The Repositioning of Citizenship: Emergent Subjects and Spaces for Politics

The two foundational subjects for membership in the modern nation- state, the citizen and the alien, are undergoing significant changes in the current moment. This becomes particularly evident in certain types of contexts, foremost among which are cities. These can be seen as productive spaces for informal or not-yet-forma lized politics and subjects. In this examination of emergent possibilities, I first outline these changes vis-à-vis nationality and citizenship. Second, I dissect notions of national membership in or der to create a set of tools for reconstructing citizenship analytically. In the third section, I deline ate two key, incipient kinds of repositioned membership: unauthorized yet recognized subjects, and authorized yet unrecognized subjects. Fourth, I situate these repositionings within contemporary curren ts of citizenship theory. In the final section, I theorize the landscape of the global city as an especially salient site for the repositioning of citizenship in practice. At the scale of the city, and the particular urban space of the global city, there are d ynamics that signal the possibilities for a politics of membership that is simultaneously localized and transnational. Most of the scholarship on citizenship has claimed a necessary connection to the national state. The transformations afoot today raise questions about this proposition insofar as th ey significantly alter those conditions which in the past fed that articulation between citizenship and the national state. The context for this possible alteration is defined by two major, partly interconnected conditions. One is the change in the position and institutional features of national states since the 1980s resulting from various forms of globalization . Th ese range from economic privatization and deregulation to the increased prominence of the international human rights regime. The second is the emergence of multiple actors, groups, and communities partly strengthened by these transformations in the s tate and i ncreasingly unwilling automatically to identify with a nation as represented by the state.