1640 Jo Shaw which have been infecting many national citizenship regimes.27 Inequality in relation to the various dimensions of citizenship has not only been fostered by the same types of societal and economic factors which have engendered the inequality effects of the pandemic/syndemic, but also by a range of other crises, such as conflicts in Iraq and Syria (giving rise to forced migrations of many thousands of people) and the financial and later sovereign debt crises of the late 2000s and early 2010s, which have engendered policies of austerity. Of similar importance for understanding the reality of unequal citizenship are systemic and ongoing challenges such as climate change and embedded gendered and racialized structures, especially within post-colonial societies. Equality is therefore at best an aspirational principle, which ends up reinforcing the continually contested character of citizenship and the struggles of citizens and non-citizens alike for equality and full recognition within the context of the boundaries set by citizenship, operating as membership principle. Sometimes equality claims can be successful in righting historic wrongs or opening the door for excluded groups, especially in the context of constitutional litigation, but this is a relatively rare outcome. In fact, the history of citizenship can best be characterized as an ongoing “struggle to reconcile boundaries with equal treatment, collective identity with individual rights, democratic self-government with individual self-realization, and the ideal of a ‘universal personhood’ with the realities of a particularistic ‘citizenship,’ which for many is nominal at best.”28 The case for adopting a framing of constitutional citizenship for understanding the pandemic/ syndemic is strong. When we look closely, we can see that the pandemic, as perhaps the greatest public health emergency the modern world has ever known, contributes to stripping citizenship back to its fundamentals, revealing it to be not only an artefact of government (in the sense of determining the basic facts of membership and of in/exclusion) but also an omnipresent element of human community and of political organization. In that sense, the pandemic has the capacity to throw into relief the organizing moral and social principles of the idea of a bounded community, as well as challenging the political nature of those bonds and boundaries. The virus attacks core principles of human sociality by casting doubt on the desirability of touch,29 physical proximity (“social distancing”), and the possibility of certain types of group behavior,30 whilst at the same time challenging us as individuals and communities to find new and ethical modes to develop and show resilience within and across boundaries and to minimize risk for ourselves and others. All of these factors relate clearly to the constitutional foundations of different polities, and, as noted, these observations shed important light upon the pandemic’s obviously disparate impacts according to well-established vectors of difference because of the clear congruence with citizenship’s own conflicted relationship with equality. In that sense, any analysis of the “people and the pandemic” needs to grapple with the inevitable tensions between the symbolic role of the citizen at the heart of constitutionalism (and thus the cherished principle of equality as socio-economic and political ideal, alongside related values such as human dignity and freedom), the instrumental behavior of states and governments in relation to citizenship status and citizenship rights, and the unequal healthcare and socio-economic outcomes that flow out of the pandemic. At the same time, COVID-19 has seen the strengthening of the state across many dimensions, with extensive mobility restrictions and the use of emergency powers to enforce lockdowns. This has thrown into relief the ongoing contestation of sovereign powers between citizens themselves as political agents and states as constituted powers. Furthermore, a framing of constitutional citizenship can also capture the dynamics of membership in times of crisis, as occurred, for example, in post-revolutionary France or in post-Civil War 27 See supra note 25, at Ch. 6. Id. at 177. 29 Isobel Sigley, It Has Touched Us All: Commentary on the Social Implications of Touch During the COVID-19 Pandemic, 2(1) SOC. SCIS. & HUMANS. OPEN 100051 (2020). 30 Nick Hopkins & Stephen Reicher, Mass Gatherings, Health, and Well-Being: From Risk Mitigation to Health Promotion, 15(1) SOC. ISSUES & POL’Y REV. 114 (2020). 28 https://doi.org/10.1017/glj.2021.77 Published online by Cambridge University Press