancient civilizations, even preventing citizenship formations. The ecocidal event would also include government officials who gave the company officials the go-ahead. International regulations, national growth plans, electoral outcomes, and other assemblages may affect that governance decision. Bribery may have influenced that decision. In this sense, distributed agency clearly helps explain the becoming of power plant ecocide.

However, using other actants’ agential capacities for private purposes illegally should increase government officials’ and corporations’ responsibility. This is so because when a river dies, a part of existence and a part of me dies too. It is a violent act against the living beings that goes beyond the boundaries of humanity. The social contract that governs the planet, based on the Indigenous principles of respect, relationship, reciprocity, and responsibility, is violated by such acts. Therefore, there must have political and legal consequences. These examples of augmented political responsibility led us to the final principle of posthuman citizenship, which is that posthuman actions are fundamental to posthuman citizenship.

Posthuman deeds

If, there are only interveners, not sovereign subjects and if ‘agency involves deeds’ (Krause 2011, 303), then posthuman citizenship can only function through posthuman deeds. Only posthuman deeds can create posthuman citizens and bring political change. A posthuman deed, therefore, refers to both a legal transfer or contract and acts of performance that disrupt, claim, and create towards sustainable political ecologies.

Indigenous stories and songs have inspired my understanding of posthuman deeds, which can be understood as both a contract and an act of performance. Stó:lō scholar Robinson (2017) argues that examples of round dancing, slahal, and breaking copper are not intended to create new aesthetic forms of activism, but rather to affirm Indigenous people’s connection and sense of belonging through Indigenous public assembly in public and private spaces. The song is not considered a performance in the conventional sense, but an act of becoming political, which creates a binding contract between the entities. These binding principles have been part of Indigenous ontologies for thousand of years. Similarly, organizing resistance, including songs and other performances, against a construction project and demanding its relocation rather than the removal of a hundred-year-old tree can be considered posthuman deeds of citizenship. These deeds may be seen as ‘speaking for the tree’, but they are more than that. I find it important to dwell on this nuance concerning a posthuman deed of citizenship. Such a deed should not only be understood as deciding on behalf of someone else, but also as taking their rights into account in an activist way. Considering the performative and legal meanings of a deed, each posthuman citizenship deed is about both governing and protecting the rights of others.

If environmental activists are found guilty, not the company that illegally opened a mining area or the local governor or any other public official who allowed it without considering the rights of others, this shows the lack of posthuman legal acts in the political-legal system. But it also reveals the posthuman acts that environmental activists perform to change the system. These are the posthuman deeds that make people ‘activists’ and make their citizenship a posthuman one, whether it is yet reflected in the legal norm or not. This also points to the importance of building posthuman solidarity networks because only collectives can meticulously work towards this goal.

Posthuman deeds can be observed across various scales of struggles for citizenship. In the last few decades, significant efforts have been made towards posthuman ‘institutionalization’ through posthuman deeds, in line with the two aspects of citizenship – legal and performative. Emergent forms of multispecies resistance and new intersectional coalitions globally demonstrate the performative aspect of posthuman deeds. An instance of this is the 1990s’ ‘one struggle’ movement in Israel that views human and animal oppressions as interconnected (Alloun and Cook 2023). Similarly, human rights and animal rights advocacy has been recently converging in the US, with organizations like The Center for Constitutional Rights embracing a vegan/vegetarian policy as an act of solidarity with the animal rights movement (Shooster 2018). However, these coalitions are still under the risk of politics of species-in-difference, and racism persists against multispecies resistance. Christopher ‘Soul’ Eubanks, a Black animal rights activist, has rightly pointed out that racism is still at work in these coalitions (Eubanks, Christopher “Soul” 2021). These persistent contradictions highlight the significance of posthuman solidarity networks that are rooted in nomadic subjects as qualitative multiplicities, where ‘[d]ifference emerges accordingly in all its positivity, having abandoned the dialectical frame’ (Braidotti 2006). This affirmative understanding of subjectivity and politics serves as the foundation for the emergence of posthuman deeds, as we strive to cultivate an inclusive posthuman citizenship that transcends discriminatory politics.

When it comes to the legal side, we can examine national and international examples. For instance, Ecuador’s recognition of the rights of nature in its constitution can be seen as the result of activists’ demands for multispecies justice (Fitz-Henry 2022) and, therefore, as a posthuman national institutionalization aimed at mediating rights between more-than-humans and the polity. Another example of posthuman institutionalization has recently become visible in the attempts to develop an international jurisdiction for ecocide. Initiatives such as Stop Ecocide have been working towards the goal of ‘making ecocide an international crime’ (Stop Ecocide International n.d..). Finally, posthuman deeds may have diverse sources and scales. While Ecuador’s history, culture, and Indigenous knowledge base support its constitutional re-institutionalization, Ecocide International collaborates with international experts and grassroots movements. Thus, both examples show that agential capacities at various scales affect the emergence of posthuman deeds.

Conclusion

This paper is based on the premise that posthuman citizenship is not only a valuable conceptualization that aligns with the posthuman condition but also a diverse range of inclusive acts aimed at political transformation to restore the balance of power in citizenship politics, promoting the cause of sustainable political ecologies. Throughout the paper, I address ‘what’, ‘why’, and ‘how’ of posthuman citizenship, while at the same time working on a new vocabulary, such as augmented political responsibility and posthuman deeds, to better understand and act on the posthuman condition. The posthuman condition is marked by a range of complex issues that encompass colonialism, extractivism, climate change, nuclear waste, industrial pollution, military aggression, armament, artificial intelligence technologies, surveillance, and precarity. These issues intersect with discriminations based on race, gender, religion, and species. The posthuman condition also corresponds to the limitations of human agency and the challenges of understanding the zoe-geo-techno assemblages. These limitations and challenges create a situation where posthuman exposure directly threatens the lives and well-being of more-than-humans. In this context, posthuman citizenship emerges as an ontopolitical alternative and a political force for change.

I previously stated that posthuman citizenship is a plural institution of posthuman subjects for posthuman subjects by posthuman subjects. As a concluding remark, I revise it: posthuman citizenship is a plural institution of posthuman actants for posthuman actants by posthuman actants. There are no subjects, only activist (non)citizens performing posthuman deeds. Posthuman deeds bring us, more-than-humans, together, create synergies for defending posthuman political ecologies, and make new deeds for fair political-legal assemblages.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the journal editors and anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful and thought-provoking feedback. I am also grateful Priyank Chandra, Cansu Ekmekçioğlu, and Randolph Haluza-DeLay for their suggestions on the earlier versions of the paper. For the purpose of open access, I have received support from Yorkville University's Support for Scholarly Activity Funding.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. According to Isin (1997), they have never been so.

2. The ancestral lands of the Anishinaabe people are located across a large area that spans from the Great Lakes region and extends westward (occupied first by the British, then by Canada and the US). For details, see Legal Aid Saskatchewan (n.d.).