It is obvious that the dynamics of migration have profound consequences for both sending and receiving societies. Yet the impact of significant immigration on the practices and understanding of citizenship in democracies fundamentally committed to fair and equal representation remains a puzzle, and not for lack of attention. A full-fledged body of literature—citizenship studies—has emerged, with rich normative and empirical analyses of citizenship that traditionally begin by declaring the fuzziness of the very subject. To paraphrase Linda Bosniak, for example, citizenship is a divided concept both rhetorically and normatively: it comprises distinct discourses designating a range of institutions...

As in many other parts of the world, recent American immigration disputes have involved tensions not just between proponents of different policies but also, and increasingly, between champions of the prerogatives of different governments—national, state, and local—governments structured both vertically and horizontally. The vertical dimension includes clashes between the government of the United States and the governments of states such as Arizona, Georgia, and Alabama, as well as between those state governments and some county and municipal agencies.¹ The primary horizontal dimension is the relationship between the governments of the United States of America and the United Mexican...

Immigration poses an array of complex questions for a receiving polity. Normative questions about integration and rights intersect with practical questions about governance and sovereignty. These questions must be answered at all levels of any society’s government, from local to regional and state to the federal and national levels. At each juncture, answers to these questions will either include or exclude noncitizens from the legal protections of citizenship in their adoptive homes. This creates a complex of multilevel citizenships within any nation-state. While supranational forces that shape multilevel citizenship abound, as evidenced by both Isiksel’s and Neveau’s contributions to this...

Historians of the Ottoman Empire are dramatically recasting our understanding of the empire in its provinces, demonstrating the flexible, locally conditioned, and often ephemeral nature of the imperial presence in each provincial setting.¹ Although it was one of the empire’s most important provinces, Egypt has not figured very significantly in this revision. There are some good reasons for this omission:² although Egypt remained part of the Ottoman Empire until World War I, Istanbul’s direct influence over its province waned dramatically over the course of the nineteenth century. By the time Britain invaded and occupied Egypt in 1882, few remnants of...

Near the end of the Qing Dynasty, six Chinese nationals were arrested in the International Settlement at Shanghai and charged with acts of treason against the Chinese state. Their arrest prompted an international crisis and, as a result, took almost a year to resolve. The men were arrested in July 1903, but it was not until May 1904 that a specially constituted court finally entered sentences for the two defendants, who remained on trial. For those two, the sentences were relatively light: one was sentenced to three years in prison, the other imprisoned for two.¹

For all its anticlimactic end,...

As the construction of state sovereignty has become more complex and nuanced in recent years, the coordinating concept of citizenship has also undergone significant transformation: it has increasingly been constructed in plural ways and has departed from its exclusive tie to territorially bounded, sovereign nation-states. As the international system changes to accommodate different postcolonial and transnational realities, so the concept of citizenship adapts and becomes increasingly complex. Indigenous peoples¹ represent one such complexity of citizenship and, in fact, have always presented a set of challenges to the dominant narrative of territorially bounded state citizenship. First, Indigenous peoples have a prior...

Although the nation-state is commonly regarded as a crucial actor and the most relevant level when it comes to citizenship politics, related policies are often executed or even shaped at the regional and the local levels. As a consequence, policies can vary from region to region or from town to town within the very same nation-state. Switzerland constitutes the most extreme case when it comes to local-level variations in citizenship policies. In this country, every municipality—be it a city of 100,000 inhabitants or a village of 400—has the right to decide its own criteria for naturalizing foreigners. As...

Examining the multilevel citizenship regime in Bosnia and Herzegovina as established through the provisions of the Dayton Peace Agreement (DPA), this chapter considers how the citizenship regime relates to the character of the Bosnian state and its statehood and how this relationship affects human rights. I argue that the existing multilevel citizenship regime harms human rights because of its particular and ambiguous relation with the sovereignty of the state. The current two levels (state and entity) of citizenship help sustain the fragile stability and sovereignty of the country but also create a basis for instability by allowing ethnic agents to...

Globalization is eroding the certainties of citizenship, but not citizenship itself. Instead, new supernational regimes and institutions are increasingly populated by new forms of political subjecthood and participation, creating new possibilities for citizenship.¹ Contrary to the hopes expressed in the literature on global citizenship, however, not all of these possibilities are salutary. In particular, although much of this literature has focused on the development of human rights regimes and transnational mobilization by civil society groups, the vocabulary of citizenship is unexpectedly relevant for characterizing the growing body of trade-related rights and entitlements that businesses enjoy under international economic institutions. This...

There is in the literature on citizenship a frequent tendency to focus on nation-state citizenship, obscuring other sites, spaces, and levels where citizenship manufacturing processes also take place. But even when citizenship analysis does include other sites, spaces, and levels, such diversity is too often analyzed through the lens of nation-state citizenship, which is thus maintained as the implicit norm. As a contribution to the debates on the notion of multilevel citizenship, I argue that they might be more fruitful if connected to an in-depth analysis of their “politics of scale” as a way in which to grasp how, in...