The Repositioning of Citizenship and Alienage: Emergent Subjects and Spaces for Politics

Abstract

The two foundational subjects for membership in the modern nation-state, the citizen and the alien, are undergoing significant changes in the current period. The effect is a partial blurring of each the citizen subject and the alien subject. Some of these changes are not formalized and hence become particularly evident in certain types of contexts, foremost among which are cities. These can be seen as productive spaces for informal or notyet-formalized politics and subjects. In this examination of emergent possibilities, I first outline these changes vis-à-vis nationality and citizenship. Second, I dissect notions of national membership in order to create a set of tools for reconstructing citizenship analytically. In the third section, I delineate two key, incipient kinds of repositioned membership: unauthorized yet recognized subjects, and authorized yet unrecognized subjects. Fourth, I situate these repositionings within contemporary currents of citizenship theory. In the final section, I theorize the landscape of the global city as an especially salient site for the repositioning of citizenship in practice. At the scale of the city, and the particular urban space of the global city, there are dynamics that signal the possibilities for a politics of membership that is simultaneously localized and transnational.Most of the scholarship on citizenship has claimed a necessary connection to the national state. The transformations afoot today raise questions about this proposition insofar as they significantly alter those conditions which in the past fed that articulation between citizenship and the national state. The context for this possible alteration is defined by two major, partly interconnected conditions. One is the change in the position and institutional features of national states since the 1980s resulting from various types of globalization-linked policies. These range from economic privatization and deregulation to the increased prominence of the Correspondence Address: Saskia Sassen, Professor of Sociology, University of Chicago.

Spatial segregation and migration in the city of Athens: Investigating the evolution of urban socio‐spatial immigrant structures

“…To that end, it can be argued that because migrants are able to modify commercial and residential spaces, they constitute a potential force for change within and outside the city core (Sassen, ). Based on this role of migration and its impact on spatial segregation, the Los Angeles school of thought attempted to highlight the ways in which cultural heterogeneity and economic disparities interact and produce new fragmented urban spaces (Soja, ).…”

Imagining the Good Place: Public Services and Family Strategies in Rural Ecuador

“…This active engagement in constructing a local imaginary, the good place or buen lugar , may be a first step toward a more active, rather than passive, citizenship. But active citizenship extends beyond the local scale (Sassen ). While theorists of endogenous rural development focus on the local and cultural bases of development, they also recognize the connections beyond the local in a globalizing world (Lowe, Murdoch, and Ward ; Martínez and North ; Ray ; Van der Ploeg ).…”

Paths to citizenship? Public views on the extension of rights to legal and second-generation immigrants in Europe

“…Notwithstanding this harmonizing trend, dissimilar national histories and membership criteria have led researchers to establish distinctions and typologies of regulatory powers (Castles and Miller 2003). This has enabled Hjerm (1998, 2001) to compare various ‘national models’ of citizenship 4 and their relation to xenophobic attitudes, although others have expressed concerns over the relative stability of such classificatory schemes (Bloemraad, Korteweg and Yurdakul 2008; Hollifield 2000) and the adequacy of national contexts as units of analysis (Favell 2001; Sassen 2006). Building on these debates, our study on attitudes toward the extension of rights to immigrants connects with the research showing that the varied nature of citizenship policies likely influences individuals' attitudes regarding immigrant incorporation (Joppke 2004).…”