Disputing Citizenship by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Public Policy, Political Science, General
ISBN: 9781447312536
Google: _07qAgAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 18526776
Publisher: Policy Press
Published: 2014-01-01T08:15:23+00:00

THREE

Imagining the ‘communities’ of citizenship

In this chapter, we explore the ‘imagined communities’ of citizenship. One of the potent qualities of the idea of citizenship is its capacity to serve as a term through which different sorts of collectivities of people and connections between people may be imagined, mobilised and brought into being. Such imagined communities are constructed and elaborated in many different sites and settings, although this diversity is overshadowed by the persistent articulation of citizenship as a national question (both in academic theory and governmental practice). We begin, then, with questions about these national articulations, launching ourselves from Benedict Anderson’s (1983) famous understanding of the nation as an ‘imagined community’. This conception of imagined communities guides us in three directions during the chapter. First, we examine the implications of treating the nation as an imagined community for reflections on citizenship. This leads us to recent debates about the fate of the national character of citizenship in what has been described as a ‘post-national’ world.

Second, we consider the ways in which the nation is equated with the ‘national level’ as a privileged site of citizenship. Here, we encounter arguments that citizenship is both identification with the political community of the nation and practised in relation to national-level institutions, processes and issues. In contrast, we consider such nationalising logics to be part of a form of ‘scalar thinking’ that naturalises a specific ordering of social and political arrangements and, in the process, diminishes the salience of other sites and scales of social organisation (seeing them as encompassed by the national and the global). In such views, the local is always ‘merely local’. We explore alternative approaches to the politics of scale: asking how scales are imagined and institutionalised, and how they are contested by alternative political projects.

Third, and most importantly, we turn to the diverse imagined communities that citizenship can articulate. We stress the importance of citizenship as an idea – a keyword – through which collectivities can be imagined and brought into being. Drawing on earlier arguments, we insist that the diversity of communities: are imagined and enacted in heterogeneous sites and settings; not only take place at different scales, but also bring with them new sets of connections between scales; and, of course, are mobilised around diverse identities and issues. Such different concerns and claims have kept citizenship at the heart of political projects across time and space.

Benedict Anderson (1983) famously described nations as ‘imagined communities’. At the core of his path-breaking work is the claim that the nation ‘is an imagined political community – and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign’ (1983: 6). He goes on to argue that ‘It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion’ (1983: 6). Here, we wish to borrow his idea and take it a little further in two particular directions. First, by

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.