The Place of Political Membership

This article argues that Abul Kalam Azad, one of India's most prominent anticolonial thinkers, was critical of nationalism because of its emphasis on circumscribing a political community with territorial borders. Instead, he conceived of India as a place, and he used this conception of place as the grounds for an alternative frame of the political. For Azad, place indicated a point of equilibrium between conceptions of nationalism, particularly as a form of anticolonialism, and universal ideas of humanity (insāniyyat), and the earth as its common inheritance (arẓiyyat). Connecting the idea of place to that of self-knowledge, this article examines how Azad laid the grounds for membership in a locality where particular identities gathered to form a general consciousness of common life. In doing so, it argues that he developed a potent normative idea that remains relevant to repetitive contentions of the political membership of Muslims in India and elsewhere.

Three Models of Political Membership: Delineating ‘The People in Question’ †

In her timely monograph, The People in Question, Jo Shaw provides a much-needed critical comparative review of the complex interactions between citizenship and constitutional law. I argue that, despite its emphasis upon citizenship’s essentially contested nature, Shaw’s latest work contains rich moral commitments and an important caution against uncritically eliding ‘full citizenship’ with ‘political membership’ more broadly construed. To establish these claims, I present a tripartite taxonomy of approaches to defining ‘the people’ based, respectively, upon the concepts of status, subjugation and duty. I claim that Shaw’s incisive analysis demonstrates perfectly why we should avoid placing undue reliance upon ‘status-based’ models of community membership and conclude by advancing an original, alternative and hybridised model of ‘the people in question’.

Migration and Homeland Politics

Chapter 1 introduces the main research questions in this book: (1) Under what conditions and in what ways do states alter the boundaries of political membership to reach out to migrants and thereby “make” diasporas? (2) How do these migrants respond? (3) To what extent does their response, in turn, transform the state? It begins with a discussion of how global economic restructuring and political regime change have reshaped the contours of migrant-homeland engagement. It then lays out the main research questions and discusses the case selection and methodology. It also specifies the causal feedback loops driving state–migrant relations. The chapter concludes with a brief overview of the remaining chapters in the book.

Legal Histories as Determinants of Incorporation: Previous Undocumented Experience and Naturalization Propensities Among Immigrants in the United States

This article examines how different histories of illegality may influence immigrants’ orientations toward acquiring citizenship in the United States. Findings from the New Immigrant Survey show that having crossed the border without authorization—compared to having no history of illegality—is associated with a higher propensity to naturalize, indicated by an expressed intention to naturalize upon eligibility and, notably, an early undertaking of the naturalization process. In contrast, there is weaker evidence that immigrants who overstayed their visas or worked without authorization differ with regards to naturalization from immigrants with no history of illegality. Results suggest that immigrants who have experienced the greatest degrees of legal insecurity in the past may be among those most likely to seek out full political membership. Thus, this article bears optimistic implications for the integration potential of previously undocumented immigrants, and highlights the importance of making available legal pathways “out of the shadows” and into the political communities of receiving states.

‘Before there is power, there is the country’: civic nationalism and political mobilisation amongst Kenya's opposition coalitions, 2013–2018

This paper provides an ethnographic perspective on the street-level deliberations of Kenya's opposition supporters between the 2013 and 2017 elections, arguing that rather than appeals to ethnicity what defines its discourse are broader, inclusive notions of political membership. A civic nationalism is enunciated by opposition supporters that congeals support between multiple ethnic groups through its emphasis on universal values – democracy, due process, equality, adherence to the constitution. However, when such civic ideas are used in political campaigning and mobilising rhetoric, describing a resurgent Kenyan ‘people’ that has been systematically disenfranchised, they take on an exclusionary character. As ‘good constitutionalists’, opposition supporters contrast themselves with ‘bad nationalists’ associated with the government, portrayed as mobilising particularistic ethnic loyalties at the expense of a majority of Kenyans. In practice, their civic ideas remain only potentially inclusive.

Fully Human

Fully Human: Personhood, Citizenship, and Rights critically considers how inequalities related to citizenship and recognition impact one’s ability to claim so-called universal and inalienable rights. Today, citizenship itself serves to recognize an individual as fully human or worthy of fundamental human rights—yet this robust form of political membership is limited or missing entirely for some vulnerable groups. These protection gaps are central to hierarchies of personhood—inequalities that render some people more “worthy” than others for protections and political membership—that lead to gross violations of the rights to place and purpose that are essential for a person to live a life of human dignity. This book presents various manifestations of hierarchies of personhood, beginning with statelessness (the most direct and obvious lack of functioning citizenship) and progressing through the forcibly displaced, irregular migrants, nomadic peoples, indigenous nations, and “second-class” citizens in the United States. It challenges the binary construct between citizen and noncitizen, arguing that rights to place and purpose are routinely violated in the space between. To resist hierarchies of personhood, functioning citizenship necessitates the opening of political space for those who cannot be neatly categorized. Only by recognizing that all people are inherently worthy of full personhood—and by advocating expanded forms of political membership and voice—can the ideals of modern human rights be realized.

Statelessness and Elusive Political Membership

Statelessness is recognized not only as a violation of the “right to a nationality” but also as a root cause of additional rights abuses. Yet while legal nationality is an essential prerequisite for the mere possibility of enjoying basic human rights, the international community’s narrow emphasis on citizenship acquisition is misguided. Legal status is only one step in a long journey toward full rights protection; statelessness is both a cause of marginalization and a symptom of it. That is, most stateless populations lack legal nationality because they face systematic discrimination from the beginning. Their circumstances are worsened by statelessness, but legal status alone cannot guarantee full rights protection. Rather than relying on the acquisition of legal nationality to ensure access to human rights, advocates must acknowledge the deeply rooted complexities of statelessness and seek out solutions that guarantee functioning citizenship rather than simple legal status.

Exile Ingathering: An Exposition

Chapter 3 examines Phase 1 of the process in which post-colonial states sought to gather their ethnic constituents into the process of independent nation-state building. It began during the turbulent disintegration of the nineteenth-century European empires, and culminated in the wake of the collapsed Soviet empire of the 1990s. To explain these exile ingathering strategies, the chapter introduces the notion of ‘regime shock’: a new concept denoting moments disruption to prevailing configurations of territoriality, sovereignty, and/or citizenship that define a specific place, and which lead to the questioning and redrawing of the lines of social and political membership, along with changes in the structure of authority.