Cet article est la traduction française de l’introduction du livre d’Ayelet Shachar, «The Puzzle of Birthright Citizenship», avec la permission de l’éditeur, tirée de The Birthright Lottery : Citizenship and Global Inequality, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, pp.1-18. © 2009 President and Fellows of Harvard College. Traduction de Martin Provencher.This paper is the French translation of Ayelet Shachar’s introduction, «The Puzzle of Birthright Citizenship», digitally reproduced by permission of the publisher from The Birthright Lottery : Citizenship and Global Inequality, Cambridge, (...) Mass.: Harvard University Press, pp.1-18. © 2009 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Translation by Martin Provencher. (shrink)

In an interdependent world of overlapping political memberships and identities, states and democratic citizens face difficult choices in responding to large-scale migration and the related question of who ought to have access to citizenship. In an influential attempt to provide a normative framework for a more just global order, The Law of Peoples , John Rawls is curiously silent regarding what his framework would mean for the politics of migration. In this piece, I consider the complications Rawls’s inattention to these (...) issues creates for his broader vision of global justice. Yet I also attempt to show how these aspects of Rawls’s theory emerge from an underlying tension which confronts all liberal democratic conceptions of justice, both in theory and in practice. In my conclusion, I sketch an alternative rooted in the insights of agonistic pluralism, which “breaks” the Rawlsian silence and actively theorizes the democratic legitimation of political borders. (shrink)

What can the analytical framework of settler colonialism contribute to sociological theorizing, research, and overall understanding of the social world? This essay argues that settler colonialism, a distinct social formation with common statuses and predictable dynamics, has much to offer towards new sociological insight regarding the United States. In expanding the scholarly models of colonialism applied to the United States, settler colonial analysis suggests that an underlying logic of Indigenous elimination and settler replacement informs a diverse set of contemporary outcomes (...) and structures. It provides a coherent and overarching framework for explaining such political phenomena as the vigorous presence of “extraconstitutional” tribal governments within the United States, recurrent Native-white conflicts, and the distinctive nature of contemporary Indigenous social and political agency. The essay also analyzes how settler supersession and the desire for Indigenous lands shapes the intensive state management of Indigenous identity, the differing racialization of African Americans and American Indians, and the contrasts between Indigenous and black sociopolitical agendas. Insights from a reconceptualization of the US as a settler colonial society are not limited to a focus on politics, American Indians, race, or the past. The article suggests additional directions for new research that have the potential to reveal contemporary social forces operating at multiple levels and in numerous fields of social action. Finally, the essay offers simple suggestions to sociologists who wish to incorporate settler colonialism in their research and teaching within the discipline or to contribute to interdisciplinary scholarship about American settler colonialism. (shrink)

This article presents a new set of analytical tools for understanding competing conceptions of political membership. Controversies concerning nationality and citizenship are often seen as products of conflict between `civic' and `ethnic' visions. However, the conceptual roots of current discussions and disagreements about political membership are actually more complicated than this might suggest. After examining the dichotomy of civic and ethnic and its limitations, this article identifies five competing ways of understanding the meaning of belonging to, or being a citizen (...) of, a given polity. Political membership may be understood and discussed as a matter of descent from common biological ancestors, cultural attachment, or identification with particular political principles. Alternatively, it may also be imagined either as an exchange of rights for duties or as a benefit granted to those contributing materially to the community. Each of these conceptions figures significantly in current political and intellectual discussions of citizenship and nationality. The typology may also prove applicable to new kinds of debates about global citizenship. (shrink)

This brief essay examines emergent spaces for politics and emergent political actors. The particular concern here is with types of politics that do not run through the formal political system, one with shrinking options for a growing number of US citizens and immigrants. Informal political actors and street-level politics in cities are major instances of this. US cities have a long history of street-level politics. The contents, the purposes, the mobilizers and the enactors of these politics have changed over time. (...) Today’s global cities are a very specific type of place because they bring together both the most globalized sectors of capital and the new transnational professionals, on the one hand, and a growing number of immigrants and native minoritized groups in a single, complex space. (shrink)

This article examines dominant socio-political questions regarding migration, ‘multiculturalism’, and ‘integration’, as a politics of citizenship (and race) in contemporary (post-colonial) Europe. The argument unfolds through a critique of the nationalist complacencies and racial complicities in Jürgen Habermas’s remarks on ‘multiculturalism’ during the 1990s. With recourse to ‘underclass’ discourse, Habermas’s reflections were themselves a trans-Atlantic metastasis of a distinctly US ‘American’ hegemonic sociological commonsense with regard to, but actively disregarding, the fact of white supremacy. Habermas’s thoughts are critically situated alongside (...) their subsequent metastasis, back across the Atlantic, into Francis Fukuyama’s recent invocations of ‘terrorism’ and his advocacy of the ‘American melting pot’ model as a trans-Atlantic prescription for Europe’s ailments. Treating ‘immigrants’ as a kind of societal illness, both are preoccupied by the same ‘problem’ — non-Europeans (as disaffected ‘minorities’). Thus, these discourses of ‘immigration’ manifest a distinctly post-colonial cancer coursing restlessly through the larger social formation of ‘the West’. (shrink)