Noncitizenship and the State: Sites, Scales, Agencies

Abstract

Citizenship has long been constructed as the primary relationship between an individual and a State. It is the legal apparatus through which membership of a given State is formally recognised, and as such acts as the gateway to a range of rights only available to citizens. It is as such a particularly important politico-legal construct. However, focusing solely on citizenship fails to capture a range of relationships between individuals and States which are not sufficiently illustrated by this model. For example, individuals living as noncitizens may construct and live their life within the boundaries of a particular State despite the State’s refusal to formally recognise them as citizens. So too, States may shape the lives of individuals living within their boundaries even where those individuals do not hold a functioning citizenship. Furthermore, some individuals may actively choose to refuse citizenship (or passively not seek citizenship) of the State in which they live or are in other ways associated, for a variety of reasons. These relationships can play out across multiple levels of local, national and international governance, creating a complex web of interaction between individuals and States far beyond the citizen/non-citizen binary. This panel examines what happens when we de-centre the assumption of citizenship as foundational to the individual-State relationship, and shift our attention to relationships of noncitizenship. The papers investigate these relationships across a range of cases, contexts and theories, and explore how individuals’ lived experiences of noncitizenship are shaped by a diversity of political commitments, regimes, and positionalities.

Title	Details
In Defense of Noncitizenism	View Paper Details
Marginalization And Inclusion In The (Local) State: The Case of Toronto, Canada	View Paper Details
Searching for Foundations in Noncitizenship	View Paper Details