Law And Citizenship

Long confined to the study of nationality, citizenship was not always considered a major concern of social scientists. In recent decades, however, the concept of citizenship has generated significant interest and intellectual debate in a variety of academic contexts. Law and Citizenship provides a framework for analyzing citizenship by paying attention to the borders and boundaries of citizenship regimes. These borders and boundaries are shifting because of immigration and refugee flows, changing movement of persons within economic communities and areas of free trade, and the rise of nationalist movements within multinational states. All of these shifts raise fundamental issues: How are traditional notions of citizenship erecting borders against those who are excluded? What are the impacts of changing notions of state, borders, and participation on our concepts of citizenship? Within territorial borders, to what extent are citizens able to participate, given that the principles of accountability, transparency, and representativeness remain ideals? Law and Citizenship will be of interest to scholars and students in law and politics as well as to anyone interested in the idea of citizenship in contemporary society.

The papers collected in this volume highlight the complex dynamic relationship between citizenship - as membership status - and the constitutional law which provides the cornerstone of all polities. It shows the many different ways in which we must use constitutional law in order fully to understand how one becomes a citizen, and what the meaning of citizenship is. Edited by a leading authority in the field, this volume contains the key works which cover national, transnational and international aspects of the topic, and the book provides a particular focus on how constitutional law constructs and upholds the range of citizenship rights. With an original introduction by the editor, this timely collection will be a valuable source of reference for students, academics and practitioners interested in citizenship and constitutional law.

This theoretically ambitious work combines analytical, institutional and critical approaches in order to provide an in-depth, panoramic and contextual account of European Union citizenship law and policy.

Few African countries provide for an explicit right to a nationality. Laws and practices governing citizenship leave hundreds of thousands of people in Africa without a country to which they belong. Statelessness and discriminatory citizenship practices underlie and exacerbate tensions in many regions of the continent, according to this report by the Open Society Institute. Citizenship Law in Africa is a comparative study by the Open Society Justice Initiative and Africa Governance Monitoring and Advocacy Project. It describes the often arbitrary, discriminatory, and contradictory citizenship laws that exist from state to state, and recommends ways that African countries can bring their citizenship laws in line with international legal norms. The report covers topics such as citizenship by descent, citizenship by naturalization, gender discrimination in citizenship law, dual citizenship, and the right to identity documents and passports. It describes how stateless Africans are systematically exposed to human rights abuses: they can neither vote nor stand for public office; they cannot enroll their children in school, travel freely, or own property; they cannot work for the government.--Publisher description.

Long term resident migrants to the UK still face significant barriers to citizenship. Dr Prabhat captures the experiences of those who successfully become British citizens through stories of belonging, citizenship, and the law. The book illuminates the gap between policy and practice in gaining British citizenship.

The essays in Law and Citizenship provide a framework for analyzing citizenship in an increasingly globalized world by addressing a number of fundamental questions. How are traditional notions of citizenship erecting borders against those who are excluded? What are the impacts of changing notions of state, borders, and participation on our concepts of citizenship? Within territorial borders, to what extent are citizens able to participate, given that the principles of accountability, transparency, and representativeness remain ideals? The contributors address the numerous implications of the concept of citizenship for public policy, international law, poverty law, immigration law, constitutional law, history, political science, and sociology.

This edited volume is the first to focus on how concepts of citizenship diversify and stimulate the long-standing field of law and literature, and vice versa. Building on existing research in law and literature as well as literature and citizenship studies, the collection approaches the triangular relationship between citizenship, law and literature from a variety of disciplinary, conceptual and political perspectives, with particular emphasis on the performative aspect inherent in any type of social expression and cultural artefact. The sixteen chapters in this volume present literature as carrying multifarious, at times opposing energies and impulses in relation to citizenship. These range from providing discursive arenas for consolidating, challenging and re-negotiating citizenship to directly interfering with or inspiring processes of law-making and governance. The volume opens up new possibilities for the scholarly understanding of citizenship along two axes: Citizenship-as-Literature: Enacting Citizenship and Citizenship-in-Literature: Conceptualising Citizenship.