34 chapter one citizenship produce different political subjects. On the question of citizenship rights, sociologist Margaret R. Somers has gone so far as to assert that the rights of legal citizens in a nation-state (de jure citizens) are irrelevant in the absence of de facto citizenship rights.6 In many cases, Somers argues, de jure citizenship in its current form of official citizenship status no longer determines rights within a nation-state. This account is more in conjunction with Hannah Arendt’s political philosophy insofar as it highlights the importance of de facto rights and legal recognition. Somers illuminates a key feature of Arendt’s understanding of citizenship, namely, that the de jure and de facto elements of citizenship, or the status and practice of citizenship, are deeply intertwined. And to determine the actual substance of citizenship, Somers employs the language of rights. In theorizing about the constellation of rights that are foundational to an inclusive citizenship regime, including civil and political freedoms, access to justice, equality and political participation, Somers adopts an Arendtian reading of citizenship as “the right to have rights” (Somers 2006). Two factors are fundamental to this formulation of citizenship: the first is the presence of both de jure and de facto rights of political membership and subjectivity; and the second element is a range of juridico-political rights that encompass social, political, economic welfare, and security rights which, by extension, can include cultural, social heritage, indigenous, and same-sex rights, among others (Somers 2008, 5–9). Central to Somers’s formulation of citizenship is that these rights are to be widely recognized, accepted by a sovereign power and socio-politically and legally enshrined. Thus, while political membership and subjectivity act as a foundation for citizenship, and make de jure and de facto inclusion, identification and recognition possible, the two features of citizenship are inherently intertwined, and complete each other. Problematizing Legal Categorizations The term citizen is, for the most part, a modern socio-legal category. First employed in the fourteenth century, the notion of citizenship only referred to an inhabitant of a polity, and it was later in the sixteenth century when the concept was seriously affiliated with the notion of a right of membership in a city (McAfee 2000, 13). Moreover, it was not until the eighteenth century when it expressed a set of responsibilities and obligations, and it 6 See Somers (2006).