Citizenship, Belonging, and Nation-States in the Twenty-First Century contributes to the scholarship on citizenship and integration by examining belonging in an array of national settings and by demonstrating how nation-states continue to matter in citizenship analysis. Citizenship policies are positioned as state mechanisms that actively shape the integration outcomes and experiences of belonging for all who reside within the nation-state. This edited volume contributes an alternative to the promotion of post-national models of membership and emphasizes that the most fundamental facet of citizenship—a status of recognition in relationship to a nation-state—need not be left in the 'relic galleries' of an allegedly outdated political past. This collection offers a timely contribution, both theoretical and empirical, to understanding citizenship, nationalism, and belonging in contexts that feature not only rapid change but also levels of entrenchment in ideological and historical legacies.

Beyond Citizenship and the Nation-State examines tensions between a push for clear boundaries defining nation-states and who “legitimately” belongs in them and a pull away from citizenship as capturing what membership in a political community looks like in the twenty-first century. Borders signify and represent these physical and metaphorical challenges in a world where (anti)migration and (anti)refugee rhetoric are central to the production and reproduction of postcolonial and nationalist political discourse and identity formation. With an expansive view of citizenship, authors challenge dominant narratives, explore alternatives to neoliberal frameworks, and link theory and practice through participatory opportunities for non-citizen political participation. In doing so, they present possibilities for reimagining citizenship for a just, more sustainable future. This book will appeal to academics and practitioners working in the disciplines of Sociology, Social Policy, Human Geography, Political Sciences, Citizenship Studies and Migration Studies. It was originally published as a special issue of New Political Science.

In the early twenty-first century, the concept of citizenship is more contested than ever. As refugees set out to cross the Mediterranean, European nation-states refer to »cultural integrity« and »immigrant inassimilability,« revealing citizenship to be much more than a legal concept. The contributors to this volume take an interdisciplinary approach to considering how cultures of citizenship are being envisioned and interrogated in literary and cultural (con)texts. Through this framework, they attend to the tension between the citizen and its spectral others - a tension determined by how a country defines difference at a given moment.

In today’s world, citizenship is increasingly defined in normative terms. Political belonging comes to be equated with specific norms, values and appropriate behaviour, with distinctions made between virtuous, desirable citizens and deviant, undesirable ones. In this book, we analyze the formulation, implementation, and contestation of such normative framings of citizenship, which we term ‘citizenship agendas’. Some of these agendas are part and parcel of the working of the nation-state. Other citizenship agendas, however, are produced beyond the nation-state. The chapters in this book study various sites where the meaning of ‘the good citizen’ is framed and negotiated in different ways by state and non-state actors. We explore how multiple normative framings of citizenship may coexist in apparent harmony, or merge, or clash. The different chapters in this book engage with citizenship agendas in a range of contexts, from security policies and social housing in Dutch cities to state-like but extralegal organizations in Jamaica and Guatemala, and from the regulation of the Muslim call to prayer in the US Midwest to post-conflict reconstruction in Lebanon. This book was previously published as a special issue of Citizenship Studies.

This major new text assesses the persistence of nationalism in a globalizing world and analyses the current nature and future prospects of this multi-faceted and evolving ideology.

Interest in citizenship has never been higher. But what does it mean to be a citizen in a modern, complex community? Richard Bellamy approaches the subject of citizenship from a political perspective and, in clear and accessible language, addresses the complexities behind this highly topical issue.

Argues that concern with the nation and national community will be a key factor in redefining twenty-first-century politics. Bringing the Nation Back In takes as its starting point a series of developments that shaped politics in the United States and Europe over the past thirty years: the end of the Cold War, the rise of financial and economic globalization, the creation of the European Union, and the development of the postnational. This book contends we are now witnessing a break with the post-1945 world order and with modern politics. Two competing ideas have arisen—global cosmopolitanism and populist nationalism. Contributors argue this polarization of social ethos between cosmopolitanism and nationalism is a sign of a deeper political crisis, which they explore from different perspectives. Rather than taking sides, the aim is to diagnose the origins of the current impasse and to “bring the nation back in” by expanding what we mean by “nation” and national identity and by respecting the localizing processes that have led to national traditions and struggles. “This is an innovative and refreshingly idiosyncratic volume that applies a range of bottom-up analyses to the problem of the nation, nationalism, and the nation-state. Framed by very readable and highly informative introductory and concluding chapters, the reader is introduced to the variety of approaches to nationalism, not only regarding methodological approaches and theoretical trends but also regionally specific meanings of the nation.” — Harald Wydra, author of Politics and the Sacred