Citizenship, belonging and attachment in the ‘war on terror’

The ‘war on terror’ has had an enormous impact on citizens’ legal rights and legal status. Using data from interviews with British Pakistani Kashmiri Muslims, this paper explores how the change to citizens’ legal rights and legal status in the ‘war on terror’, the legal dimension of citizenship, has impacted the psychological dimension of citizenship. Through denoting legal rights, equality and status the study revealed the powerful role of the state and the police in shaping citizens’ perceptions of the legal dimension of citizenship. The paper explores how changes to participants’ perceptions of their legal status and legal rights are instrumental in shaping the psychological dimension of citizenship—participants’ sense of loyalty, belonging and attachment to their British identity and their Islamic identity.

Women in the driving seat Eastern European immigrant women s citizenship participation and educational inclusion in Portugal

This paper is a case study of Eastern European immigrant women’s social inclusion in Portugal through civic participation. An analysis of interviews conducted with women leaders and members of two ethnic associations provides a unique insight into their migrant pathways as highly educated women and the ways in which these women are constructing their citizenship in new contexts in Northern Portugal. These women’s accounts of their immigrant experience embrace both the public realm, in using their own education and their children’s as a means of integration but also spill over into ‘non-public’ familial relationships at home in contradictory ways. These include the sometimes traditional, gender-defined division of labour within the associations and at home and the new ways that they negotiate their relative autonomies to escape forms of violence and subordination that they face as women and immigrants.

‘Every Coward’s Choice’? Political Objection to Military Service in Apartheid South Africa as Sexual Citizenship

Sexuality was articulated by the apartheid state as a means of disciplining the white population and marginalizing white opponents of apartheid. As such, homophobia was a recurrent feature of political and legal discourse. The End Conscription Campaign (ECC) opposed compulsory conscription for all white men in the apartheid era South African Defence Force (SADF). Its challenge was a potentially radical and profoundly destabilizing one and it articulated a competing definition of citizenship to that offered by the state. The pro‐ and anti‐conscription discourse was inherently gendered and overtly sexualized. The South African government regularly associated men who objected to military service with effeminacy, cowardice and sexual ‘deviance’. The case of Dr Ivan Toms' objection, a gay objector who wished to cite his sexuality as a primary motivation for his objection, reveals the unwillingness of the ECC to engage in sexual politics. Using Shane Phelan's and Zygmunt Bauman's concept of friends, enemies and strangers, this paper investigates the construction of both white gay men and white people who opposed apartheid as ‘strangers’ and suggests that the deployment of homophobia by the state was a stigmatizing discourse aimed at purging the ECC's political message from the public realm. In this context the ECC adopted an assimilatory discursive strategy, whereby they attempted to be ‘respectable whites’, negotiating over shared republican territory. This populist strategy, arguably safer in the short term, avoided issues of sexuality and the fundamental conflation of sexuality and citizenship in apartheid South Africa. The ECC thus circumscribed its radical and deconstructive political potential and did not offer a ‘radical democratic’ message in opposition to apartheid.

Struggles for Citizenship in South Africa

South Africa’s first democratic constitution of 1996, which defines the content and scope of citizenship, emerged out of what the country’s Constitutional Court accurately described as ‘a deeply divided society characterized by strife, conflict, untold suffering and injustice which generated gross violations of human rights, the transgression of humanitarian principles in violent conflicts and a legacy of hatred, fear, guilt and revenge’ (cited in Jagwanth, 2003: 7). The constitution was internationally noteworthy for its expressed protection of women’s and sexual minority rights and its extension of rights of citizenship to socio-economic rights, such as rights of adequate healthcare, housing and education (SAGI, 1996). During South Africa’s first two decades of democracy, the Constitutional Court has proven its independence by advancing citizenship rights on a number of occasions (O’Regan, 2012). The struggle for citizenship was at the heart of the liberation struggle against the apartheid regime and within the complex dynamics of the anti-apartheid movement, increasingly sophisticated and intersectional demands for citizenship were made. South Africa’s constitutional rights for citizenship are not always matched in practice. The country’s high rates of sexual violence, ongoing poverty and inequality and public attitudes towards the rights of sexual minorities and immigrants lag well behind the spirit and letter of the constitution. Nevertheless, the achievement of formal citizenship rights in South Africa was the result of a prolonged and complex liberation struggle and analysis of South Africa demonstrates Werbner’s claim that ‘struggles over citizenship are thus struggles over the very meaning of politics and membership in a community’ (1999: 221). This chapter will begin with a contextual and historical overview before moving onto analyzing the development of non-racialism as a basis for citizenship, non-sexism and gendered citizenship, contestations of white, militarized citizenship and the achievement of sexual citizenship by the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) rights movement. As shall be made clear, all these citizenship demands emerged during the decades of the country’s liberation struggle.

Citizenship and Inclusion: Rethinking the Analytical Category of Noncitizenship

The paper problematises the category of noncitizenship. It traces its trajectory in accounts of inclusive citizenship and argues that it is difficult to theorise it as a distinct theoretical category outside of citizenship. To support this argument, the paper distinguishes between a pluralist, political and democratic variant of accounts of inclusive citizenship and it shows how they all end up reducing noncitizenship to a journey to citizenship. To overcome this limit, the paper develops the idea of subversive politicisation and suggests that injustices and inequalities can be challenged without falling back on the vocabulary of citizenship.