4
Molly Land, Kathryn Libal, and Jillian Chambers
(formal citizenship) and the social, political, cultural, and symbolic practices of
becoming and being a citizen (substantive citizenship), focusing on the non-citizen
through a human rights lens.10 Chapter 7 by Eleni Coundouriotis and Chapter 11 by
Susan Bibler Coutin address how citizenship is enacted and new forms of belonging
emerge through what some have called “lived citizenship,” a concept that stresses
the phenomenological and performative aspects of citizenship. As Kirsi Kallio,
Bronwyn Wood, and Jouni Häkli note, such work contrasts citizenship “based on
status and the respective rights granted by the state” and attends to “less formal
modes of political participation and ways of enacting citizenship beyond the largely
institutionalized practices within states.”11
Furthermore, there are many aspects of the topic the volume does not address,
including the experience of non-citizens with quasi-membership rights, such as
work authorization but without political rights, or the experience of resettled
refugees or permanent residents. It also largely does not address the experience of
those who may have political citizenship, but for whom the rights of citizenship
have been denied due to racism or other forms of oppression.12
Securing the human rights of non-citizens is one of the most pressing global
social problems of the twenty-first century. Like climate change and the global
economy, addressing the human rights implications of global migration – and
forced migration in particular – transcends the limits of any one state and requires
both domestic and international commitments and action. This volume attempts to
provoke conversations across disciplines about how we can ground such commitments and action for those with whom we do not share a political community.
part i: the failure of rights
The first section of the book discusses the imperfections of citizenship as a basis for
rights. A historic number of refugees, asylum seekers, asylees, undocumented
migrants, and immigrants with varied statuses reside and work within states where
they do not have citizenship.13 And, in the post-Cold War era, they share new forms
of insecurity and precarity due to a rise in xenophobia and racist backlash against
E. F. Isin, “Theorizing Acts of Citizenship,” in Isin and Nielsen (eds.), Acts of Citizenship,
pp. 15–43.
11
K. P. Kallio, B. E. Wood, and J. Häkli, “Lived Citizenship: Conceptualizing an Emerging
Field” (2020) 24(6) Citizenship Studies 713–729 at 714.
12
Brysk and Shafir, “Introduction,” pp. 6–7.
13
The International Organization of Migration estimates that there are 272 million international
migrants (3.5% of the world’s population), of which approximately two thirds are labor
migrants, in 2020. This figure surpasses earlier estimates that by 2050 there would be 230 million
international migrants. IOM UN Migration, World Immigration Report 2020 (Geneva,
Switzerland: International Organization for Migration, 2020), https://publications.iom.int/
system/files/pdf/wmr_2020.pdf at 2.
10
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108914994 Published online by Cambridge University Press