Introduction

Abstract

In recent years we have had a proliferation of citizenships. They have sprung up like weeds: ecological citizenship, sexual citizenship, active citizenship, global citizenship and so on. Citizenship talk also infuses popular debates and political practices, where its internal contradictions are often exposed: Is citizenship a privilege or a right? Is naturalisation a means of facilitating integration or a reward for integration? There have been claims that the combination of overuse and confusion has meant that the concept of citizenship risks losing its meaning, and in recent years migration scholars have contributed significantly to the literature on citizenship by emphasising that citizenship is a legal status. As Baubck puts it, citizenship ‘marks a distinction between members and outsiders based on their different relations to particular states’ (Bauböck 2006: 15). While legal citizenship has been opened to many (but not all) groups who in the past were not considered ‘citizens’, such as Black people, women, those who do not own property, people with physical disabilities and so on, this expansion stops at the national border. Importantly, the border is not simply at the edge of territory but reaches into the heart of political space. Non-citizens are not simply excluded from the territory but are differentially included when residing on the territory.