Research Article

Introduction: Beyond Citizenship and the Nation-State

Published: 2020-10-1

Journal: New Political Science

DOI: 10.1080/07393148.2020.1860560

Abstract

The Call for Papers for this Special Issue of New Political Science “Beyond Citizenship and the Nation-State” was written in what now seems an utterly different time: Fall 2019. This Special Issue acts as a bookend to “Intersectionality for the Global Age,” the December 2015 Special Issue co-edited by Jocelyn M. Boryczka and Jennifer Leigh Disney. “Intersectionality in the Twenty-first Century,” Boryczka and Disney wrote in their Introduction to that issue, “seems to provide an analytic method and epistemological perspective that resonates with our attempts, as scholars and everyday people, to understand the rapidly changing and increasingly complex contemporary world.” That Special Issue reflected their focus as co-editors from 2014–2017 on bringing intersectional scholarship from across the globe more centrally into the journal’s scope. Building a stronger international presence for the journal in terms of contributors, reviewers, and audience remained a commitment of the editorial team led by Jocelyn M. Boryczka (2014–2020), Jennifer Leigh Disney (2014–2017), and Sarah M. Surak (interim co-editor 2019–2020) over a six-year trajectory. Intersectionality as a methodology and epistemology now extends well beyond the discipline of political science and academia and into mainstream political discourse. For instance, signs produced by the National Organization for Women (NOW) stating “Intersectional Feminism” appeared at the annual Women’s March Global protests from 2017–2020. Intersectionality also travels well beyond the borders of the United States to operate on a more global scale, providing a powerful tool for critically analyzing what “citizenship” and “nation-state,” the cornerstone concepts in this current Special Issue, mean in the twenty-first century. “This is my home/this thin edge of barbwire,” Gloria Anzaldúa, a founding feminist political theorist of intersectionality, writes, “the U.S.-Mexican border es una herida abierta where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds.” This border acts as a touchpoint for this 2020 Special Issue as one way to examine the push for boundaries defining nation-states and who belongs in them and the pull away from citizenship as unable, given its conceptual grounding in the modern period, to account for what membership in a political community actually means in a globalized world. The driving question for this Special Issue then is, what does citizenship mean in this age of securitization and globalization as the nation-state appears simultaneously to decline and ascend? Little did we know when conceiving this question in Fall 2019 the extent to which the events of 2020 would shape our thinking around such questions or the production of this Special Issue. The outbreak of COVID-19 was first reported on December 31, 2019, in Wuhan, China, right on the precipice of 2020. Rapidly, the virus spread across China and Europe, arriving in the United States in February 2020 with stay-in-place orders going into place quickly thereafter in the Northeast. Hospitals filled. The elderly in nursing homes suffered and died. Grocery stores became the only place to go beyond your primary residence. Universities and colleges quickly went to remote learning. Homeschooling went from a more marginal practice to the primary way young people learned as parents and guardians became full-time teachers. To date, 217 countries and territories report about 64.2 million cases and 1.5 million deaths, with the United States as the world leader in both categories. Amid a global pandemic, nation-states pulled inwards, closing borders between countries and often preventing travel within them. Citizens pulled even further inwards into their homes and onto computer screens. Social gatherings of any size disappeared for most as isolationism took on new meaning and intensity. This Special Issue is wholly a pandemic issue. While the articles do not focus on COVID-19, the first round of papers were due March 15, 2020, as lockdowns, shutdowns, and border closings spread quickly. Working with authors during this time, in particular, humanized the editorial process. We learned about the families, work constraints, and general wellbeing of our authors, engaging, as we all were, in a chaotic, stressful, and taxing time. We all felt the pressure of timelines, delays, and at points, the inability to think creatively as the world around us changed rapidly. As we draw the narrative arch of these articles, we cannot neglect the overlying situation of the world around us. This is not the way we anticipated culminating our time with the journal, but seldom is reality that of our making. Migration, a central focus of this Special Issue, has currently paused as borders close and states restrict travel to stem the spread of COVID-19. It will likely resume, perhaps in new ways, in the wake of mass vaccine distribution in 2021. Physical migration is a pattern of life shared by many across the world and a feature of human life accelerated by globalization. Virtual migration is a newer feature of contemporary human life, one intensified during the pandemic as Zoom became a verb common to everyday conversation. This Special Issue’s authors take us across the globe from Turkey and Sri Lanka to Canada to engage with variations of migration as the entry point to inviting us to imagine a world no longer defined by citizenship as a vestige of the modern nation-state. The Special Issue begins with work of David Watkins, who engages with citizenship through the lens of political theorists of immigration who either critique or defend restrictive policies in ways that overlook concrete identities and insights from a critique of methodological nationalism. In “Identity and the Demand for Inclusion: The Critique of Methodological Nationalism and the Political Theory of Immigration,” Watkins lifts up the importance of theorizing immigration with a fuller conception of how identity and its processes shape the subjectivity of immigrants. The nation-state’s role in forming this subjectivity is of particular significance as moving across borders, where the full force of the state is on display, impacts immigrant identities in ways that differ from others while informative to understanding that of us all. Watkins does so through a critique of methodological nationalism, which “treats a normative justificatory vision of how nation-states should work as if it were a description of how they do work.” Watkins argues “that greater attention to concrete identities and identity formation processes, divorced from the assumptions and biases of methodological nationalism can actually erode, rather than bolster, the case for restrictivist immigration policies.” This article contributes to conceptualizing the identity formation of all citizens in terms of border crossings as opposed to ossified locations within the geographic and imaginary boundaries of nation-states. Rachel Yacaaʔał George and Sarah Marie Wiebe provide an alternative understanding of citizenship centered within the relationship of humans and the natural environment. “Fluid Decolonial Futures: Water as a Life, Ocean Citizenship and Seascape Relationality” challenges the reader to shift understandings of a state-based identity to one framed by the source of all life: water. Unlike our drawing of fixed boundaries in the modern nation-state system, this alternative is a fluid understanding of seascapes as spaces that open and produce and reproduce rather than stable, hardened borders. The rhythm of their piece mimics the ever-present motion of waves hitting a shoreline and enacts a form of “voyaging methodology.” Weaving together vignettes of practice, this article engages a range of alternate methodologies, including interpretive methods, political ethnography, Indigenous storytelling, and community engagement research rooted in theoretical perspectives that challenge Western, anthropocentric settler-colonial narratives. Through this praxis, illustrated with photographs taken along their physical journeys, the authors open a space to allow the reader to imagine another type of world that is yet rooted in current arrangements. Water itself, required for life, is ever-present throughout the article, centers this space and rejects the human delineated boundaries of the territory of a nation-state. Instead, water brings together people and can be a space for community-engaged research that imagines and calls forward decolonized futures. While we imagine land borders, in ways signaled by Watkins’ article, as we consider the modern expression of the nation-state, Shelby Ward uses the ocean narrative from a geopolitical framing to describe how water as a defining feature of how once colonized island states produce and reproduce national identities both historically and contemporarily. In “The Postcolonial State as Container: Lessons on Nation-Building and the Nation-State from Sri Lanka,” Ward examines the discursive production and reproduction of the “idea” of post-colonial Sri Lanka as an island state through explicit and hidden forms of overt and discursive violence. Ward describes how the historical mapping and social imaginary constructions of colonial islands as sites of pleasure and adventure are reproduced today within the tourism industry. Given the history of violent political struggle and deadly natural disasters, this reproduction is possible only when recasting the narrative by reproducing the colonial imaginary of islands as exotic “treasure boxes” containing “exotic,” historically “Oriental” experiences and artifacts for Western appropriation and enjoyment. Ward then shifts to describe how to also read the history of Sri Lanka as a “caged-problem,” a colonial sign from international relations which also draws upon this inside/outside narrative rooted in the European display of the colonial (human) zoo. This hierarchy is reproduced in post-colonization politics of inside/outside through the interstate relations, as is illustrated by the example of the civil war and external sovereign relationships illustrated by the international response to the 2004 tsunami. Ward’s reading brings together the intersections of travel, war, human rights, and disaster relief by describing both the production and reproduction of the nation-state as a one of reproducing discourses of the island-state as “treasure box” as well as embodying the “caged-problem,” both rooted in colonial domination and international economic relations. The full force of securitization as exercised along nation-state borders emerges in Reha Atakan Cetin’s article “Externalization of the European Union Migration Regime: The Case of Turkey.” Turkey hosts the largest number of refugees in the world, the majority of whom fled from Syria, generally practicing an open-door policy. As a candidate for membership in the European Union (EU), however, Turkey increasingly aligns its migration policies with the EU’s securitized management practices designed to prevent migrants from crossing its borders. “This study,” as Cetin states, “focuses on the ways in which the externalization of the EU migration regime securitizes Turkish immigration policy. It argues that the EU further securitizes Turkey’s already securitarian migration regime by employing the principle of conditionality,” in this case, membership in the EU. This historical case analysis locates the refugee or migrant within the broader dynamics of international politics where nation-states negotiate their relationships and determine who garners inclusion in such unions. The final two articles describe attempts to confront and leverage migration and citizenship through political actions and engagements. The first describes how migrants have challenged and integrated the state’s neoliberal requirements by infusing their own methods of practice to secure citizenship rights. The second engages those who are already within borders, focusing not on legal status but democratic community participation. In “Family Reunification as an Earned Right: A Framing Analysis of Migrant Workers’ Pathways to Neoliberal Multicultural Citizenship in Canada,” Rupaleem Bhuyan, Kate Yoon, and Lorraine Valmadrid analyze the discourse of migration and neoliberal citizenship in Canada. Canada is unique in that it allows the application for permanent residence for migrant careworkers and their families after only two years of work. While this appears to be quite liberal in terms of immigration policy, and the government in recent years has touted a “welcome immigrants” platform while creating language, status, and education barriers for those migrating in seeking permanent residence. Using a feminist, participatory action research methodological approach, the authors interpret the experiences of migrant caregivers who challenge requirements for permanent residency and family reunification based on exclusionary neoliberal, multicultural discourses. Through their framing analysis of policy documents and political rhetoric, as well as interview research, they find that caregivers simultaneously define themselves as neoliberal actors to leverage their “value” within the Canadian migration system while at the same time continuing to engage traditional ethics utang na loób, a form of reciprocal obligation to define for themselves their relationship with the state. In doing so, careworkers have leveraged their employment position to serve as an anchoring point for family immigration by leveraging the neoliberal discourse of self-sufficiency. In “Race, Citizenship, and Participation: Interrogating the Racial Dynamics of Participatory Budgeting,” Laura Pin assesses how municipal-level participatory budgeting practices in Chicago (United States) intersect with race and citizenship, allowing limited spaces for non-citizen participation with the potential for more substantial community engagement. Building upon the work of many of the scholars appearing in New Political Science’s symposium on this topic in 2017, she uses rich, in-depth interviews and participant observations to understand the impact of participatory budgeting, which is assumed to increase minority participation that actually leverages engagement within diverse communities. While participatory budgeting does increase participation by Black and Hispanic residents, Pin’s interviews show that this participation is surface level rather than a deep form of engagement proposed within deliberative democratic theory. With a specific focus on citizenship, Pin also explores how in Chicago’s model, unlike many others in the United States, participation is both allowed and encouraged by non-citizen community residents regardless of legal status. Her research shows that undocumented residents face explicit and implicit barriers to participation despite defining and specifically opening participation to anyone living in the community. Pin concludes that while participatory budgeting does increase community engagement, as currently practiced it does not challenge or transform existing structural inequalities. For Pin, this is not an inherent constraint within participatory budgeting. In a very timely conclusion, she identifies how we see alternative forms of participatory budgeting with calls to defund the police by community members. For Pin, these, perhaps, hold a far better chance of “recovering the radical core of the process and extending political inclusion.” From theory to practice, this Special Issue calls forward the critical dimension of how identity forms the subjectivity of peoples globally when reimagining citizenship and the nation-state in the Global Age. Attention to the dynamics of race, class, gender, sex, sexuality, and the entire range of ascriptive identity variables humanizes the often dehumanizing processes of globalization when peoples crossing borders become numbers categorized to determine entry. COVID-19, of course, knows no nation-state borders or categories of peoples, though its impact has been most devastating for Black and brown peoples across the globe. As the global pandemic spread in 2020 so did a resurgent movement to address another ongoing, historic pandemic – that of racism. The September 2020 issue of this journal included a collection of essays and “New Political Science and Black Lives Matter Statement” reflecting on the confluence of these two pandemics – racism and COVID-19. The articles in this Special Issue, in conjunction with the September 2020 issue, capture the impulse of progressive scholarship required of this current moment as we engage in theoria “to see” a way toward a better, more sustainable, just future.

Faculty Members

  • Jocelyn M. Boryczka - Fairfield University, Fairfield, CT, USA
  • Sarah M. Surak - Salisbury University, Salisbury, MD, USA

Themes

  • Nation-State
  • Globalization
  • Decolonization
  • Neoliberalism
  • Impact of COVID-19 on Social Structures
  • Participatory Budgeting
  • Intersectionality
  • Citizenship
  • Environmental Citizenship
  • Migration
  • Racial Dynamics
  • Identity Formation
  • Political Community
  • Securitization

Categories

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