54 By-passing state power and neutralising state bureaucracies the international sphere was increasingly founded on notions that decoupled individual rights from group identities (Howard-Hassmann 2015). Divorcing citizenship status from group identity Citizenship since the emergence of the post-WWII human rights framework has often been described as being constituted of three interrelated and overlapping aspects: legal, political, and identity based (Cohen 1999; Joppke 2007; Tonkiss and Bloom 2015).36 This I refer to in this book as the trinity of citizenship. The legal aspect describes citizenship as status, or as the formal membership of a state and the rules of access associated with it. Citizenship status is understood to provide admittance to a bundle of civil, political, and social rights, which vary from state to state (Marshall 1950). Citizenship status in line with the formal equality of states does not distinguish between different types of political governance—the status is recognised internationally, whether citizenship is granted under a liberal democracy or, for example, a totalitarian state. The political aspect of citizenship is generally associated with democratic principles and denotes active participation in national affairs or governance of the state. The concept draws on classical Greek definitions of democratic citizenship as opposed to the subjecthoods of monarchies, colonial rule, or authoritarian rule (see Dagger 1997). The legal and political aspects of citizenship are sometimes differentiated from one another by the characteristics of ‘thin’ and ‘thick’ citizenship (Tilly 1995:8; Sadiq 2009:21–22)—the first relating to the status plus bundle of rights provided by the state and the second relating to how individuals actively participate in society. Descriptions of ‘thick’ citizenship have been further qualified by notions such as ‘active’ and ‘activist’ citizenship which describe how individuals interact with the state (Isin and Nielson 2008:38; Isin 2009). The third aspect, citizenship as identity, refers to how individuals conceive of themselves and act in relation to their membership of a group. This aspect has been studied from within sociology and political science and draws on notions such as loyalty and belonging (Yuval-Davis 2006; Isin and Nielson 2008; Anderson, Gibney et al. 2011; Yuval-Davis 2011; Belton 2015). Typically, identity in citizenship studies refers to a person’s sense of identity as it relates to the state and national belonging. Joppke (2007:38), for example, describes ‘citizenship as identity’ as addressing ‘the unity and integration of society . . . closely connected with the semantics of nation and nationalism.’ Identity in citizenship studies may also relate to membership of groups that are associated with the nation-state, such as indigenous or ethnic groups, and may refer to an individual’s interactions with other (non-ethnic) state-ascribed or state-associated categories (Tilly 1995; Isin and Wood 1999). Citizenship studies have sometimes conceptually broadened to delink citizenship from its relationship with the state, incorporating concepts such as sexual, multicultural, or ecological citizenship (Isin and Turner 2002;