The Strength of Weak Citizenship

• In Event: 579 - Regular Session. Citizenship and Identities in the Globalized World

Abstract

What is the future of citizenship in the global age? How to “include” people who increasingly find themselves outside the state’s penumbra? While the notion of national citizenship has long held the promise of inclusion, it has proved less useful in a world of accelerated migrations and displacements. Given the force of history toward globalization, the puzzle arises what, if any, changes are effected in national citizenship. Modest evidence for the transnationalization of citizenship emerges in the rise of dual and multiple citizenships across the globe. Indeed, the very notion of citizenship seems to have moved away from its territorial basis in recent decades, as attested by works on postnational membership, flexible citizenship, diasporic citizenship, and biological citizenship. In this rich scholarly landscape, however, there is a large theoretical question that remains to be answered: if postnational or biological citizens must be citizens “of” something, what is that something? Must it be the nation? Or, do these newer forms of citizenship have a different referent? Based on ethnographic research conducted in India (2012-13), this study detects a nascent global political formation signaling the possibility of a form of membership untied from one territory, one state, and one system of rights.

Author

• Aneesh Aneesh, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee