German Law Journal (2021), 22, pp. 1635–1660 doi:10.1017/glj.2021.77 ARTICLE Citizenship and COVID-19: Syndemic Effects Jo Shaw1 1 School of Law, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, United Kingdom Corresponding author: jo.shaw@ed.ac.uk (Received 03 September 2021; accepted 13 September 2021) Abstract This article begins the task of outlining the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic in relation to matters of citizenship, using what is termed a “syndemic analysis.” This type of analysis places both the pandemic and citizenship in their wider contexts. The synergistic or intersectional thinking encouraged by the characterization of the pandemic as a syndemic, which links together health, socio-economic issues, and political questions, is useful for highlighting how much more vulnerable to many of the negative impacts of the pandemic in the sphere of citizenship are those who are also more vulnerable both to catching and suffering more seriously from the virus and to experiencing negatively the externalities of the measures taken to restrict social contact by shutting down economies. While the scope of the review is relatively broad and encompasses many different domains of “pandemic life,” what emerges from the analysis are important insights into how many of the impacts of the pandemic in fact operate at the intersection of citizenship and constitutional law and thus play out in the form of changes in relation to constitutional citizenship, both as ideal and as practice. The article takes an important step towards developing the use of constitutional citizenship as a framing device for understanding citizenship as putative full membership in a given society. Keywords: Citizenship; pandemic; syndemic; constitution; COVID19 A. Introduction This article studies the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in the domain of citizenship. It highlights how the pandemic enhances existing vulnerabilities and inequalities and thus undermines ideas, concepts, and practices of membership, especially for some individuals and groups, and suggests areas where strengthening citizenship may also be a strategy for effective recovery after the pandemic. The article combines reflections on the pandemic, which has triggered crises of governance, public health, and economic wellbeing, with an articulation of the idea and ideal of constitutional citizenship as a place where the symbolism of (in)equality is rife. The urgency of the analysis is driven by the significance that citizenship, as membership, can take on in the context of crisis, especially when it becomes a strong marker of entitlement and belonging. Furthermore, citizenship is not only a legal and socio-economic issue but also a proxy for political questions about legitimate responses to both a public health emergency and its longer term societal and Acknowledgements: I am grateful to a number of colleagues who have read versions of my ruminations on citizenship and the pandemic including Jelena Džankić, Jacob Eisler, and Martijn van den Brink. I am additionally grateful to colleagues for their comments on presentations on Citizenship and COVID-19 made at Edinburgh Law School, Maxwell School of Citizenship, Syracuse, and IFDT Belgrade. © The Author(s) 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the German Law Journal. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. https://doi.org/10.1017/glj.2021.77 Published online by Cambridge University Press