The Politics of the Concept of Citizenship

Abstract

The panel explores citizenship as a contested concept. This means that the concept of citizenship is seen as a historical, changing and controversial. Moreover, it is considered as an object and a tool for doing politics. The key question is, how the concept of citizenship is, in different ways and circumstances, interpreted, practised, or fought over. The contexts for contestation can be theoretical, or more empirically grounded through debates and practices. In the analysis of the politics of the concept of citizenship we are interested in asking how the concept is, and has been, defined and re-defined, used and constructed in its different usages and meanings given to it. The panel includes a variety of situational but politically important readings of citizenship. They especially refer to topical contexts in which citizenship and its dimensions are currently reformulated and reinterpreted. Important developments for the politics of citizenship are migration and European integration, which highlight citizenship as a locus for conceptualising inclusions and exclusions. The analyses also thematise how changes and contemporary challenges to citizenship have been and are being discussed in political and democratic theory, thus reflecting the conceptual interplay between theory, debates and practice.