Mutable Citizenship

Abstract

Can the claims of citizenship help promote social justice? There are reasons for doubt: not least that the concept was originally conceived to resolve questions of political obligation and membership for individuals. Social justice in the early twenty-first century includes these issues, but it also extends beyond them. Moreover, as several essays in this volume indicate, many institutional and rhetorical expressions of citizenship in the present continue to exclude some groups and include others only conditionally. Laura Brace’s ‘Reflections on the Good Citizen’ develops these and other reasons for scepticism. Citizenship in the western social contract tradition, Brace tells us, is steeped in exclusion and inequality, in white privilege and patriarchy. Brace locates her readings of Rousseau and Hegel within this overarching structure. And it is this same framework which is invoked when Brace draws our attention to the conditions endured by ‘non-static migrants’. Their disadvantages under the law and in labour markets, she argues, are interconnected and generate conditions inferior to those enjoyed by citizens and by other, more highly valued, workers. One implication of Brace’s essay is that the multiple mistreatments suffered by temporary migrants are symptomatic of a more fundamental problem located in the defective character of citizenship itself and its imbrication in the working of global markets, as well as in patriarchy and racial subordination.