citizenship

Over the past several decades, citizenship status has become more important in immigrant lives and communities in the United States. Undocumented adults who arrived as children, the 1.5 generation, comprise a growing percentage of the immigrant population. Although they are similar to children of immigrants born in the United States (the second generation) they face a variety of barriers to integration due to their lack of legal status.

Poverty amidst affluence, chronic unemployment, political apathy and cynicism, crime and corruption, sexism, racism, and a moral climate of widespread hedonism-- these are evils familiar to all of us. The above is the first sentence in my recent book, Toward a Just Social Order. In that book I use theoretical ideas from sociology and ethical philosophy to locate and defend those institutional arrangements appropriate to a just social order. My book is an exploration in social theory. More specifically, it is a work in normative sociology. 

Scholarship on the dissemination of human rights norms and principles has focused predominantly on the socialization of nation-states into the values which have been widely endorsed. I argue in this article that the socialization mechanisms, discussed by such scholars as Meyer et al. (1997) and Risse and Sikkink (1999), do not capture the complex processes of the negotiation of more controversial rights.

This article argues that attempts to conceptualize the memory boom in amnesic societies have resulted in a clash between two theoretical stands: the approach which stresses the significance of remembering and the perspective which insists on the value of forgetting.

The emergent European social project draws on a re-alignment between these strands: work, social investment, and active participation. In this article, I consider the implications of this project for immigrant populations in Europe in particular and for the conceptions of citizenship and human rights in general.

Immigrant citizenship rights in the nation-state reference both theories of cross-national convergence and the resilience of national political processes. This article investigates European countries’ attribution of rights to immigrants: Have these rights become more inclusive and more similar across countries? Are they affected by EU membership, the role of the judiciary, the party in power, the size of the immigrant electorate, or pressure exerted by anti-immigrant parties? Original data on 10 European countries, 1980–2008, reveal no evidence for cross-national convergence.

This article extends critical trends of citizenship studies and the theory of accumulation by dispossession to articulate how settler colonial citizenship is instantiated through the active accrual of land and resources and how the emerging settler colonial citizenship entrenches both structural subjugation and resistance. The article then examines the reformation of the boundaries of citizenship through indigenous agency.

As important aspects of purported tendencies toward globalization and pluralization, recent immigration waves and the resulting presence of culturally different ethnic minorities are often seen as fundamentally challenging liberal nation‐states and traditional models of citizenship. According to this perspective, migrants and ethnic minorities contribute through their claims making both to the external erosion of sovereignty (the postnational challenge), and to the internal cultural differentiation of liberal nation‐states (the multicultural challenge).

We apply the concept of “biopolitical citizenship” to show how and with what consequences biology and medicine are mobilized as political techniques in the legal immigration procedures of permanent residency acquisition and family reunification. Medical examinations and DNA testing are employed by the U.S. state as objective sorting criteria in the immigration legal process.

Liberal and marxist theories of civil society contain a conceptual paradox of `civil society without citizenship'. This article shows how the paradox about civil society comes about through an under-theorization of the multivalent character of citizenship and rights, which in turn reflects a rather impoverished understanding of culture, discourse and symbolization.