Citizenship, migration, borders

This chapter examines the genealogy and contemporary configuration of two key concepts that are central to governing the ‘boundary’ and ‘quality’ of citizenship in China: hukou and suzhi. Whereas hukou, or the household registration system, functions as a formal meso-level citizenship that distributes rights and regulates internal migration, the discourse of suzhi, loosely translated as quality, constructs what a desirable citizen subject should look like. These technologies of citizenship are inherently interconnected to one another, as the notion of suzhi—which articulates hierarchized difference and calls for the government of the self – is used in political, academic and everyday discourses to justify the regime of differentiated rights and mobility. Discourses about hukou and suzhi are analyzed in the context of hybrid governmentalities in post-socialist or neo-socialist China. While the emphasis of suzhi on market value and self-improvement is reminiscent of neoliberal citizenship and the liberal subject of improvement, it is best understood as fusing together different rationalities around the government of the self and within the hegemonic modernization discourse in contemporary China. (link)(pdf)

The impact of freedom of movement in the EU on the restructuring of national social citizenship has been subject to vigorous debates in both political and academic discourses. This chapter draws on the insights of critical citizenship theory to move beyond the individualistic approach to transnational rights in liberal cosmopolitanism, on one hand, and the static approach to solidarity in defence of national closure, on the other. Rather than a fixed collection of social rights and a finalised national project, social citizenship can be understood as an open-ended process shaped by ongoing collective struggles over needs and social inclusion. Relations of solidarity and reciprocity can emerge in such processes rather than being a precondition external to them. The chapter then considers the political significance of non-institutionalised forms of contestation over the social rights of migrants that resist and challenge the individualist and discriminatory logics in the governance of free movement. As practices geared towards constructing new solidaristic relations and identities across borders, these acts of (social) citizenship articulate an alternative understanding of mobility as social and spatial practices that enable collective engagements and set in motion inclusive forms of solidarity that traverse the boundaries of the national, the European and the legal. (link) (pdf)

Drawing on insights from critical citizenship studies and governmentality studies, this article explores and theorizes the changing mobility regime in China and its centerpiece, the household registration (hukou) system, from a global comparative perspective. First, we conceptualize the hukou system within the broader problematique of the spatiality of social citizenship and show how it enables processes of boundary-making that are comparable to the policing of the migrant poor in pre-welfare-state Europe and the subordination of international migrant labor in the contemporary world. Second, we argue that the shifting mobility regime envisaged by the current hukou reforms and new urbanization, which moves away from the dualistic structure of inclusion/exclusion to a multiplication of legal statuses and boundaries of citizenship, embodies a neoliberal-authoritarian rationality of government. Engaging with the debate on the hybrid governmentalities of post-socialist China, we focus particularly on new techniques of mobility management in China’s first-tier cities, whose national positioning resembles that of Northern countries in the global hierarchy of power. Through examples of the point-based system and the strategy of functional dispersal, we demonstrate how these globalizing cities actively engineer a highly polarized mobility regime in their pursuit of generating globally competitive spaces. The article contributes to the critique of methodological nationalism by denaturalizing national citizenship as a pre-given point of departure in examining mobility and socio-spatial boundaries. It also offers new insights into the converging trends of neoliberal authoritarianism and authoritarian neoliberalism in governing the ‘glocal’ hierarchies of citizenship and mobility. (link)

This article investigates the making and contestation of mobile borders around the Channel Tunnel, the fixed link connecting Britain and the European continent. It suggests that the bordering of the infrastructural and vehicular spaces is both an object of inquiry in its own right and a productive lens for reflecting on questions related to European Union (EU) territory, the heterogeneous nature of borders as well as the interplay between regimes of control and resistance. The article starts by reviewing the legal and institutional frameworks in which the Channel Tunnel area is governed and envisioned as an interstate and European/Schengen borderzone. It then examines the uncoordinated efforts of national, private and European authorities in managing the episodic migration controversies around this area, which bring together the interconnected rationales of security, economy and humanitarianism and expose the dissonance between and within them. Finally, the article considers how the acts of turbulent mobilities interact with this contingent assemblage of mobility governance and realise the radical potential of territorial borders. (link)

There has been an explosion of interest in the idea of European Union citizenship in recent years, as a defining example of postnational cosmopolitan citizenship potentially replacing or layered on top of national citizenship. We argue this form of EU citizenship undermines industrial citizenship, which is a crucial support for social solidarity on which other types of citizenship are based. Because industrial citizenship arises from collectivities based on class identities and national institutions, it depends on the national territorial order and the social closure inherent in it. EU citizenship in its ‘postnational’ form is realized through practices of mobility, placing it in tension with bounded class-based collectivities. Though practices of working-class cosmopolitanism may give rise to a working-class consciousness, the fragmented nature of this vision impedes the development of transnational class-based collectivities. Industrial and cosmopolitan citizenship must be re-imagined together if European integration is to be democratized. (link)

This paper brings together the project of human rights and that of the European Union under examination vis-à-vis the rights of non-citizens, and in particular the rights of undocumented migrants. In so doing, it attempts to grasp the tension between the postnational articulations of membership, both as normative expectations and institutional construction, and the post/neocolonial condition as expressed in the politics of citizenship and migration in today’s Europe. I argue that the exclusion and exploitation of postcolonial migrants have both underpinned and betrayed the EU’s ambition to re-establish Europe as a leading ‘normative power’ committed to the value of human rights. When shifting the focus from EU citizenship and its reproduction of differential inclusion and essentialist cultural identity to migrant subjectivity, the paper engages with the emerging field of critical citizenship studies which sees migrant mobilisations as sites of contesting and enacting citizenship. However, it further argues that this emancipatory intent is continuously disrupted by the fact that the employment of the discourse of rights centred on performativity and universality often has to be mediated through the categories of race, religion, culture and the colonial legacy. Thus a critical cosmopolitanism needs to start with acknowledging, rather than masking, the paradoxes in itself. (pdf)