Sköld 219 and mutually-beneficial relationship between the state and the individual’.12 Kingston thereby builds on Marion Young’s pre-existing notion of “differentiated citizenship” through which the presumed universality of citizenship is challenged and which calls for differentiated forms of citizenship, such as through group representation, to better achieve full inclusion for all citizens.13 Ultimately, Isin and Wood argue that citizenship should not be understood as an exclusively legal or sociological concept, but as a combination.14 Thus, the narrow legal definition of citizenship as formal legal status is not wrong per se, but rather deeply emblematic of the visionary societal structure ascribed to by liberal nation-states. Understanding the legal concept of citizenship is fundamental for understanding the grounds on which inclusion and exclusion is perceived to be justified. By combining this framework with sociological concepts of citizenship, where citizenship is in various ways understood as a social mechanism of inclusion and exclusion beyond formal legal status, the dominant assumptions around citizenship and statelessness can be brought to light and scrutinized. 2.1 Conceptualizing Citizenship in Light of Nationality Although sociological literature on nationality is commonly situated within the field of nationalism studies, a comprehensive understanding of citizenship requires an interrogation of the dialectical relationship between citizenship and nationality. The concepts of “nation”, “nationality” and “nationalism” have proved notoriously difficult to define but ‘are among those terms used to refer not to any clearly definable set, the members of which all share some common features which nonmembers lack, but rather to a cluster of “family resemblances”’.15 In his seminal work Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson defines the nation as ‘an imagined political community—and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign’ and goes on to argue that ‘[c]ommunities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined’.16 Here, the term “imagined” is not be confused with the term “invented”, which bears a connotation of falsity. Rather, the idea of nationhood as “imagined” can be thought of as a way to address nationhood in a nonprescriptive manner, focusing on the nation as a lived experience. Whereas some scholars, notably Anthony Smith, argue that the origins of the nation lie in pre-existing ethnic populations, or “ethnies”, contemporary literature takes a stronger modernist approach in their understanding of nations and nationalism.17 Central to the study of nations and nationalism is the interrogation of how the concepts in the nexus between ethnicity, nationalism and state relate to one another. An in-depth exploration of the origins of the nation is beyond the scope of this paper, but I argue that it is crucial to situate the concept of citizenship within an understanding of nationhood in order to be able to explore processes of inclusion and exclusion within its appropriate national and state context. Thus, it must be recognized that nation-states’ criteria for citizenship are deeply reflective of their dominant understanding of nationhood and of who is included and excluded within this idea.18 In other words, citizenship reflects the nation as it is ‘imagined’ by the dominant group, but might be less reflective of how the nation is ‘imagined’ by other groups. This is made possible partly through the rights that states possess to determine their own criteria for citizenship. In this way, citizenship can be understood as a tool to institutionalize a dominant group’s idea of nationhood and national identity, which Bosniak illustrates through conceptualizing citizenship as a mask through which the dominant group’s interests are operationalized and masquerade as a state’s universal identity.19 To exemplify by looking at the case of Kurdistan, Eliassi writes that in Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran, citizenship is understood as a heavily ethno-nationalist concept, and is closely associated with being Turkish, Arab or Persian, respectively. This is clearly attested in the case of Syria, where the country’s official name is the Syrian Arab Republic, and thus explicitly conflates Arab identity with Syrian citizenship.20 Eliassi continues this line of reasoning when stating that the national identities of Syria, Iraq, Iran and Turkey were all 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 Lindsey Kingston, ‘Statelessness as a Lack of Functioning Citizenship’ (2014) 19 Tilburg Law Review 127. Iris Marion Young, ‘Polity and Group Difference: A Critique of the Ideal of Universal Citizenship’ (1989) 99 Ethics 250. Engin Isin and Patricia Wood, Citizenship and Identity (Sage 1999). Craig Calhoun, ‘Nationalism and Ethnicity’ (1993) 19 Annual Review of Sociology 215. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (rev edn, Verso 2006). Anthony Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations (Blackwell 1986). See Rogers Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany (Harvard University Press 1992), where he suggests to treat ‘legal definitions of citizenship as expressions of deeply rooted cultural and political conceptions of nationhood’. Linda Bosniak, The Citizen and the Alien: Dilemmas of Contemporary Membership (Princeton University Press 2006). Since 2016 there have been discussions of removing the term ‘Arab’ from the country’s name.