Theorizing Acts of Citizenship

ENGIN F. ISIN

Citizenship in Flux: Subjects, Sites, Scales

It is now widely recognized that the social and political struggles over citizenship have acquired a new intensity (Isin and Turner 2002, 2007). What has become apparent more recently is that while citizens everywhere may be contained legally within state boundaries that enact rights and obligations, their own states are not subject to such containment. All states, through multilateral arrangements and international accords, implicate (or fail to implicate) their citizens involuntarily in a web of rights and responsibilities concerning the environment (wildlife, pollution), trade (copyright, protection), security, refugees, crime, minorities, war, children and many other issues. While the enforceability of these accords is a contested matter, every state exists in social, political or economic integration and is implicated in varying degrees of influence and autonomy. These complex webs of rights and responsibilities implicating citizens in various ethical, political and social decisions are important to keep in mind when thinking about citizenship today. What complicates this image further is that many citizens and non-citizens (illegal aliens, immigrants, migrants) of states have become increasingly mobile, carrying these webs of rights and obligations with them and further entangling them with other webs of rights and obligations. The status and habitus (ways of thought and conduct that are internalized over a relatively long period of time) of the subject we call the citizen is made infinitely more complex by its entanglements with these overflowing webs of rights and responsibilities.

Much has been debated concerning these matters in the past two decades, especially in the field of citizenship studies. By taking stock of these debates and suggesting that much of the focus has been on the status and habitus of citizenship, this chapter aims to outline a different perspective on the question of how subjects of the new overflowing rights and responsibilities enact themselves as citizens. It aims to constitute acts of citizenship as an object of investigation that is distinct from (but related to) the status and habitus of citizenship. After further defining the new context of global movements and flows, and articulating the need to focus on the concept of the act itself, I draw from several interdisciplinary thinkers who have investigated the concept of the act and outline a set of principles for theorizing acts of citizenship that will indicate the approach to citizenship we are building.

There is no doubt that the new intensity of struggles over citizenship is associated with global movements and flows of capital, labour and people. The movements of capital have created new sites of production and exchange of commodities across various boundaries and stretched limits of regulation. The creation of various zones, regions and territories to enable competitive production and exchange has created new sites of domination, exploitation and resistance. Similarly, global movements of labour across nations and states have generated new sites of struggle for both redistribution and recognition. As well as major movements into European, Anglo-American and Australian labour markets, there have been population movements within major states such as China and India. Meanwhile, within Anglo-American states, the post-war consensus on the welfare state and social citizenship has ended in a morass of vague disavowal, while neo-liberalization of the provision of social services has created new injustices and inequalities (Clarke 2004). This intensification of social relations through movements and flows has generated new affinities, identifications, loyalties, animosities and hostilities across borders.

Thus, whatever names are given to these processes of 'globalization', 'neo-liberalization' and 'post-modernization', and one can certainly question the adequacy of all or any of these names, various processes have combined to produce new, if not paradoxical, subjects of law and action, new subjectivities and identities, new sites of struggle and new scales of identification. Through these new subjects, sites and scales of struggle, citizenship, while typically understood as a legal status of membership in the state, if not the nation-state, became increasingly defined as practices of becoming claim-making subjects in and through various sites and scales (Isin 2008, forthcoming). These debates have illustrated that when combined with various adjectives such as 'intimate citizenship', 'multicultural citizenship', 'sexual citizenship', 'transgendered citizenship', 'consumer citizenship', 'cosmopolitan citizenship', or 'ecological citizenship', new identities could be investigated as the formation of new subjects, sites and scales of claim making (Clarke et al. 2007; Isin and Wood 1999; Kymlicka 1995; Kymlicka and Norman 2000; Lister 2002). This is not to say that there has been less emphasis on status but, rather, to suggest that most critical studies on citizenship focus on how status becomes contested by investigating practices through which claims are articulated and subjectivities are formed (Benhabib 2004; Soysal 1994). The effect of this shift to practices has been the production of studies concerning routines, rituals, customs, norms and habits of the everyday through which subjects become citizens. We can suggest that the impact of this body of work has been to include habitus (internalized or embodied ways of thought and conduct) alongside status within studies of citizenship (Bourdieu 1994; Schatzki 1997). This body of research has demonstrated effectively that virtues are cultivated, that citizenship is not inherited but learned, and that cultivating citizenship requires establishing supportive and relatively enduring practices and institutions (Allman and Beaty 2002).

Theorizing Citizenship: Status, Habitus, Acts

To put it another way, critical...