BOOK REVIEW SYMPOSIUM INTRODUCTION THE PEOPLE IN QUESTION? CONSTITUTIONAL CITIZENSHIP AND ITS IMPACT ON STATELESSNESS AND CITIZENSHIP STUDIES BARBARA VON RÜTTE * Jo Shaw is well-known in the field of citizenship studies. Over the last twenty years, Shaw has widely researched EU citizenship and membership in a supranational legal order, citizens’ rights — particularly political rights — democracy and constitutions. Her most recent book, The People in Question reads like a culmination of this work, elegantly weaving together these different strands of research while clearly expanding beyond them. 1 In The People in Question, Shaw sets out to explore the importance of citizenship in relation to constitutions and constitutional law in order to identify and to articulate a clear understanding of the frequently contested nature and significance of constitutional citizenship, and its relationship to contemporary pressures and tensions within and across states in the modern world. 2 She not only examines the many details of such ‘constitutional citizenship’ in one specific domestic context, but assumes a broad view covering multiple jurisdictions and layers of national and international governance based on an impressive empirical dataset, and critically asks what happens if constitutional citizenship is put under pressure by processes of populism and deterritorialisation caused by globalisation. 3 Shaw builds on the common assumption that constitutions and citizenship are closely related in modern states through a long and straightforward history. 4 But her analysis shows that the relationship is more complex. In fact, constitutions rarely regulate citizenship explicitly. 5 Rather, ‘the constitutional substance of citizenship so often reveals itself in ways that are indirect or that present a fragmented picture’. 6 Shaw skilfully puts together the pieces of this fragmented * 1 2 3 4 5 6 Barbara von Rütte is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Göttingen. She convened this Book Review Symposium in her function as the Book Review Editor of the Statelessness & Citizenship Review. The Symposium was developed in close collaboration with Johanna Hase and Liav Orgad of the WZB Berlin Social Science Center where Jo Shaw’s new book was discussed in a virtual event on 8 October 2020. More information and a recording of the event can be found here: <https://www.wzb.eu/en/node/68516>. Jo Shaw, The People in Question: Citizens and Constitutions in Uncertain Times (Bristol University Press 2020). ibid 33. ibid. ibid 253. ibid 8. ibid 253.