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Multilevel Citizenship

Willem Maas editor

Format:Hardback

Publisher:University of Pennsylvania Press

Published:30th May '13

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

Multilevel Citizenship cover

Multilevel Citizenship challenges the dominant conception of citizenship as legal and political equality within a sovereign state, demonstrates how citizenship is constructed by political and legal practices, and explores alternative forms of membership in substate, suprastate, and nonstate political communities.

Citizenship has come to mean legal and political equality within a sovereign nation-state; in international law, only states may determine who is and who is not a citizen. But such unitary status is the historical exception: before sovereign nation-states became the prevailing form of political organization, citizenship had a range of definitions and applications. Today, nonstate communities and jurisdictions both below and above the state level are once again becoming important sources of rights, allegiance, and status, thereby constituting renewed forms of multilevel citizenship. For example, while the European Union protects the nation-state's right to determine its own members, the project to construct a democratic polity beyond national borders challenges the sovereignty of member governments.
Multilevel Citizenship disputes the dominant narrative of citizenship as a homogeneous status that can be bestowed only by nation-states. The contributors examine past and present case studies that complicate the meaning and function of citizenship, including residual allegiance to empires, constitutional rights that are accessible to noncitizens, and the nonstate allegiance of nomadic nations. Their analyses consider the inconsistencies and exceptions of national citizenship as a political concept, such as overlapping jurisdictions and shared governance, as well as the emergent forms of sub- or supranational citizenships. Multilevel Citizenship captures the complexity of citizenship in practice, both at different levels and in different places and times.
Contributors: Elizabeth F. Cohen, Elizabeth Dale, Will Hanley, Marc Helbling, Türküler Isiksel, Jenn Kinney, Sheryl Lightfoot, Willem Maas, Catherine Neveu, Luicy Pedroza, Eldar Sarajlić, Rogers M. Smith.

"The view that citizenship is a homogeneous, unitary, and singular status is coming to be challenged, but alternative analyses of multilevel citizenship have remained limited. Here, finally, is a collection of first-rate essays that explore nested and overlapping citizenship constellations across a wide range of historical and geographic contexts." * Rainer Bauböck, European University Institute *
"Multilevel Citizenship presents the best new critical studies of citizenship that are deconstructing the homogeneous and coherent image of the figure of both the nation and the citizen. From indigenous peoples to previously Ottoman Egyptians and from Mexican America to Bosnia and Herzegovina, it illustrates-in vivid and crisp writing-how the sites and scales of citizenship have always been multilevel, perhaps more so in the era of accelerated migrations and intensified communications." * Engin Isin, The Open University *
"An exceptionally strong volume, well conceived and accessible. Multilevel Citizenship will appeal to citizenship scholars by introducing novel contexts in which to disaggregate the institution." * Peter Spiro, Beasley School of Law, Temple University *

ISBN: 9780812245158

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: unknown

288 pages