Most of us generally know what we mean when we use the term “citizenship.” We know, for example, that having citizenship of a country entitles a person to a set of rights, such as the right to a passport issued by that country. A passport, in turn, authorizes a person to reenter their country from outside its borders without any additional documentation, such as a visa. We also know that adult citizens of a country usually have the right to vote in the local, regional, and federal/general elections of that country.

But, if you look carefully, you will find that some countries also allow long-term legal permanent residents, who are not citizens, to vote – at least in some elections. Conversely, there are some citizens and nationals who are not allowed to vote in the country in which they reside. Equally, having citizenship in any given country also means that one has a set of obligations to that political community, such as the duty to serve on a jury to decide the fate of one’s peers, the duty to pay taxes on income, and so on. These duties vary from country to country: some have no jury trial while others make it mandatory for everyone to vote or serve in the military at a predetermined age.

Citizenship is therefore not an easy term to define. The rights and duties associated with citizenship are not uniformly distributed among citizens around the world. Nor are noncitizens uniformly denied all the rights that citizens have in any given context. In other words, the rights and duties associated with citizenship appear in different combinations, depending on time, place, and context.

Consider, as a hypothetical example, the Robinson family living in Louisville, KY, United States, on July 1, 2014:

Now consider the Kowalski family – also living in Louisville, KY, United States, on July 1, 2014:

What these examples indicate is that, while some people have full citizenship rights in any given political community at any given time, there are others who either have “semi-citizenship” or are without any citizenship rights at all.¹ This can be described more formally, as: Even though citizenship is commonly misunderstood as a categorical and binary concept (one either is or is not a citizen), in reality, one experiences citizenship as a gradient or slope. Thus, depending on the context, one might be said to have more or less of it.

A relatively comprehensive account of contemporary citizenship, such as the one we seek to provide in the remainder of this book, requires that we attend to the subject with care and nuance and also that we familiarize ourselves with at least three dimensions of citizenship:

1. the theories that inform the practice of citizenship;
2. the historical development of citizenship as a practice; and
3. citizenship as an instrument of administrative rationality,^† as well as lived experience.

In the remainder of this book, we will address all of these facets of the concept of citizenship. In chapter 1, we begin with a brief discussion clarifying the concept of citizenship itself. In so doing, we highlight the fact that the task of defining the term can be a highly complex exercise. Indeed, the term represents an example of what W. B. Gallie has called “essentially contested concepts.”

Scholars also disagree as to whether citizenship should be regarded as a norm-producing or as a norm-abiding concept. While there is some broad agreement that citizenship usually denotes the bestowal of a “bundle of rights,” there is also widespread contestation about the precise substantive content of this rights bundle. One of the purposes of a concept-clarification exercise is to sort through these contestations to stipulate the term’s necessary, but not sufficient, conditions. In addition, we also differentiate here the term’s meaning from closely related terms like “subjecthood,” “nationality,” and so on.

Chapter 2 addresses influential theories of citizenship that have come to be regarded by scholars as canonical accounts of the term. The chapter begins with a brief survey of the history of premodern and modern political thought on citizenship, with particular attention to the writings of a specific set of influential philosophers like John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. A modern, liberal model of citizenship has had a significant impact on contemporary western democratic thought surrounding the idea of citizenship as well as its practice. This model prioritizes individual rights over the well-being of the citizenry and seeks to enhance liberty – understood here primarily as a condition in which states refrain from interfering in the private lives of individuals.

In chapter 3, we offer a synopsis of existing scholarship that aims to disrupt and transform the two major strains of citizenship theory discussed in chapter 2 – liberalism and civic republicanism. We suggest here that, as Rogers Smith has pointed out, in the United States civic ideals have always tracked “multiple traditions,” including liberal and civic republic norms, along with identity-based hierarchies and discrimination that have, in turn, found juridical as well as social expression.

We also introduce here some prominent challenges to traditional theories of citizenship deriving from the feminist, post-national, multicultural, and other approaches, including concepts such as subnational citizenship, regional citizenship, dual/multiple citizenship, quasi citizenship, ecological/environmental citizenship, and global/international citizenship. We address each of these disruptions to traditional thinking in some detail and we also group these discussions broadly into approaches based on the history of political and legal thought, theoretical approaches, non-state centric approaches, and non-anthropocentric approaches.

We explain, for example, how multicultural citizenship, an idea most prominently associated with Will Kymlicka, rejects any formulation of citizenship that exclusively relies on an identical basket of liberal and individual rights for all members of the political community. Multicultural citizenship, in this view, would preserve the liberal set of rights typically associated with citizenship and also accord specific group-differentiated rights, such as special representation, multicultural, and self-government rights, to deserving sub-groups within a national polity. Equally, we point out here that many thinkers also decry the denial of equal rights (such as the right to vote, own a gun, live independently) to children and those who have intellectual disabilities.

Among non-state centric approaches, some theorists of citizenship draw upon the concept of personhood, as defined in international human rights law, to determine the full set of rights that ought to accrue to individuals residing in any given country. Recent decades have also seen an exponential increase in dual and multiple citizenships. As Peter Spiro has recently suggested, although historically reviled, dual citizenship is increasingly a widely accepted fact of life in the United States. For Spiro, dual citizenship should also be protectable as a human right. Many people – typically, but not always, naturalized immigrants and the descendants of naturalized immigrants – actively seek dual or multiple citizenship as a way of formalizing sentimental ties, and even allegiance, to two or more nation-states. Furthermore, the idea of quasi citizenship signals that, even without the bestowal of formal citizenship status, many individuals can and do enjoy certain rights associated with citizenship. We also cover here a growing discussion of global/international citizenship, an idea that draws from the philosophy of cosmopolitanism. In this view, a person may identify more strongly with a global community than with the nation-state of which she is a citizen. This is not a rejection of national citizenship. Instead, it is a way in which some people subordinate their national identity to their feelings of membership in the broader category of “humanity.” This concept has close affiliations with cosmopolitanism, a worldview that stipulates that all human beings are members of a single community and have a shared sense of morality. In this chapter’s closing discussion, we note that some scholars have even championed the expansion of citizenship to political subjects not traditionally thought to be capable of political membership, including animals and even the environment.

In chapter 4, we move away from a discussion of citizenship theory and focus on practices of citizenship. In doing so, we consider several dimensions of citizenship practice. Some of these include: the historical “determinants” of citizenship; the obligations imposed by states on their citizens; and norms such as length of stay and civic integration that govern naturalization policies. Historically, the “determinants” of citizenship have typically been: blood lineage, birthright/birthplace, naturalization, and matrimony. States can, and do, sometimes change the determinants that inform their citizenship policies. Thus, although jus sanguinis laws, or citizenship by blood lineage, have constituted an enduring tradition in liberal democracies, most states have relinquished the practice of using this as an exclusive system of granting citizenship – and have come to also allow, in practice, birthplace citizenship, naturalization, and citizenship through matrimony. One of our purposes in this chapter is to illustrate the specific justifications for the use of each of these “determinants” to grant citizenship. In addition, we discuss norms for naturalization. Liberal democracies differ in the ways in which they structure their naturalization policies. Most countries require an aspiring citizen to spend a specific duration of time with the status of permanent resident before they can apply for citizenship. However, in some countries naturalization policies favor familial ties and in others they favor skills-based migration. For example, the United States’ naturalization policies heavily favor an applicant’s familial ties to US citizens and permanent residents. Countries like Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, on the other hand, place a significant emphasis on the skills of aspiring migrants, and each of these countries uses a formal “points” calculator to determine eligibility for naturalization. This chapter discusses the implications of these different emphases for naturalization strategies.

In chapter 5, the concluding chapter, we look at the categories and instances in which citizenship practice departs radically from the norms and standards that have been discussed in the preceding chapters. This chapter begins with a discussion of the concept of refuge and other related terms, such as internally displaced persons, asylum, statelessness, and so on. We note here that although people fleeing conflict typically tend to be highlighted in the media, a host of other reasons impel people to seek refuge elsewhere. These reasons can include religious or homophobic persecution, political dissidence, natural disasters, and so on. We also address here the legal and conceptual ambiguities surrounding the categories and terms associated with refuge, which can lead to a significant amount of confusion.

Some who flee and are not accepted as refugees or asylees wind up stateless. These are people without any form of citizenship at all, and they routinely only enjoy a scant handful of the rights available to citizens of liberal democracies. We discuss stateless persons and related processes of denationalization and denaturalization. We then move on to two short discussions about current and ongoing controversies related to statelessness and refuge. As brief descriptions of cases, we consider here two ongoing contemporary controversies: the Rohingya people in Myanmar; and the European migrant/refugee crisis. We conclude the chapter with a discussion of the philosophical arguments for and against open borders. Thus this book on theories of citizenship closes with a discussion of those who do not enjoy even the most distant penumbra of citizenship protections.