A Global, Democratic, Institutional and Humble Cosmopolitanism? Response to Contributors in Symposium on The Humble Cosmopolitan

This article engages contributions from Cricket Keating, Natasha Behl, Fred Lee and Jaby Mathew, and Brooke Ackerly’s introduction, in a symposium on The Humble Cosmopolitan. It first notes insights taken for the development of a democratic cosmopolitanism oriented to political humility from the work of Indian Dalit-rights champion and constitutional architect B.R. Ambedkar, and from interviews conducted with globally oriented Dalit activists. It then considers Mathew’s concerns about accommodation of the moral importance of local democratic practices, and Keating’s about the book’s emphasis on advancing institutional over attitudinal changes. It addresses issues Behl raises around attention to alternate conceptions of citizenship, e.g., ones which would center Dalit women’s voices; and Lee’s concerns about whether the model can recognize the importance of subaltern nationalisms. Responses focus on ways in which the model seeks to enable individuals to challenge political arrogance from a position of co-equal citizenship in regional and global institutions.

One Hand Giveth, the Other Taketh Away

This article presents a feminist perspective on polity, religion, and gender in the Yishuv. It analyzes how each of these three categories is shaped by its intersection with the others while simultaneously constituting the whole. Two major decisions that were enacted in the 1920s—women’s right to vote and the institutionalization of the Chief Rabbinate—serve as case studies of the formation of these categories, as well as of the creation of social boundaries, the politics of inclusion and exclusion, and the culture of political arrangements in the Jewish state-in-the-making. Women were both the focus of and significant actors in these multi-dimensional conflicts. They won their rights for equal citizenship in terms of suffrage, but lost their personal status rights as a result of the institutionalization of the Chief Rabbinate.

Gender Equality Politics

This chapter examines the gender contract between women, society, and the state to identify continuities and changes in gender equality in Irish society since the 1970s. It examines attitudes to women in the home and the controversial public policy debates on abortion to illustrate shifts and stasis in this relationship. The chapter explores the slow evolution of gender equality as an institutional policy concern, supported by successive government commissions and given impetus by the feminist movement. These initiatives culminated in national gender equality plans linked to international commitments, along with targeted plans for specific areas such as violence against women, and women’s participation in political and public life. The chapter concludes that while strides towards gender equality have been made in social, economic, and political life over fifty years, there remain deep-seated attitudes resistant to women’s autonomy and equal citizenship. The gender contract continues to be a work in progress.

Tribes and Tribalism in the Modern Middle East: Introduction

This roundtable is the product of a conference on tribalism in the Modern Middle East held at the University of Maryland in College Park in early May 2019. In two days of scholarly exchange, the participants addressed questions on the reality of tribal life in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and its impact on politics and society. Most of the specialists who participated in the conference are also contributors in this forum. To keep the discussion concise, the case studies focus on the Arab East – Syria, Jordan, and Iraq – as well as Yemen and Saudi Arabia. Building on the findings and reflections shared in College Park, the contributors responded to the following prompt as a point of departure for their essays: For cultural, intellectual, political, and arguably even most social historians, tribes remain an enigma. As an ideal-type, the tribe seems to be all that the modern state is not: it defies positive law, rational administrative structures, equal citizenship based on individual rights and duties, and, still, in some cases, sovereignty based on fixed territorial boundaries. As a non-state, the tribe seems to be, on the other hand, the most enduring socio-political structure of human history. It is a kind of substrate, or a hetero-stratum of social organization at least in Middle Eastern societies. Its position as such seems even more pronounced in today's period of state disintegration and instability. What is the place of tribes in modern society, how do they relate to the modern state? How can what is seemingly an atavism of pre-modern times still have currency in today's world?The responses share the perception that tribes are not the antithesis of the modern state or of progress in the region. Researchers and politicians alike should take them into account in their analyses of modernization processes. They offer meaningful identities and forms of organization across the region and enjoy influence and power.

Legal Civic Orders and Equitable Lived Citizenships

Most modern Western political theories embrace equal citizenship as a normative ideal. Many scholars, however, focus on “legal citizenship” and conceive of equal citizenship as uniformity of legal rights and duties. Others focus on experiences of “lived citizenship” and conceive of equal citizenship as achieving sufficient economic, political, and social standing for persons to be seen as civic equals. Using the United States as its example, this article offers a unifying framework for mapping the relationship of legal citizenship to lived citizenship. It illustrates the value of this framework by using it show why realistic efforts to achieve equal citizenship must aim for not uniform legal rights and duties but instead equity in the possession of economic resources, political representation, and social recognition among different categories of citizens.

Internationalization, Whiteness, and Biopolitics of Higher Education

From a postcolonial perspective, U.S. higher education is entangled with the colonial past and the neoliberal neo-colonial present as an economic actor that dominates global educational markets through internationalization. The COVID pandemic and the nationwide movement for racial justice have brought these entanglements into stark relief in the ways U.S. colleges and universities are implicated in the neoliberal biopolitics of race. Applied to higher education, Michel Foucault’s concept of biopolitics as the management of life and wellbeing of populations and his conceptualization of racism as a biopolitical tool illuminate how U.S. colleges and universities maintain racialized categorizations of lives worth protecting and lives considered disposable in the service of dominant whiteness. De-centering whiteness and eliminating its advantage and superiority in research, curricula, instruction, and internationalization is a necessary step toward a future that envisions a more inclusive and equal citizenship.

Skype kids and the price elasticity of demand: constructing the common law constitution

In 2017, the Supreme Court held that it was unlawful to charge a British citizen earning £15,000 a year approximately £160 to bring a claim to an employment tribunal, but lawful to prevent their partner from living with them in the UK. This article analyses these two decisions in relation to the Common Law Constitution (CLC). It shows that there was a profound discrepancy in the judicial approach, with structurally different tests employed at sharply different intensities, despite the two cases raising similar legal issues and both plausibly involving interests which have been protected at common law. It is argued that the CLC is being used as guise to promote a distinctive ideology, focused on a set of court-centred norms. This article questions the constitutional legitimacy of this development, which privileges certain norms whilst marginalising others, especially those conducive to the interests of the poor and equal citizenship.

Philosophical and Legal Interpretation of Individualism in Philosophy of Montesquieu and Voltaire

The article attempts to find individualistic ideas in philosophy of Montesquieu and Voltaire, who continued to discourse on legal themes specific particularly to the Enlightenment: the theme of natural condition, social contract, rationalism, morality, human’s place in the world and God in a human. Revealing, first of all, the most topical issues of this time, the thinkers in their philosophy deal with the matters that are utterly individualistic. It is about: the idea of equality, freedom, natural rights (rights to life and ownership), human nature, etc. It is determined that Montesquieu and Voltaire, like other thinkers of the Enlightenment, revealed the essence of individualistic tendencies through rationalism, because human is a rational person who makes decisions, fights his desires supported by reason. The mind, as a source of law, allows man to develop on the basis of science, learnt by him patterns. It is defined that Montesquieu also discoursed on the individualist attributes; in particular, he pays attention to the problem of equality and freedom: 1) as thinker emphasizes, all were equal in natural state but afterwards this equality could be ensured only by the laws, which have to be just; 2) freedom in his philosophy is considered in two aspects: political and personal. For individualist issues important are revealing the personal aspect of freedom, which firstly was in safety of citizen. Providing this freedom is just laws and proper organization of statehood. It is studied that basic individualist principles of Voltaire are: 1) humanity, which lies in declaring the natural right of every person to life and to meet basic needs; 2) freedom manifests in that people become autonomous entities and are no longer formally dependent on one another; freedom lies in depending only on the laws; 3) people are equal and free to each other individuals, and equality is understood by him in just political and legal sense: acquiring equal citizenship status by all people, alike dependence of all citizens on the law and their equal protection by law; 4) ownership — freedom of labor, which is the right of every person «to sell his work to those who pay the highest price for it, as labor is the property of those who have no other ownerships.»

The Quest For Equal Citizenship: Middle Eastern Christian Narratives of Migration and Inclusion in the United Kingdom

This article explores how migrants experience the process of becoming (and being) citizens by taking the understudied case of Middle Eastern Christians of Iraqi and Egyptian heritage residing in the United Kingdom. It is argued that exclusion in the Middle East reinforces a sense of inclusion in the UK particularly due to the prevalence of the rule of law in the UK. However, by exploring a “clash of values” on the role of religion in society and sexual liberalization issues, it is suggested that Middle Eastern Christians’ support for equality and tolerance is not absolute, especially when they perceive societal norms as conflicting with religious teachings. Finally, the paper shows how the notion of “protective patriotism” is used by some Middle Eastern Christians to express their belonging to their new state by defending perceived societal values.