Citizenship and Inequality

Citizenship has been recognized as one of the most important mechanisms producing inequalities globally. Citizenship relates to economic inequalities. Citizenship creates cultural distinctions. Citizenship has even been proposed as an institution producing a global caste system. Citizenship is the nexus between nation-states, their ideologies, persons, and struggles for power, recognition, inclusion, and survival. Globally, nation-states exert physical and symbolic violence to normalize cross-national inequalities. National ideologies, including citizenship ideologies, justify these unequal global institutional arrangements. Persons may uphold global citizenship arrangements, challenge them directly or indirectly, or simply try to navigate them as best as they can. The resulting struggles create a global order that is continuously unequal but also dynamic and changing. Migration “crises” represent concrete manifestations of these dynamics. Persons challenge nation-states’ efforts to consolidate the global citizenship order by migrating. Migration affects this order in two ways. Migration impacts global material relations emphasized by world-systems analyses. Migration amounts to an effort to redistribute economic opportunities accumulated through centuries of unequal exchange between the world’s core, semi-periphery, and periphery. Simultaneously, migration unsettles global symbolic structures, central to global institutionalist accounts. Migration highlights inequalities and exclusions inherent in nation-states’ ideological frameworks. Migration thus represents a twofold attack on the nation-state system, an attack on its economic foundation and on its ideological foundation. Logically, nation-states and their supporters perceive migration waves as a series of crises and face them with fierce opposition. This panel invites proposals that examine different aspects of this citizenship nexus of nation-states, ideologies, persons, and struggles.