Abstract
How are membership of a national community, polity and the internal hierarchies of membership changing at times of the conflicted coexistence of neoliberal globalisation, stricter immigration regimes and transnational human rights regime? Within and Beyond Citizenship addresses this question through developing a more nuanced attentiveness to different scales, sites, actors and acts that inform entitlements and meanings of membership within the context of contemporary proliferation of immigration statuses that unsettles the binaries of legality and illegality, citizenship and alienage.
The book starts with De Genova’s thought-provoking account that unpacks citizenship addressing its failure to recognise and take responsibility of millions of people living in ‘grey spaces’ that supersede the binary categories. He argues that citizenship has been a bordered identity from the beginning with illegality being legally produced. Attending to the membership-defining character of deportation and detainability, he encourages detecting regularities as well as irregularities, which are simultaneously and mutually constitutive.
The book continues with thick empirical accounts on immigrants’ everyday negotiations over membership and belonging. Chapter 3 and Chapter 4 reveal that the effects of the discrepancies of citizenship are not limited to irregular migrants, while Chapter 5 focuses on how the sovereign power operates most efficiently, not on illegality per se, but on the zone separating legality and illegality, through systematically blurring it by granting only partial and/or temporary legalisation to migrants.
Following the exposure of the gap between the formal and lived citizenship, Chapters 6–10 explore the dynamic process of search for a new citizenship through acts that make the migrants feel like ‘a bird freed from its cage’ (p. 133), as expressed by an undocumented migrant who was involved in the European March. These cases reveal the crisis of citizenship through presenting a glimpse of citizenships that are yet to come like ‘a match that is lighted’ (p. 88). What is remarkable about the ways these are discussed is that the invaluable effort to bring the voice of the people living in grey areas has not prevented a sensibility to avoid overlooking the limits of these acts. Thus, the transformative power of attempts from below to challenge the acquired meanings of membership is discussed in relation to the simultaneous attempts to maintain and reproduce the boundaries between insiders and outsiders that suddenly make particular individuals and groups feel like a bird with only one wing. For instance, Chapter 6 demonstrates the power of protest-based citizenship acts to give voice to people who have few channels to speak; yet through follow-up interviews, the limited power of citizenship acts in terms of achieving long-term goals vis-à-vis the disciplining force of legal rules for naturalisation and fear over deportation is revealed.
Equally importantly, in Chapter 8, Bendixsen reveals the complex dynamics of power and control in which the acts are situated, focusing on formulation of migrant activists’ claims (like good citizen) that are less about opening up for who can be included and excluded in the nation-state and more about representing themselves as already part of the existing community of values. Likewise, in Chapter 9, Swerts exposes the ambivalence of the process of transforming the meaning of citizenship from below during European March addressing the discrepancy between the marchers’ attempts to mobilise across borders and their re-affirmation of the importance of national boundaries through crossing them. Last but not least, in Chapter 10 Van Baar focuses on the overlooked potential of the mundane and more durable practices in constructing and transforming political subjectivities and solidarities as well as heroic and disruptive acts.
In the closing chapter, Anderson and Gibney take us back to the point of departure of the book that is to reveal the production of irregularities by and within the existing citizenship regime. Exploring the ways failed citizen is currently redefined in the UK and addressing the internal hierarchies created among the state’s members, they reveal how these undermine the boundaries between formal citizen and alien in such a way that renders the long settled citizens as well as non-citizens vulnerable.
Although the limits of citizenship acts particularly in terms of durability reveal the necessity to articulate the empowerment derived from rights claims to more mundane practices in order not to be overwhelmed by the migrants’ enduring wish to become incorporated, it is invaluable to emphasise the irreversible impacts generated by the enactments of a new vision of social justice through these acts. Thinking as a whole, the book exposes the inevitability of the process of moving beyond citizenship through attending to the inherent irregularities thereof. Through providing glimpses of the light infiltrating from the cracks generated by the dynamic negotiations and struggles over membership, it encourages further efforts to widen those cracks across time and space against the all-encompassing subjection to the irregularities of citizenship. As inclusion exists in a continuum with exclusion (Mezzadra and Nielson, 2013: 7), a critical examination of the enduring promises of citizenship and the processes which encourage people’s wish to become incorporated might be the next step that would follow the book’s attempt to move beyond the bordered vision of citizenship and build a broader mobilisation around that.