6 Unwanted and ambivalent citizenship In liberal political thought, citizenship is often taken uncritically to be emancip atory and so also to be desirable.1 Even critical approaches to citizenship often seem to assume its desirability in their reconceptualisations. There is a good reason for this. Full formal citizenship in some State is in fact mostly needed today for rights and recognition and in order to have a say (however symbolic) in how the local, regional and global systems are organised. Citizenship is made desirable within a system based upon liberal democratic principles because there is no other officially acknowledged option available within that system. The struggle for citizenship has, then, been the struggle for representation, for rights, and for recognition in the absence of an alternative. Yet, a resilient understand ing of citizenship requires an appreciation of what happens when it is experi enced in ways that challenge standard interpretations – when that citizenship is unwanted or ambivalent. By acknowledging that citizenship may be unwanted and that noncitizenships may be rationally claimed, it is possible to provide a more complex characterisa tion of the reality (including the theoretical reality) of those States built upon liberal democratic principles. It may be that, in the end, a more radical approach will be needed, but if we are to make a proper go of using liberal democratic frameworks, it will be crucial not only to acknowledge the function of the nonci tizen relationship within them, but also to use this in analysing the reality of unwanted or ambivalent citizenship. In earlier chapters, I already argued that the historic framing of citizenship needs to be examined from a range of perspec tives, which is not restricted to that of the European beneficiaries of the Enlight enment. Even as contemporary citizenship was being defined for some, others were being written out of the very structure of that citizenship, both theoretically 1 For example, see these classic texts: Thomas H Marshall (2009) ‘Citizenship and Social Class’, in Jeff Manza and Michael Sander (eds) (2009) Inequality and Society, W.W. Norton and Co, New York. [first published 1950]; Will Kymlicka (2002) Contemporary Political Philosophy, Oxford University Press; Stuart White (2003) The Civic Minimum, Oxford University Press. See also essays in Engin Isin and Bryan Turner (2003) Handbook of Citizenship Studies, Sage. For a useful survey, see Will Kymlicka and Wayne Norman (1994) ‘The Return of the Citizen: A Survey of Recent Work on Citizenship Theory’, pp. 352–381 in Ethics 104(2).