2019 Statelessness & Citizenship Review 1(1) henceforth recognised as a citizen of that state, thereby remedying for one that predicament confronting all stateless persons alike: the absence of any legal identity to which no formal recognition by any state is owed. For this reason, it is citizenship, meaning the ‘passive and active membership of individuals in a nation-state with universalistic rights and obligations at a specified level of equality’ 7 that serves as the core concept in this study’s conceptual framework. Still, citizenship is an all too vast concept encompassing no less than twenty distinct theoretical approaches, 8 such that ‘the scope of this field now certainly goes well beyond the mastery of any scholar’. 9 However, because this study seeks to explore the degree to which the previously stateless person, or individual, has access to four specific rights, and given that ‘liberal theory, whether of citizenship or of anything else, begins with the individual’, 10 a liberal theory of citizenship has been adopted. Even so, a theory of citizenship that champions liberal individual rights remains incomplete, for liberal theory views rights as guaranteed by the state and allocated to those under its authority wherein they are passively enjoyed by those fortunate enough to have been brought within the state’s fold. 11 In this way, rights are bestowed upon individuals from on high, with the individual portrayed as a passive recipient of rights as opposed to an active political agent engaged in the political process. Yet, as Marshall reminds us, citizenship ‘is stimulated both by the struggle to win those rights and by their enjoyment when won’. 12 It is the first half of this statement that is instructive, for Marshall acknowledges that citizenship rights are also secured from below through the struggle for their attainment, 13 and in so doing tacitly suggests that these rights are not entirely the product of state beneficence but can result from citizen engagement. In contributing to the notion of struggle advanced by Marshall, 14 Lister states that the content of citizenship rights is never fixed but remains the object of political struggle, and that as an ideal, ‘citizenship provides a potent weapon in the hands of disadvantaged and oppressed groups of insiders’ to not only gain new rights, but give substance to those rights that have already been secured. 15 Thus, citizenship can also be conceived of as struggle, as a site of contestation or negotiation, as ‘the invention and creation of new rights, which emerge from specific struggles and their concrete practices’ 16 given that those excluded from their entitlement to the rights 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 Thomas Janoski and Brian Gran, ‘Political Citizenship: Foundation of Rights’ in Engin Fahri Isin and Bryan S Turner (eds), Handbook of Citizenship Studies (Sage 2002) 13. Engin Fahri Isin and Bryan S Turner, Handbook of Citizenship Studies (Sage 2002); Margaret R Somers, Genealogies of Citizenship: Markets, Statelessness, and the Right to Have Rights (Cambridge University Press 2008). Isin and Turner (n 8) 2. Peter H Schuck, ‘Liberal Citizenship’ in Engin Fahri Isin and Bryan S Turner (eds), Handbook of Citizenship Studies (Sage 2002) 132. Michael Walzer, ‘Citizenship’ in Terence Ball, James Farr and Russel L Hanson (eds), Political Innovation and Conceptual Change (Cambridge University Press 1989); Keith Faulks, Citizenship (Routledge 2000); Isin and Turner (n 8). Thomas Humphrey Marshall, Citizenship and Social Class, and Other Essays (Cambridge University Press 1950) 41. ibid. ibid. Ruth Lister, Citizenship: Feminist Perspectives (New York University Press 2003) 5. Evalina Dagnino, ‘Culture, Citizenship and Democracy: Changing Discourses and Practices of the Latin American Left’ in Sonia E Alvarez, Evalina Dagnino and Arturo Escobar (eds), Cultures of Politics, Politics of Cultures: Re-Visioning Latin American Social Movements (Westview Press 1998) 50 (emphasis altered). 8