We begin by posing the question addressed to us by a friend: ‘Why another book on citizenship?’. It is indeed true that, in recent years, citizenship has been the focus of a torrent of books, articles and conferences, such that adding one more to this overwhelming flow looks like a strange decision. But part of our answer to the question is that this flourishing interest in citizenship is one of the ways in which it looks important and influential, and, indeed, serves as a sort of keyword for many different scholarly interests. Indeed, even a brief survey of recent publications...

What is at stake when we speak of citizenship? For some, it is the relationship between the political subject and the state. Others treat it as the ground of a critical distinction between citizens and aliens. Some view citizenship as the focal point for struggles over equality and inequalities. Still others emphasise its foundational character in Hannah Arendt’s much-cited phrase ‘the right to have rights’, or define it as ‘being political’ (Isin, 2002). As studies of citizenship proliferate, so, too, do the definitions and characterisations of its core features. Indeed, this multiplicity of definitions can be seen as a tribute...

In Chapter One, we argued for the importance of recentring conceptions of citizenship. This need to ‘recentre’ citizenship so as to highlight its deep embeddedness in political projects and cultural formations implies a parallel move to ‘decentre’ it from its generally agreed-upon connections, in particular, to the formations of state, nation and law in which citizenship is typically understood as a status, and as necessarily and culturally ‘national’. In this chapter, we will develop this decentring by making the contingent connections between citizenship and states visible as a critical analytical issue, and not merely an empirical observation. We will then...

In this chapter, we explore the ‘imagined communities’ of citizenship. One of the potent qualities of the idea of citizenship is its capacity to serve as a term through which different sorts of collectivities of people and connections between people may be imagined, mobilised and brought into being. Such imagined communities are constructed and elaborated in many different sites and settings, although this diversity is overshadowed by the persistent articulation of citizenship as a national question (both in academic theory and governmental practice). We begin, then, with questions about these national articulations, launching ourselves from Benedict Anderson’s (1983) famous understanding...

We are conscious that we have written a rather strange book. It has been disputatious, wrestling with approaches to, and conceptions of, citizenship that we find unhelpful. It has been ‘all over the place’ as we have traced different sites, settings and forms in which citizenship has been – and continues to be – disputed. It has tried to liberate citizenship from the ties that bind it to particular normative, institutional or political formations, and instead to make its mobility and mutability a central rather than a secondary feature. We have tried to take seriously Etienne Balibar’s wonderful and productive insistence that...