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Lambeth Palace Library's primary function is to preserve the records of the Church of England, but there are ample opportunities for researchers to use these archives to better understand Britain's histories of citizenship, race relations, and migration in the twentieth century. Lambeth Palace Library (LPL) houses documents on projects on race relations undertaken by the British Council of Churches and the Church of England's Board of Social Responsibility's Race and Community Relations Committee, as well as Archbishop Michael Ramsey's correspondence from his tenure as Chair of the National Committee of Commonwealth Immigrants. These papers attest to the Church of England's significant role in urgent national debates on migrant rights and race equality, and the work of organisations representing the interests of Commonwealth migrants as they actively sought the support of church leaders in their campaigns. LPL collections reveal the important place British churches had in building networks, providing funding and supplying resources to support anti‐racist organisations, and the ways ideas of Britishness were contested in the 1960s and 1970s around the passage of the Commonwealth Immigrants Acts and Race Relations Acts. Papers in LPL collections can also be used to critically examine post‐imperial formations of Whiteness, xenophobia and the racialisation of British citizenship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the relationship between property and citizenship by engaging in a genealogy of one property in Portland, Oregon, “Block 16”, which details how this property was first enacted and then maintained into the 21st century. The paper foregrounds how normative definitions of liberal subjectivity were applied to Indigenous peoples originally living on this land, as well as valuations of citizenship for marginalised renters and the residents of a homeless encampment “illegally” occupying this property, to justify the dispossession and displacement of the groups using this same plot of land over time. I argue that the spatial enactment and maintenance of private property is contingent upon producing political subjects demarcated as “improper”, deviants from the normative or ideal liberal subject and citizen. To highlight how property shapes propriety, the paper engages in landscape analysis to reveal how the social relations producing land as property rely upon representations of impropriety and moral deficit to maintain the ownership model of private property against the historical use values of the land. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the last two decades, India's system of agricultural land management has been transitioning from paper to digital records. In effecting this shift, engineers and bureaucrats in the city of Bangalore, India's "Silicon Valley," have tacitly and invisibly shifted the responsibility for maintaining data from the state to individuals. Moreover, the new digital databases of land records have fragmented offices and dispersed data across new sites and actors. Under these transformed conditions, people can access services only through what I call citizen labor. That is, when digitization is applied to land and property—which are quintessential sites for the making and unmaking of citizenship—people are interpellated into laboring on their own data. This shows that the digitization of government extracts a form of labor, one whose benefits accrue to groups and organizations beyond the laboring individual. As a result, people have an increasingly degraded experience of substantive citizenship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses how Citizenship in an Independent Scotland (CIS)—published by the Scottish Government as part of a ‘prospectus for an independent Scotland’—discursively represents the Scottish nation in the context of establishing who should be eligible to be a member of that nation. I relate CIS to the historical and contemporary determination of British citizenship and to evidence concerning popular conceptions of citizenship and national belonging in Scotland. I argue that while CIS reflects nation‐building through an attempt to rhetorically differentiate Scotland from Britain, it also reflects the influence that the evolution of British citizenship has on proposed post‐independence Scottish citizenship. I also evaluate CIS's stress on ‘inclusion’, consistent with its representation of Scotland as an ‘inclusive’ nation. I conclude that the proposals may be described as compromised inclusion and that the reasons for this are likely to be common to similar aspirational secessionist proposals in sub‐state nations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A queue‐jumping argument concludes that some course of action is impermissible by likening it to the presumptively impermissible act of jumping a queue. Arguments of this sort may be found in a disparate range of contexts and in support of policies favoured by both left and right. Examples include arguments against private education and private health care but also arguments against accommodations for learning disabilities, refugee resettlement, and birthright citizenship. We infer that, although queue‐jumping arguments are strictly analogies, they constitute a sufficiently distinct class of arguments to justify their separate treatment. The paper proposes an argumentation scheme for queue‐jumping arguments and demonstrates its applicability to some existing arguments of this type. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we examine citizenship crisis in the Northeast Indian state of Assam through the lenses of structural and cultural violence. In 2019, close to two million people in Assam were disenfranchised by updating the National Register of Citizens (NRC). The vast majority of those disenfranchised are Miya people who have been subjected to legacies of persecution and violence since the early 19th century during British colonial rule. We map the contours of the citizenship crisis by centering the struggles of Miya communities who are most deeply impacted by violent citizenship regimes. Using a structural and cultural violence lens, we elucidate the linkages between colonial histories, (post)colonial policies, and institutional practices on the one hand and Miya people's everyday struggles on the other. Across these analyses, we demonstrate how current citizenship regimes operate as a form of state‐sanctioned violence against Miya people. The implications of these analyses for rethinking contemporary notions of citizenship and belonging for community‐engaged scholarship are discussed. Highlights: We examine citizenship crisis in Assam by centering struggles of Miya people who are most impacted.We use a structural and cultural violence lens to understand the citizenship crisis in Assam.Citizenship regimes can operate as a form of state‐sanctioned violence.We need to rethink citizenship and belonging beyond the normativity of modern nation‐state borders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Every few years, Karachi floods during the summer monsoon. The flooding brings latent manoeuvrings by political actors looking to establish their hold over the city to the surface. Politicians, urban administrators, and relevant state and non‐state institutions blame historical planning failures, informal and illegal constructions, institutional conflict, incapable municipal governance, and widespread corruption for the flooding. They move quickly to establish authority and consolidate power while offering 'fixes'. Eviction drives against 'illegal settlements' built along storm‐water drains, heavy taxes, fines, and demolitions of non‐conforming constructions, institutional reforms, budget allocations, and project approvals for new infrastructure all happen at once. Once the emergency ceases, key players in urban politics – resident groups, community associations, political parties, municipal authorities, land developers, planners, international non‐governmental organisations, and military institutions – start working on projects of accumulation and entrenchment, in preparation for the next crisis. In this paper, we look at the space–time of Karachi's certain and yet uncertain flooding crisis as a moment to study the politics of the maybe in the Pakistani megacity. Outlining marginal and affluent residents' lived experiences in a flooding city and relating their politics with governmental responses to immediate and possible future floods, we study the conditions of inhabitation, citizenship claims, and governmental relations in Karachi. We argue that the monsoon's expectant arrival becomes a locus for articulating and modulating different kinds of popular vernaculars, governmental practices, and political manoeuvrings for institutional and individual actors seeking profit and power in and through Karachi. The politics of the maybe hinges on actors entrenching their political positions without care, taking away any possibility for a shared, coherent worldview for all Karachiites. In conclusion, we argue that distant interests and logics of this politics of governance and inhabitation are inherently exploitative, threatening to pull apart the very city they thrive on. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]