The Constitutional Citizen in Narratives
THE NARRATIVE IN THE PEOPLE IN QUESTION
Scholars are storytellers. As Barbara Czarniawska has argued, social scientists
recount the events and phenomena that they observe, and theorise by connecting
them with a plot. 5 From this perspective, Shaw’s book not only speaks to the
character of the constitutional citizen in narratives of peoplehood, but tells a
narrative about the concept of constitutional citizenship itself. This Part highlights
some of its notable features. First, it is extraordinarily rich in nested narratives.
Telling countless stories-within-the-story, Shaw illustrates the development of
constitutional citizenship using concrete cases. In a captivating way, she describes
developments as diverse as the definition of the franchises for referendums in postcommunist Eastern and Southern Europe, 6 Brexit, 7 the situation of Haitian
migrants and their descendants in the Dominican Republic, 8 the suffrage of
prisoners in South Africa 9 and many more. As is her objective, Shaw thus includes
events linked to (post-) colonialism that too often go untold in the Western
narrative of citizenship. 10 Second, she recognises that even academic narratives
are told from certain perspectives, as articles and monographs include some events
while excluding others, and as scholars (sometimes unconsciously) choose to
represent matters in a certain way, with certain words. She repeatedly alerts the
reader to the fact that her interpretation and her personal voice underly the book. 11
However, she refrains from explicitly advancing her normative stance about what
kind of constitutional citizenship is the most desirable. On the contrary, she
distances herself from this simple way of posing the question. Instead, she asks,
with more nuance: ‘what are the elements that shape the development of the
discursive space within which the citizenship/constitution interaction plays out?’ 12
Third, Shaw’s narrative includes contradicting plots, as it shows different ways in
which the observed dots could be connected. She takes, for instance, account of
the instrumentalisation thesis, which argues that rather than speaking to ‘the very
heart of a polity’, citizenship is increasingly used instrumentally both by states and
individuals. 13 Taken together, these three features do not make Shaw’s narrative
about constitutional citizenship an easy or conventional one. It does not offer a
familiar plot that would reveal at its end one supreme meaning of constitutional
citizenship, a moral message about what it should be or what simple lessons are to
be learned from her story. Only very carefully does she hint to pluralism as one
possible solution to some of the pressures on constitutional citizenship in her
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Barbara Czarniawska, ‘Narratives in Social Sciene Research’ (SAGE 2006) 34 e77, 117−29.
Similar arguments have been made for legal scholars, see Richard A Posner, ‘Legal
Narratology (Reviewing Law's Stories: Narrative and Rhetoric in the Law by Peter Brooks,
Paul Gewirtz)’ (1997) 64(2) The University of Chicago Law Review 737; Andreas von
Arnauld, ‘Was War, Was Ist — Und Was Sein Soll. Erzählen Im Juristischen Diskurs’ in
Christian Klein and Matías Martínez (eds), Wirklichkeitserzählungen: Felder, Formen und
Funktionen Nicht — Literarischen Erzählens (Springer 2009).
Shaw (n 1) 69–70.
ibid 199–210.
ibid 107–109. See also Baird (n 3).
ibid 168–70.
ibid 47–50.
ibid 31–32, 175, 253–54.
ibid 255.
ibid 57, 58–59.
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