Citizenship

Anthropology ◽  
2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sian Lazar

At its most fundamental, citizenship means political belonging, and to study citizenship is to study how we live with others in a political community. Anthropological work on the theme of citizenship tends to break open the classic version of citizenship as a universal legal status belonging to citizens of a given nation-state. Instead, it recognizes the differentiated nature of political membership, and the ways that citizenship acts as an ordering and disciplining device as well as a mechanism for making claims upon different kinds of political communities. These may include the state but they are not limited to it. In dialogue with political theorists, anthropologists of citizenship have argued that the constitution of any given community requires a considerable amount of work, and that meaningful membership is more than the possession of rights and responsibilities. Citizenship may be formal or substantive, full or partial, and it is always under construction, as citizens and noncitizens claim inclusion and effective participation in political life. That may be articulated through languages of rights but may also be conducted—and contested—through other kinds of everyday or insurgent political practices. One of the main focuses of ethnographic study of the practices of citizenship has therefore been on how people relate to the state, bringing out the relationship between people and state bureaucracies and between people and law. Another aspect is the scale at which relevant political communities operate, as anthropologists have added to the discussion of national citizenship with studies of cosmopolitan, transnational, or global citizenships and of local, city-based formations. Citizenship is a complex bundle of practices of encounter between the state and citizens at different scales or levels. Because citizenship practices are also the means by which societies organize inclusion and exclusion, the figure of the noncitizen is crucial to the construction of citizenship. Noncitizens might be conceptualized as strangers, migrants, or refugees, and these individuals always raise questions about the definitions of political communities and their borders. Central to all these processes of inclusion, exclusion, encounter, and claims-making is the way that people (citizens and noncitizens) build their own political agency and subjecthood under what constraints and in what realms of life, including the most intimate.

Author(s):  
Jonathan Preminger

Chapter 15 summarizes the chapters which addressed the third sphere, the relationship of labor to the political community. It reiterates that since Israel was established, the labor market’s borders have become ever more porous, while the borders of the national (Jewish) political community have remained firm: the Jewish nationalism which guides government policy is as strong as ever. NGOs, drawing on a discourse of human rights, are able to assist some non-citizens but this discourse also resonates with the idea of individual responsibility: the State is no longer willing to support “non-productive” populations, who are now being shoehorned into a labor market which offers few opportunities for meaningful employment, and is saturated by cheaper labor intentionally imported by the State in response to powerful employer lobbies. These trends suggest a partial reorientation of organized labor’s “battlefront”, from a face-off with capital to an appeal to the public and state.


2018 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 17-36
Author(s):  
Dipesh Kumar Ghimire

Federalism has been constitutionally uniting separate political communities in a limited by encompassing political community (Kincaid and Tarr 2005). Federalism as a mode of governance is concerned with combining 'self-rule and shared rule' (Elazar, 1987), where by the constituent members of the federal union can govern themselves autonomously while they and their citizen also participate together in the common national governing regime, which is autonomous within its sphere of constitutional authority (Kincaid, 2011). Federalism is the extreme form of decentralization. Similarly, corruption is defined as exercise of official powers against public interest or the abuse of public office for private gain. Corruption is a symptom of degeneration of the relationship between the state and the people, characterized by bribery, extortion and nepotism (Altas, 1968). Similarly, Sen (1999) defines corruption or corrupt behavior as "the violation of established rules for personal gains and profits". This article tries to explore the relationship among federalism, decentralization and corruption. My finding is: constitutional, political and spatial decentralization is very strong and fiscal decentralization is very weak in Nepal. Fiscal decentralization plays vital role to improve quality of governance. However, lack of proper fiscal decentralization and highly constitutional, political and spatial federalism or decentralization promote corruption in the local level. Similarly the monitoring mechanism and vertical controls system are very weak in Nepal. It shows that the localization process motivate to corrupt behavior among public authorities.


2014 ◽  
Vol 53 (1) ◽  
pp. 139-159 ◽  
Author(s):  
Clifford Angell Bates

Political theorists today are addressing issues of global concern confronting state systems and in so doing are often forced to confront the concept of Homo sapiens as a ‘political animal’. Thus theorists considering Aristotle’s Politics attempt to transcend his polis-centric focus and make the case that Aristotle offers ways to address these global concerns by focusing on Empire. This article, contra Dietz et al., argues that Aristotle’s political science is first and foremost a science of politeia and that this approach to the operation and working of political systems is far superior to recent attempts at regime analysis in comparative politics. Thus Aristotle’s mode of examining political systems offers much fruit for those interested in approaching political phenomena with precision and depth as diverse manifestations of the political communities formed by the species Aristotle called the ‘political animal’. From this perspective, focusing on the politeia constituting each political community permits an analysis of contemporary transformations of political life without distorting what is being analyzed.


2016 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 199-211
Author(s):  
Nick Cheesman

Throughout February 2012, a court sitting at Myanmar’s central prison recorded a defendant’s narrative of torture by policemen to have him confess to a bombing two years prior. How was this record made possible? What does the narrative reveal about the relationship of police torturers to the political community giving them authority to act? Working from Agamben’s intuition that in the moment of violence the policeman occupies an area symmetrical to the sovereign, inasmuch as his use of violence is justified in the name of public order, I suggest the account of police torture in this case can be explained in terms of Hobbes’s theory of attributed action. Like Hobbes’s sovereign, the Burmese policemen had the prerogative to decide when and how to use violence against the detained subject on behalf of the state. That the defendant could later recount to a judge the torture done to him was only because he lacked standing to lay claims against sovereign police, who he himself, as a member of the political community, had authorised. Ironically, the record of his narrative was possible precisely because his claims were without efficacy.


2004 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-83 ◽  
Author(s):  
JUSTIN WOLFE

This study examines the relationship between labour and nation in nineteenth-century Nicaragua by exploring how the state's institutional efforts to control labour coincided with a prevailing discourse of nation that idealised farmers (agricultores) and wage labourers (jornaleros and operarios) at opposite ends of the spectrum of national citizenship. The article focuses on the towns of the ethnically diverse region of the Prefecture of Granada, an area that included the present-day departments of Granada, Carazo and Masaya, and where coffee production first boomed in Nicaragua. It is argued that labour coercion rested not simply on the building of national, regional and municipal institutions of labour control, but also on defining the political and social role of labourers within the national community. At the same time, subaltern communities, especially indigenous ones, contested these efforts not merely through evasion and subterfuge, but by engaging the discourse of nation-state to claim citizenship as farmers and assert independence from landlords.


2015 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 320-334
Author(s):  
Silas W. Allard

In her essay “The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man,” Hannah Arendt famously wrote, “Nobody had been aware that mankind, for so long a time considered under the image of a family of nations, had reached the state where whoever was thrown out of one of these tightly organized closed communities found himself thrown out of the family of nations altogether.” Surveying the aftermath of the world wars, the same aftermath that eventually led to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Arendt found that a person had to be emplaced—the subject of a political space—in the state-oriented order of geopolitics to be cognizable as a subject of human rights. The stateless, being displaced, were excluded from such a regime of rights and from the global political community. Bare humanity, Arendt argued, was an insufficiently binding political identity. As she wrote in her arresting language, “The world found nothing sacred in the abstract nakedness of being human.”


2019 ◽  
pp. 11-15
Author(s):  
Larysa OSTROVERKH ◽  
Yurii SHANDRENKO

The article explores the phenomenon of the development of virtual currencies and their growing popularity, resulting in a natural imbalance when innovations in the field of economy outstripped the development of legislation governing the relationship between entities in the field of calculations and payments. This led to the lack of a common understanding of the legal status of cryptocurrency and the methods of its regulation at the current stage of economic relations and global technologies, which caused the world community the problem of determining the legal status of cryptocurrency, which arose from the evolution of money and the emergence of new structured financial products. For Ukraine, as for most countries in the world, the global digital economy remains an area with undiscovered potential, since the National Bank of Ukraine does not recognize cryptocurrencies with either electronic money, money surrogates or other legal means of payment and does not recommend using them as such, but, in addition, it does not prohibit their use. Evidence of NBU's desire to keep up with current global trends was the emergence in May 2016 of the first Ukrainian «Karbowanec» cryptocurrency (after the Karbo rebranding in September 2017), which prompted many financial agents to ask whether – «Can you trust Karbo?» and «What is Karbo better than other cryptocurrencies?». Karbo is positioned as an alternative to low volatility settlement, designed for calculations and real use with new cryptocurrency ways of regulating money supply and market price. However, the question remains open – should the state recognize cryptocurrency as a digital (virtual) currency, or as a means of exchange or payment, or as other digital or intangible assets, or as property rights, etc., to introduce a method of accounting and regulate the system of taxation of transactions with it?


2021 ◽  
Vol 23 (5) ◽  
pp. 53-59
Author(s):  
LEONID LEVIN ◽  

The article studies the issues of regulating the cryptocurrency circulation, the relationship between the space of fiat money (money, not secured by gold and other precious metals, when the nominal value is set and guaranteed by the state, regardless of the value of the material used for their manufacture) and a large number of new digital payment instruments, as well as examines the control over their circulation and conversion. The purpose of the article is to identify actual legal gaps in the regulation of cryptocurrencies, the uncertainties of their legal status and to find the promising conditions for its effective integration with the financial and economic space of the Russian Federation. The study is carried out considering the importance of preserving the financial, economic, and social security of the state. The relevance of the study is determined by the need for rapid development of the digital economy and accelerated formation of information society relations. The imperfection of the current regulatory framework remains due to the conceptual differences between centralized and decentralized approaches to determining the monetary component of currency policy of the state.


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