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chapter one
A similar analysis challenging the exclusionary model of citizenship as
rooted in national sovereignty is provided by Dutch-American sociologist
Saskia Sassen:
[T]he destabilizing of national state-centered hierarchies of legitimate
power and allegiance has enabled a multiplication of non-formalized or
only partly formalized political dynamics and actors. These signal a deterritorializing of citizenship practices and identities, and of discourses about
loyalty and allegiance (Sassen 2005, 80).
Rather than a static and detached institution, citizenship instead involves
a range of related interactions, dynamics, and tensions between the individual and the state order at the legal, political, cultural, and psychological
level. In her analysis of the denationalizing and post-national developments in modern citizenship, Sassen also points to the events leading to
the nationalizing of citizenship. Here, Sassen highlights the “formation
and development of the national state as the key political community and
[as] crucial to the socialization of individuals into national citizenship”
(Sassen 2002, 279). The evolution of political subjecthood and participation in conjunction with state formation generated a citizenship regime in
Western societies where nationality served as a fundamental element of
citizenhood at a political, cultural and psychological level. Indeed, this
development of the national character along with the formation of the
institution of citizenship accounts for differences between the various
incorporation and citizenship regimes of nation-states in Europe and
North America. Having explained the nationalizing features of citizenship, Sassen goes on to distinguish between denationalizing and postnational trajectories of citizenship. Though “not necessarily mutually
exclusive,” the former is concerned with the “transformation of the
national” while the latter involves “new forms that we have not even considered and might emerge out of the changed conditions in the world
located outside the national” (Sassen 2002, 286). Sassen’s distinction
between denationalization and post-nationalist tendencies in citizenship
brings the discussion to the question of how these transformations in the
conception of the “national” and their direct and indirect amendment of
the particular features of the institution of citizenship affect the kinds of
actors of citizenship, or the citizen-subjects that arise.
New actors in the arena of citizenship, including refugees, asylum
seekers, courts, international courts, multinational organizations and
other non-status and/or non-citizen agents surface as political subjects.
And as political subjects they carry demands and claims for inclusion,
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