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Uncertainty is central to the governance of citizenship, but in ways that erase, even deny, this uncertainty. Uncertain citizenship investigates this uncertainty from the unique vantage point of ‘citizenisation’ – twenty-first-century integration and naturalisation measures that make and unmake citizens and migrants, while indefinitely holding many applicants for citizenship in what Anne-Marie Fortier calls the waiting room of citizenship. Fortier’s distinctive theory of citizenisation foregrounds how the full achievement of citizenship is a promise that is always deferred. This means that if migrants and citizens are continuously citizenised, so too are they migratised. Citizenisation and migratisation are intimately linked within the structures of racial governmentality that enables the citizenship of racially minoritised citizens to be questioned and that casts them as perpetual migrants.
Drawing on multi-sited fieldwork with migrants applying for citizenship or settlement and with intermediaries of the state tasked with implementing citizenisation measures and policies, Fortier brings life to the waiting room of citizenship, giving rich empirical backing to her original theoretical claims. Scrutinising life in the waiting room enables Fortier to analyse how citizenship takes place, takes time and takes hold in ways that conform, exceed and confound frames of reference laid out in both citizenisation policies and taken-for-granted understandings of ‘the citizen’, ‘the migrant’, and their relationships to citizenship. Uncertain citizenship’s nuanced account of the social and institutional function of citizenisation and migratisation offers its readers a grasp of the array of racial inequalities that citizenisation produces and reproduces, while providing theoretical and empirical tools to address these inequalities.
[C]itizenship is, through and through, precarious, recent, threatened, and more artificial than ever. (Derrida 1998 : 15) Citizenship is uncertain. It is volatile, its boundaries, limits and promises are forever revised, amended and deferred. Citizenship can be bought, taught, fragmented, multiple, probationary, precarious, stripped, disposable, impossible, gifted, strategic, disputed, relinquished, achieved
1 Challenges to national citizenship It is clear from the experience of the United States and Britain that the possession of full, formal citizenship does not impede the development of multiply disadvantaged ethnocultural minorities. (Brubaker, 1998, p. 137) An effect of the popularity of “multicultural” or postcolonial texts is the questioning of fixed and self-evident notions of nationality and citizenship. After decolonization, writers in newly independent countries like Kenya, India or Algeria made nationalism an important issue in their writing. This was
8 Politics and citizenship The key challenge facing both Government and Irish society in the period ahead is the need to integrate people of a different culture, ethnicity, language and religion so that they become part of our nation, part of the Irish family in the 21st century. (Fianna Fáil, 2009) This chapter examines immigrant political participation and the role of citizenship in the political integration of immigrants. Firstly, it considers bottom-up efforts of immigrants to participate in electoral politics since 2004, when two former asylum seekers
:49 PM Page 19 The long march back 19 Reciprocity Similarly, whereas the Old Left based its ideas upon the social rights of citizenship and interpreted entitlements to welfare as unconditional (Plant, 1998), the NSD regards obligations as equally important. This does not mean abandoning the category of social rights, as the New Right advocated (Plant, 1993), but it does mean being clearer and firmer about attaching rights to responsibilities (Roche, 1992). This reciprocity mirrors the social interdependency that is expressed in the principle of community, since
Introduction On 11 June 2004, the Irish electorate voted on the ‘Twenty-seventh Amendment of the Constitution Bill’ or, as it is more generally known, the Citizenship Referendum (hereafter the Referendum). On that day a large majority of those who voted – almost 80 per cent – sanctioned a withdrawal of the automatic constitutional right to citizenship for all children born in the Republic of Ireland. The Citizenship Act (2005) introduced a distinction between children born in Ireland whose parents were Irish, and those whose parents were not. This
4 Migration, cosmopolitanism and ‘global citizenship’ from the 1990s The quest for ‘lifestyle’ in two generations I exist now in a state of limbo. I’ve lived in New Zealand for nearly four years, which my Wellington friends assure me is no time at all. I still have an English accent and gravitate without intention to other English people. But I don’t feel English any more. I don’t read the English news or support England against New Zealand in sport. I knew more about the All Blacks than I did about the British Lions on their recent tour, but I’m still not a
80 4 Citizenship v. religion in the school curricula of the 2000s This chapter will examine how general policy orientations were translated into school curricula in the late 1990s and 2000s with regard to cultural and religious matters. Can these curricula be said to demonstrate a pluralist transition, or even revolution, as compared with the still strongly Christian educational message of the 1970s? We will consider the school curricula as statements of intent on the part of Irish public institutions. As Fionnuala Waldron remarked in her analysis of Irish
Deporting Black Britons provides an ethnographic account of deportation from the UK to Jamaica. It traces the painful stories of four men who were deported after receiving criminal convictions in the UK. For each of the men, all of whom had moved to the UK as children, deportation was lived as exile – from parents, partners, children and friends – and the book offers portraits of survival and hardship in both the UK and Jamaica. Based on over four years of research, Deporting Black Britons describes the human consequences of deportation, while situating deportation stories within the broader context of policy, ideology, law and violence. It examines the relationship between racism, criminalisation and immigration control in contemporary Britain, suggesting new ways of thinking about race, borders and citizenship in these anti-immigrant times. Ultimately, the book argues that these stories of exile and banishment should orient us in the struggle against violent immigration controls, in the UK and elsewhere.
In recent years, exhumation campaigns of mass graves resulting from the armed conflict (1980–2000) between the Maoist guerrillas of PCP-Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso) and the States armed forces have increased in Peru. People in rural Andes, the most marginalised sectors of national society, which were also particularly affected by the war, are the main group concerned with exhumations. This article examines the handling, flow and re-appropriation of exhumed human remains in public space to inform sociopolitical issues underlying the reparation policies implemented by the State, sometimes with the support of human rights NGOs. How do the families of victims become involved in this unusual return of their dead? Have the exhumations become a new repertoire of collective action for Andean people seeking to access their fundamental rights and for recognition of their status as citizens? Finally, what do these devices that dignify the dead reveal about the internal workings of Peruvian society – its structural inequities and racism – which permeate the social fabric?