Citizenship As A Challenge

The book discusses citizenship in the contemporary world; as a concept, as an ideal, as a policy and as a goal to be achieved from the perspective of different academic disciplines.

Drawing on contemporary global events, this book highlights how global citizenship education can be used to critically educate about the complexity and repressive nature of global events and our collective role in creating a just world.

In stark contrast to previous scholarship about citizenship as a construct, this groundbreaking book covers the full spectrum of literature on citizenship theory, including the state and structure of identity, the individual and the public, and the enduring issues of civic engagement and collective discourse. It examines some of the complex challenges faced by citizens and policy makers and explores the existing procedural and institutional mechanisms that undermine democratic political accountability as well as its legitimation. Drawing from classical conceptions of citizenship in the early Greco-Roman eras to the more contemporary critical social theory and postmodernist contentions, the work casts a wide net that covers complex issues including rights and obligation, the doctrine of state sovereignty and authority, equality, the principle of majority rule, citizen participation in governance, public versus self-interest, ideas of justice, immigration and cultural identity, global citizenship, and the evolution of hybrid communities that challenge traditional notions of state-citizenship identity. With meticulous detail and powerful analysis, author Kalu N. Kalu unceasingly places citizenship as the central thesis of this project, illuminating its intellectual richness on the one hand, and demonstrating the ongoing challenges in both conceptualization and practice, on the other.

Over the last ten years citizenship has become an area of interdisciplinary research and teaching in its own right. This book highlights that globalization poses new challenges for established understandings and practices of citizenship, and that intellectual work is required to fashion models of citizenship better suited to present problems and realities. In particular, this volume emphasizes the pluralization of identities and communities within states brought about by such forces as mass immigration, global communication, substate regionalism and more generally the fragmentation of modern notions of nation. The challenge is to devise forms of democracy and political identity adequate to these 'globalized' conditions. Ideally suited to anyone interested in globalization, cultural diversity and citizenship.

This study focuses on the field of security studies through the prism of migration. Using ethnographic methods to illustrate an experiential theory of security taken from the perspective of migrants and asylum seekers in Europe, it effectively offers a means of moving beyond state-based and state-centric theories in International Relations.

Teachers have the challenge of teaching for equity, justice and solidarity in plural and fast-changing societies where their students are well aware of inequality and injustice. How much does government policy encourage understanding of global interdependence and skills for democratic participation? How can schools integrate issues of citizenship, human rights and multiculturalism and what support do they recieve? Drawing on case studies from England, Ireland, Denmark and the Netherlands, this text examines the institutional support provided in educating for global citizenship. It looks at the contradictions students and their teachers face when they compare what is learned in school with the messages from politicians and the media about refugees and asylum seekers, young poeple's rights, environmental issues and the impact of globalization.

In Supranational Citizenship and the Challenge of Diversity Francesca Strumia explores the potential of European citizenship as a legal construct, and as a marker of group boundaries, for filtering internal and external diversities in the European Union. Adopting comparative federalism methodology, and drawing on insights from the international relations literature on the diffusion of norms, the author questions the impact of European citizenship on insider/outsider divides in the EU, as experienced by immigrants, set by member states and perceived by “native” citizens. The book proposes a novel argument about supranational citizenship as mutual recognition of belonging. This argument has important implications for the constitution of insider/outsider divides and for the reconciliation of multiple levels of diversity in the EU.