Search

Recent analysis indicates that the coronavirus pandemic has disproportionately affected Roma people, amplified pre-existing exclusion, poverty, discrimination, and exposed marginalized Roma to vulnerability even more than before. This study explores the securitization and militarized quarantine of Roma settlements during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in Slovakia. The study analyzes who, how and why securitized Roma communities? On what issues and for whom? With what result and under what conditions? The result of securitization, i.e. militarized quarantine of six Roma settlements is investigated in terms of legality, necessity, proportionality, and temporariness. The topic is approached from the perspective of political science. The study deploys a new institutionalism approach, securitization as an analytical frame, and qualitative research design. This includes a case study, elite interviews, and qualitative content analysis. The study concludes that, in the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in Slovakia, securitization took place instead of right-based discourse and a humanitarian approach towards the most vulnerable and socially excluded MRCs. Slovakia deployed heavily securitized responses towards Roma, targeting them selectively and collectively with anti-corona measures. Residents of six Roma settlements were exposed to the discrimination and most restrictive measures that the rest of the population did not face. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Arab Spring provides for a comparative study and debate on Citizenship, its expansion, and shrinkage. Ironically, the demands for citizenship in the Middle East have risen in a period when the model of liberal citizenship in established democracies appears to be in crisis. The grim results of the Arab Spring had influences beyond the region as instability, militant Islam, and civil wars drove many to seek refuge in Europe and underscored new debates on citizenship and belonging, often questioning the European liberal creed of citizenship, a model for some of the protestors in the Middle East. Right wing parties across the continent gained popularity by demanding to restore or instill an ethno-national citizenship regime. Securitization, a discourse that emphasizes ‘danger’ to the stability and public order of society, led governments to undertake steps to stave off potential challenges to their control of the state and hegemony over the public sphere and restrict citizenship access and rights. Thus, across the Middle East and Europe, a new phenomenon that we label the ‘Shrinking nature of Citizenship’, the decline and reduction of the rights of certain segments of society, has taken place, in different forms and with different oppositions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this article, we examine elements of contemporary securitization discourse about immigration and citizenship in Germany, looking both at the German-domestic and European contexts. We seek to identify mechanisms of exclusion from citizenship rights and from human rights that securitization discourses serve to establish. The current disaster faced by refugees and forced-migrants in the aftermath of the Arab Spring is a dreadful illustration of persistent ambivalences: The Federal Republic, in the post-Nazi era and the European Union from its very inception, proclaim allegiance to human and citizens’ rights, which serve, in ones and the same time to promulgate the promise of inclusion and equality, and as instruments of securitization and exclusion. This ambivalent role of citizenship rights and human rights is illustrated in the article by the following cases: Germany’s reform of citizenship law and subsequent rules of social exclusion pertaining primarily to Muslim citizens; the ‘normalization’ of Roma minorities in Germany and other EU member-states. We conclude that the persistence of this ambivalence is remarkable and it ought to be reckoned with, if the emancipatory potential – impaired as it may be – of citizenship and human rights is to be safeguarded. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The current article delineates the qualified nature of citizenship in the Turkish Republic. Its primary argument is that the content of citizenship in Turkey has been shaped and reshaped since its establishment by a continuous struggle for social and political hegemony. Throughout this struggle the incumbent regimes, Kemalist, populist, and Islamist, subjected the full range of citizenship rights to conceived – internal and external, real and imagined – security threats, which further legitimized restrictions on Turkish citizenship. The recent downturn in Turkish citizenship, which started in 2011 and peaked following the failed coup attempt in summer 2016 and the referendum of April 2017, should be understood in relation to the contemporary turmoil in the Middle East which confronted the Turkish state with a plethora of security challenges and justified further infringement of citizenship rights in Turkish society. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article discusses a recent amendment to the Canadian Citizenship Act, which retroactively restores or gives Canadian citizenship to ‘hundreds of thousands of unsuspecting foreigners, most of them Americans’ (P. Dvorak, 2009. Canada issues a wake-up call: you may be a citizen.The Wall Street Journal,17 April. Available from:http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123993183347727843.html) while also restricting the inheritance of Canadian citizenship to the first-generation born abroad. Aiming to redress past discriminations based on gender, marital status and dual citizenship while simultaneously curtailing modern citizenship's dubious ius sanguinis provision, the new law might be interpreted as perpetuating Canada's reputation as a world leader in interethnic relations and human rights. A contextual analysis of the new law, by contrast, shows that the opposite is the case: the boundaries that are being drawn by Canada's new citizenship regime follow the now common trend of re-ethnicization and securitization. Specifically, they conflate kinship and Whiteness, thereby leading, on the one hand, to the construction of possible citizens whose authenticity and loyalty to the nation are unquestioned. On the other hand, within the logic of the new laws and their surrounding discourses, non-White, non-Christian ‘impossible citizens’ emerge, whose lack of loyalty and instrumental use of their Canadian passport are said to be eroding the value of citizenship from within. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article delves into the uses of history and examines how the enlisting of Indian soldiers – particularly from Punjab – into the British Indian Army during the First and Second World Wars has been memorialized and remembered in contemporary Britain. This issue has become particularly salient in the light of the politics of the so-called ‘war on terror’ or ‘new imperialism’, which Paul Gilroy and Vron Ware argue has heightened tendencies towards militarism in British society. Using examples from the public sphere – remembrance day events, TV documentaries and army recruitment fairs – as well as interview material, I argue that Britain's Punjabi communities have been organizing in order to weave themselves into the national tapestry by memorializing role played by Punjabis in the First and Second World Wars – iconic to the national fantasy, using this forgotten history to demand recognition from the state and stake a claim for citizenship. In the ‘new imperialism’, however, it is not equally possible for Sikh and Muslim Punjabis to argue for their inclusion on the terms of militarized citizenship, and the various chords within the diaspora seem to be increasingly disharmonious, effacing their composite and shared colonial history. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article studies the multiple connections between contemporary structures of German and Turkish citizenship, and German-Turkish migrants' own practices of citizenship transcending national borders. Hence, the citizenship structures of the two countries and the ways in which they shape and are shaped by the migrants' civic activism shall be exposed in a dialogical way. It will be argued that German-Turks constitute a transnational space, making it imperative that the existing institutions of citizenship in both countries respond to their globalized and transnationalized experiences. Addressing the literature on transnational space, citizenship studies, diaspora studies and cultural studies, and referring to a survey conducted among German-Turks, this work will briefly refer to the production of transnational space by immigrants of Turkish origin and their descendants in Germany and the use they make of the means of globalization, which provide them with a set of diversified habitats of meaning away from their country of origin. Subsequently, it will claim that the traditional framework of national citizenship has been superseded as transmigrants have become mobile between their countries of origin and of settlement in a way that may require dual citizenship as well as dual loyalty, allegiance and orientation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines current citizenship discourses and practices in Canada, focusing on the implications not only of marketization, but also of growing securitization vis-a-vis citizenship, and the gendered ramifications of such developments. The repercussions of marketization and securitization and their interrelations, for women in general, as well as racialized and immigrant women in particular, are outlined and assessed. In this way, we see how women are at the receiving end of highly contradictory processes in that they are both 'invisibilized', in other words, rendered invisible, by the Canadian state, but are also are increasingly 'instrumentalized', in other words, used in strategic ways. Yet, women also challenge these trends and tactics, thereby interrogating these processes that serve to limit the terms and scope of citizenship in Canada. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]