A study of migration tides which explores political and economic factors that have influenced immigration in post-war Europe and the USA. It seeks to explain immigration in terms of the globalization of labour markets and the expansion of civil rights for marginal groups in liberal democracies.
As the neo-liberal marketization of citizenship and the resulting processes of individualization proceed, debates on citizenship tend to flounder in outmoded ideological oppositions. By examining concrete cases and processes that accompany contemporary practices of citizenship, this volume brings analytical clarity to contemporary debates about citizenship. The state, the market and the forum are analysed as competing fields of citizenship practice, and it is their complex relationship which helps us to understand the role and function not only of the debate on citizenship, but of the institutions and practices of citizenship itself in the contemporary world.
This book is an ambitious intertwining of multidisciplinary themes about citizenship, social exclusion, statelessness, civil society, knowledge, the public sphere, networks and narrativity. Margaret Somers offers a fundamental rethinking of democracy, freedom, rights and social justice in today's world. This is political, economic and cultural sociology and social theory at its best.
Contrary to predictions that it would become increasingly redundant in a globalizing world, citizenship is back with a vengeance. The Oxford Handbook of Citizenship brings together leading experts in law, philosophy, political science, economics, sociology, and geography to provide a multidisciplinary, comparative discussion of different dimensions of citizenship: as legal status and political membership; as rights and obligations; as identity and belonging; as civic virtues and practices of engagement; and as a discourse of political and social equality or responsibility for a common good. The contributors engage with some of the oldest normative and substantive quandaries in the literature, dilemmas that have renewed salience in today's political climate. As well as setting an agenda for future theoretical and empirical explorations, this Handbook explores the state of citizenship today in an accessible and engaging manner that will appeal to a wide academic and non-academic audience. Chapters highlight variations in citizenship regimes practiced in different countries, from immigrant states to 'non-western' contexts, from settler societies to newly independent states, attentive to both migrants and those who never cross an international border. Topics include the 'selling' of citizenship, multilevel citizenship, in-between statuses, citizenship laws, post-colonial citizenship, the impact of technological change on citizenship, and other cutting-edge issues. This Handbook is the major reference work for those engaged with citizenship from a legal, political, and cultural perspective. Written by the most knowledgeable senior and emerging scholars in their fields, this comprehensive volume offers state-of-the-art analyses of the main challenges and prospects of citizenship in today's world of increased migration and globalization. Special emphasis is put on the question of whether inclusive and egalitarian citizenship can provide political legitimacy in a turbulent world of exploding social inequality and resurgent populism.
Citizenship Beyond the State is a critical introduction to the concept of citizenship: it challenges the notion that citizenship has to be defined as membership of a state (a notion implicit in Derek Heater's book, and only touched on in Keith Faulks' earlier work).
Changing labour markets, welfare policies and citizenship readdresses the question of how full citizenship may be preserved and developed in the face of enduring labour market pressures. It: clarifies the relationship between changing labour markets, welfare policies and citizenship; discusses possible ways in which the spill-over effect from labour market marginality to loss of citizenship can be prevented; specifies this problem in relation to the young, older people, men and women and immigrants; offers theoretical and conceptual definitions of citizenship as a new, alternative approach to empirical analyses of labour market marginalisation and its consequences; highlights the lessons to be learned from differing approaches in European countries.
In Varieties of Sovereignty and Citizenship, scholars from a wide range of disciplines reflect on the transformation of the world away from the absolute sovereignty of independent nation-states and on the proliferation of varieties of plural citizenship. The emergence of possible new forms of allegiance and their effect on citizens and on political processes underlie the essays in this volume. The essays reflect widespread acceptance that we cannot grasp either the empirical realities or the important normative issues today by focusing only on sovereign states and their actions, interests, and aspirations. All the contributors accept that we need to take into account a great variety of globalizing forces, but they draw very different conclusions about those realities. For some, the challenges to the sovereignty of nation-states are on the whole to be regretted and resisted. These transformations are seen as endangering both state capacity and state willingness to promote stability and security internationally. Moreover, they worry that declining senses of national solidarity may lead to cutbacks in the social support systems many states provide to all those who reside legally within their national borders. Others view the system of sovereign nation-states as the aspiration of a particular historical epoch that always involved substantial problems and that is now appropriately giving way to new, more globally beneficial forms of political association. Some contributors to this volume display little sympathy for the claims on behalf of sovereign states, though they are just as wary of emerging forms of cosmopolitanism, which may perpetuate older practices of economic exploitation, displacement of indigenous communities, and military technologies of domination. Collectively, the contributors to this volume require us to rethink deeply entrenched assumptions about what varieties of sovereignty and citizenship are politically possible and desirable today, and they provide illuminating insights into the alternative directions we might choose to pursue.