Land and Contestations over Autochthony and Local Citizenship in Agrarian Ghana

This article examines the reimagination of communities in an industrial cassava frontier of Ghana in the wake of a contested land grab supported by state and community institutions. Qualitative and survey data were used to construct the existing social relations in the communities through the lens of earlier processes of agrarian change that have transformed the social base of the communities. It is argued that the expansion of capitalist production systems into agrarian areas results in local citizenship contestations centered on land, and redefinition and reclassification of people and their access to land. The multiple claims and contestations that arose from the land grab and the political reactions from below are highlighted. It is further argued that differentiated dispossession and class differences determine the strategies used by affected people. While some farmers demonstrated agency by holding on to a “little pie” to enjoy greater community social cohesion, others, drawing from their local citizenship status, although contested, fought the land grab.

Liberalism, Patriotism, and Cosmopolitanism in Local Citizenship in a Global Age

In this review Essay, I survey the most valuable lessons from Local Citizenship in a Global Age. But I have some reservations about the book, and I want to mark those off as well. The book comes off as critical of views that seek to control immigration and to establish relatively demanding criteria for noncitizens to become citizens. In my view, two factors contribute to this impression, and the book would have been more satisfying if both had been addressed.

Questions of Citizenship and the Nature of "The Public"

This essay is taken from a talk given at a symposium discussing Professor Ken Stahl’s book, Local Citizenship in a Global Age.1 It is not a traditional book review, but rather a series of musings inspired by the ideas in the book. Professor Stahl’s new book, Local Citizenship in a Global Age, addresses a number of important issues, many of which have been the focus of my prior work: the existence of boundaries, borders, and the spaces in between; who we include in those boundaries and who we exclude; public space, private space, and the lines between them; spaces of production versus those of consumption; and questions of place and authenticity. Thus, I was excited to participate in a discussion of the book. This essay focuses specifically on Part III of Stahl’s book, which addresses “Race, Space, Place, and Urban Citizenship.” In addition to the topics I mentioned above, Professor Stahl’s book is about citizenship. Indeed, it is primarily about citizenship. But, as Professor Stahl describes various conceptions of citizenship, it is clear that the reader has to grapple with all of the other issues I noted—boundaries, place, exclusion—in order to fully understand citizenship. This essay provides no broad critiques or sweeping analysis. Rather, it will discuss the concepts that struck me in the book and the ideas it made me think about. Thus, what follows are some thoughts, organized generally in the order in which they came to me as I was reading Part III of the book.

THE PRINCIPLES OF GUIDED EVOLUTION OF SOCIETY – A SYSTEMIC PERSPECTIVE

Since the beginning of the 21st century, many regions in the world have faced with economic volatility, political instability, environmental degradation, cultural wars and various cyber threats, which only intensified during the coronavirus pandemic. The reason behind these crises is a fragmented character of human interactions that are motivated by self or local interest, despite the fact that we are becoming increasingly interconnected in complex global networks. From a systemic perspective, human interactions in contemporary society are motivated by centrifugal social forces, promoting independence and an increased sense of entitlement, exclusive individualism, hostile competitiveness, all of which are completely purposeless, even harmful in today's global society. We are constantly trying to implement pre-global individualistic values in a global interdependent system, thus causing "cracks" in the social fabric of reality, which we could especially witness during the coronavirus pandemic. In order to bring about a change in current trends, a paradigm shift is required, first of all in human values, which would increase existing centripetal social forces. This means that the generation living today must formulate a commitment to global citizenship alongside involvement in local citizenship. In order to protect ourselves from future outbursts of pandemics and other similar systemic crises, a new vision of human society is required which fosters openness, care for the "other", and mutual responsibility across national borders, as well as cultural, religious, racial, gendered and other divides. The only effective response to global crises is – global response.

New Yorkers’ Street Smarts and Survival Smarts During the Pandemic: Preppers, Community Resilience and Local Citizenship

This qualitative study examines the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the philosophy and practices of New York’s urban prepper subculture. My three research goals are to: 1) explore preppers’ approaches to protecting their families against the pandemic, and how their commitment to self-reliance may have changed; 2) describe the different experiences of surviving a pandemic in New York, a global capital that is sharply divided by class and race; and 3) analyze the possible benefits of community resilience rooted in a sense of strong social bonds. For urban preppers, the government’s failure to enact a clear response to the pandemic reaffirmed their core belief: the government was not coming to help them. But while they had a strong foundation for successfully sheltering in place, they did not anticipate the challenges of working from home, remote learning, and staying in one location for such an extended time period.

EXPRESS: Uncertainty Evokes Consumers’ Preference for Brands Incongruent with their Global-Local Citizenship Identity

This research demonstrates that under states of certainty consumers with a relatively stronger global (local) identity prefer global (local) brands, whereas under states of uncertainty, consumers with a relatively stronger global (local) identity prefer local (global) brands. This effect occurs because uncertainty (certainty) activates a divergent (convergent) thinking style, which results in a preference for options that are more distant from (closer to) the identity to which consumers associate more strongly. The effect holds both when individuals’ global-local citizenship identity is measured and when it is manipulated. The research further establishes an important boundary condition for the effect. The effect holds in the citizenship identity context because people normally associate themselves with both local and global citizenship identities, and situational or dispositional factors only influence the degree to which they associate with each identity. The effect does not surface when local-global citizenship identities are construed as interfering, such that holding one identity is conceived as being in conflict with holding the other.

The Borderwork of Humanitarianism During Displacement from War-Torn Syria

This chapter attempts to add nuance to the scholarly debate on the security politics of borders and invites its readers to consider the practices and identities of refugees, host border societies, and earlier border migrants in a way that considers their pre-crisis (im)mobility status within the hybrid human realm of the border. The vacillating status of earning a living across the border in times of peace pervades the space of local citizenship during displacement. Against this backdrop, a clear-cut humanitarianism along borders—purporting to distinguish who is the host and who is the guest—acts as a force intended to preserve nation-state privileges. This vacillating status between borders represents the local citizens’ desire that the refugees return home as soon as possible; the refugees, in turn, are left to deal with the paradox of this request, as they are unable to definitively choose either site. It is in this vein that this chapter engages with ungraspable categories of life—and humanitarian labels—pushing border-crossing beyond a matter of life or death, and draws on the taxonomies that humanitarian borderwork and national border policies engender.