Statelessness & Citizenship Review 2020 2(1) safeguard tribal sovereignty and alternative membership, rights to place and to purpose are crucial. Adopting a positive, but not uncritical perspective, she maintains that the case of indigenous nations thus offers an interesting viewpoint on how functioning citizenship for different groups could be achieved. 20 Chapter Seven zooms in on the US context and discusses the situation of ‘second-class citizens’ in the cities of Saint Louis, Flint, and New Orleans. The mainly black and poor populations in these cities suffer from structural violence, marginalisation and oppression despite having legal nationality. 21 Kingston contends that these three examples illustrate the construction, reinforcement and perpetuation of hierarchies of personhood in race and class over generations, and denial of fundamental rights to place and purpose. 22 She discusses the right to housing, water and health, and shows how ‘functioning citizenship is frequently allotted along racial and socioeconomic lines’. 23 (Neo)liberal conceptions of rights and worthiness thereby serve as markers on the hierarchy of personhood by valuing personal choice rather than rights’ protection. The chapter clearly illustrates that legal nationality alone does not guarantee equal rights protection. Kingston goes full circle to the situation of stateless persons, where the granting of legal nationality alone does not guarantee equal rights protection either. Part IV closes the book with a number of concrete policy recommendations on how to create inclusive forms of membership. Chapter Eight focuses on the topic of issue emergence and discusses the ways in which hierarchies of personhood are addressed but also reinforced in the work of the international human rights community, with the example of images, visual narratives and social media. 24 Kingston calls upon actors in the human rights field to re-evaluate the hierarchies and categories of worthiness that influence issue emergence and to empower claimants to share their perspectives and knowledge. In the conclusion (Chapter Nine), Kingston develops a number of concrete and very practical policy recommendations to actualise the ideal of functioning citizenship. Some protection gaps caused by the persisting hierarchies of personhood could, as Kingston proposes, be filled with relatively simple measures — such as the ratification and implementation of relevant international human rights standards, the issuance of birth certificates and identity documents, fair and impartial procedures or an understanding of ‘rights entitlement rather than reliance on charity models’. 25 Eventually, Kingston defines functioning citizenship as an aspirational ideal that moves beyond mere legal status to facilitate mutually beneficial, rights-protective relationships between the state and the individual while opening political space for those who do not fit within traditional conceptions of the citizenry. 26 With her thorough discussion of the six groups and their respective positions on the hierarchy of personhood, Kingston elegantly weaves together different sites of contestation of citizenship and denial of rights and makes a credible claim for her concept of functioning citizenship. One could argue that the idea of citizenship 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 ibid 173. ibid 176. ibid. ibid 189. ibid 205–15. ibid 223–32. ibid 240. 193