Citizenship Agendas in and beyond the Nation-State

In today’s world, citizenship is increasingly defined in normative terms. Political belonging comes to be equated with specific norms, values and appropriate behaviour, with distinctions made between virtuous, desirable citizens and deviant, undesirable ones. In this book, we analyze the formulation, implementation, and contestation of such normative framings of citizenship, which we term ‘citizenship agendas’. Some of these agendas are part and parcel of the working of the nation-state. Other citizenship agendas, however, are produced beyond the nation-state. The chapters in this book study various sites where the meaning of ‘the good citizen’ is framed and negotiated in different ways by state and non-state actors. We explore how multiple normative framings of citizenship may coexist in apparent harmony, or merge, or clash. The different chapters in this book engage with citizenship agendas in a range of contexts, from security policies and social housing in Dutch cities to state-like but extralegal organizations in Jamaica and Guatemala, and from the regulation of the Muslim call to prayer in the US Midwest to post-conflict reconstruction in Lebanon. This book was previously published as a special issue of Citizenship Studies.

Martijn Koster is an assistant professor at the department of Anthropology and Development Studies at Radboud University, Nijmegen, the Netherlands. He has conducted ethnographic research in Brazil and the Netherlands. His main research interests are citizen participation, political brokerage and urban development.

Rivke Jaffe is professor of Cities, Politics and Culture in the department of Human Geography, Planning and International Development Studies at the University of Amsterdam. Her research focuses primarily on intersections of the urban and the political, and includes a strong interest in the spatiality and materiality of urban inequalities.

Anouk de Koning is assistant professor at the Department of Anthropology and Development Studies at Radboud University, where she leads an ERC-funded project Reproducing Europe: Migrant Parenting and Contested Citizenship. She has worked in Cairo, Paramaribo and Amsterdam, researching how political regimes and public discourses impact people’s everyday lives.