The Transformation of Citizenship, Volume 3

Citizenship is on the decline. Citizenship is on the rise. Which is true? In fact, this is the civic differential that a remarkable collection of essays seeks to illustrate, cutting across unstable borders of peace and war, welfare and dereliction, the rule of law and the states of exception. Once again, they show, insurrection and constitution, agency and status have become inseparable. The issue of rights: conquering them, defending them, defining them, is our collective challenge. (Etienne Balibar, Columbia University)

Mackert and Turner proclaim T.H. Marshall’s famous paradigm of civil, political, and social rights is now outdated. Instead of peaceful evolution towards ever-wider sharing of the rights of citizenship, we need to recognize that rights historically grew out of war mobilization and often-violent domestic struggle. Will struggles, violence, and rule-breaking as a tactic for acquiring rights open the way for more peaceful politics at the other end of a new transition? These are the questions raised by the provocative essays of this volume. (Randall Collins, UPenn)

While social movements have been at the basis of citizenship rights, the theories and empirical research on the two issues in the social sciences have grown quite apart from each other. This important volume starts filling this gap, by looking at a broad variety of recent movements as struggles for citizens’ rights face to neo-liberal challenges, while reflecting on the relations between resistance, the state and violence. (Donatella Della Porta, Scuola Normale Superiore, Florence)

This is a very timely book for it deals with the wave of challenges to citizenship rights and indeed to social order itself, which have been sweeping across the world. From France, to Turkey, to Colombia - the authors give authoritative and insightful analyses of these challenges. Definitely a book for our times. (Michael Mann, University of California, LA)