How is a sovereign prerogative brought to market? We know much about how states shape markets and vice versa, but less about the dynamics when states not only set market rules, but are also the sole producer of the good. This article takes up the case of citizenship by investment—“golden passport” programs that offer citizenship in recognition of an investment in a country—to unpack the challenges that appear when states commodify sovereign prerogatives. In these cases, the state holds multiple roles that generate conflicts of interest and a concern for credibility. To address these concerns, states may adopt two strategies: institute a division of labor in issuing the product, and outsource elements of supervision to third-party actors. Empirically, the analysis shows how migration service providers retooled murky discretionary grants of citizenship in peripheral countries into formal citizenship by investment schemes. The conclusion addresses how these strategies apply in markets for other sovereign prerogatives, particularly government debt, and discusses the implications for citizenship and neoliberalism.

À partir d'une recherche qualitative menée auprès de femmes âgées de 60 ans et plus, l'article propose une modélisation de la citoyenneté « vécue » dans l'avancée en âge. Construites à partir des pratiques de la vie quotidienne, quatre figures de citoyenneté sont proposées. La présentation des figures met en lumière autant la description des pratiques du quotidien que les finalités d'action qui animent l'agir quotidien. Par la suite, l'analyse narrative examine les diverses formes de citoyenneté vécue des participantes dans le vieillissement. Si les citoyennetés tracées rendent compte de différentes pratiques de participation sociale et d'affiliation au collectif, elles témoignent aussi, par ailleurs, des inégalités sociales et de genre qui sont toujours à l’œuvre pour penser les rapports à la citoyenneté vécue des femmes âgées sous des modes polyphoniques.

This paper argues that conceptualizing Western state citizenship from the vantage point of advancing liberalism is insufficient. Instead, recently restrictive trends may be summarized under the umbrella of earned citizenship. Conceived of as privilege not right, this is a citizenship that is simultaneously more difficult to get and easier to lose, and it inheres elements of neoliberalism and of nationalism in tandem. One could even call it an instance of neoliberal nationalism, which is neither ethnic nor civic but including on the basis of merit and desert. The rise of earned citizenship is a convergent trend across Western Europe and the classic immigrant nations of North America and Australia.

We investigate how refugee sponsors and sponsorship groups approach their responsibility to “create new Canadians.” We set the stage by reflecting on the history of Canada as an immigrant-receiving, multicultural country, as well as on the role of acculturation attitudes of host community members in establishing the integration environment for newcomers in general. We use findings from nearly 60 interviews with sponsors in the Ottawa area to outline the different approaches that sponsors take. Approaches to sponsorship fall into three general orientations: paternalistic, passive paternalistic and mutualistic. These approaches manifest in the actions that sponsors take during the sponsorship process. In our discussion, we consider the implications of these approaches for the sponsor–refugee relationship, as well as the broader project of Canadian multiculturalism. We argue that mutualistic approaches best demonstrate welcoming acculturation orientations to newcomers, and that they are an important component of supporting privately sponsored refugees to become Canadians.

The 1988 constitution has led to the introduction of ethno-legal categories grounded on the dual premises of exceptionality and territorial administration. This article offers an explanation of why mobilizations based on ethnicity have not petered out despite the evident disengagement of the state, suggesting that it is important to distinguish between two ways of envisioning the articulation of singularity with territory: while the state considers that differences between populations pre-exist prior to territorial delimitation, local populations are convinced that the intention to proceed with demarcation suffices in itself to demonstrate their specificity. Moreover, from their perspective, a territorial claim is important as a way of accessing other rights that they consider equally essential. Our second section examines not only recent declarations of identity but also the observed switching between ethno-legal categories, building on a comparison with religious conversion as a meandering, complex, sometimes paradoxical process. Ethnicity, like religious affiliation, can thus be seen as a language developed at the national level but reappropriated by various populations in the service of local issues and usages. A final section examines particularism, whether quilombola, traditional or Indian, as the currently dominant norm and form of expression for social protest, while reflecting on the role of outside actors as “institutional hosts” [Houtzager 2004]. It should be noted, moreover, that such standardization of the forms of political involvement no more precludes the replication of the social hierarchies between outsiders and natives, than it prevents social protest from being co-opted by the authorities.

Despite ongoing debates on the continued legal significance of citizenship in a globalized world, international comparative tests of the salience of citizenship under the law have yet to be undertaken. This article combines data from US and German courts with interviews of judges from both countries to 1) estimate the punishment consequences of lacking state membership; 2) compare the sentencing gap across international contexts, and; 3) identify and explicate the mechanisms linking citizenship to punishment considerations. Findings show noncitizens receive increased punishment in US and German courts net of legal factors, but this effect is less pronounced in Germany. The interviews suggest that a variety of intervening mechanisms explain these results. Prominent among these is that judges in both countries resent the fact that noncitizens compound their immigrant status with criminal transgressions. However, German judges place greater emphasis on consistency and proportionality at sentencing, thus guarding against overly harsh and disparate punishments.

In this paper, we use postcolonial theories of temporality—specifically the idea of belatedness—to examine how literal forms of lateness inform the so-called Lucky Moose case, wherein Chinese-Canadian grocer David Chen tardily performs a citizen’s arrest in Toronto. Canadian news media outlets, the Chinese-Canadian community, and R v Chen (2010) all contribute to the construction of Chen as an active legal subject, capable of working through the law on his own terms and in his own temporal framework. Consequently, Chen’s belatedness can be understood as part of a larger politics that serves to transform the temporality of citizenship and citizen’s arrest law in Canada.

Drawing primarily from the Canadian case, this paper explores the process of birthright citizenship determination for children born abroad through the use of assisted reproductive technologies. The determination of parentage is central to these cases, raising issues of how parental status is defined in the law—through biology, intentionality, and/or matrimony. Moreover, the complexities of defining who is a child and who is a parent, in order to determine who is a citizen, reveal fundamental contradictions in the consent-based model of liberal citizenship.

Canada can boast of having one of the highest rates of naturalization in the world. In the past five years, the government has introduced a series of amendments to citizenship rules, with the majority having a direct impact on the naturalization process. From a sociological viewpoint, we seek to answer the following question: Is naturalization as “liberal” in Canada in the early twenty-first century as it was in the 1990s, or are we seeing a trend toward re-nationalization, as is currently the case in many European countries? Our findings seem to indicate no substantive change in political regime since the arrival of the Conservative Party in power, given the actual scope of the majority of the amendments. However, a discourse increasingly centered on identity and the protection of a specific way of being Canadian reflects a new rhetoric about Canadian citizenship, one that is very close to the “nationalist” concept of naturalization.

This article examines Canada's federal Live-in Caregiver Program (LCP) from the perspective of international human-rights and labour norms pertaining to the protection of migrant workers. Showing that the current legal framework of the LCP restricts migrant caregivers from effectively exercising a range of human and labour rights, the author argues for the removal of the labour (im)migration program's unnecessary structural obstacles and proposes a reformulation of the LCP under the principles and guidelines of the International Labour Organization's Multilateral Framework on Labour Migration, in order to transform this controversial labour policy into a decent work opportunity.

Achieving consensus on a definition of “democracy” has proven elusive. Institutions that have been taken to be essential to democracy have changed radically since the word “democrat” began to be widely used toward the end of the eighteenth century. Democratic ideas and democratic practice engender conflict that transforms institutions rather than just reproduces them. Its transformative character rests on a half-dozen key attributes of democracy: it is an actor’s concept, as well as an analyst’s; it can arouse strong feelings; it combines not always compatible ideas; it empowers dissent; it involves a dynamic mixture of inclusion and exclusion; and the democratic histories of national states have been intertwined with global domination. Two processes combine to generate much social dynamism. First, democracy’s stirring inclusionary claims have been contradicted by a complex structure of exclusions, including distinctions in rights of full participation among citizens, distinctions in rights between citizens and non-citizens, and distinctions in resources among legally equal citizens. And second, democratic practice has been fertile soil for the development of social movements. Taken together, democracy is an invitation for movements to try to shift the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion, and in so doing to expand or constrict democracy itself.

This paper examines changing German and Korean policies towards transborder coethnics (Germans in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, and Koreans in Japan and China) during the high Cold War and post-Cold War eras. The paper contributes to the emerging literature on transborder forms of membership and belonging by highlighting and explaining the selective, variable, contingent, contested, and revocable nature of states’ embrace of transborder coethnics. The explanation highlights the relationship of transborder populations to predecessor polities; changing geopolitical contexts and domestic political conjunctures; the constitutive, group-making – and group-unmaking – power of state categorization practices; and the enduring institutional legacies and unintended consequences of such practices.

Rogers Brubaker in his 1992 path-breaking study proposes a theory of citizenship as a coherent world view: the French liberal model identifies citizenship as a community based on territoriality; the German ethno-nationalist model bases citizenship on blood-line. Rogers Smith challenged Brubaker and, based on a 1997 study of United States immigration laws, claims that the American concept of citizenship is a non-coherent mix of various principles: liberal, ethno-nationalist and republican at the same time. Both authors inspired a great deal of research, but all studies so far have attempted to adjudicate between the two competing theories by looking at inclusionary practices, at the various ways citizenship is granted in various countries, and their results are inconclusive. This paper reports findings for a study which looked at exclusion. The data on United States laws and legislative debates about the states’ rights to revoke, and citizens’ privilege to renounce, citizenship lends support to Rogers Smith’s arguments regarding inclusion and citizenship, while underlining war as an independent sociological source for the genesis, persistence and dispersion of these bundles or equilibria.

This paper scrutinizes the paradox of the increasing objective yet diminishing subjective value of citizenship in Western states. The decreasing subjective value points to an inevitable lightening of citizenship, which persists despite states’ recent efforts to upgrade and re-nationalize citizenship by ceremony, civic integration tests, and more exclusive rights. I discuss some features of citizenship light, most notably instrumentalism and a dissociation of citizenship from nationhood. The recently court-empowered European Union citizenship serves as an illustration.

Health care cuts and restructuring are shifting the site of acute care from hospitals to homes and prompting provincial governments to introduce varying forms of mixed economies in home care. Typically, such arrangements seek to drive down public costs and to reposition service users as “consumers” of market-modelled care. Drawing on an ongoing study of frail elderly women and women with disabilities receiving home care in Ontario, this paper explores the significance for service users of these economic and political objectives. Rather than feeling like consumers free to exercise choice and demand quality in the mixed economy of home care, they experienced their positioning within it as insecure and subordinate and its supply as unpredictable and meagre. The implications of these findings for fashioning secure and equitable public responses to elderly and disabled citizens who need assistance at home over the long term are discussed.

The article discusses three liberal arguments about freedom of movement: immigration as a remedy for global injustice in the distribution of opportunities, freedom of movement as an integral aspect of individual autonomy, and immigration control as implied in democratic self-determination and citizenship. The article shows how these apparently irreconcilable stances can be reconstructed as partially overlapping once we realize that liberal citizenship provides not only reasons for closure but entails a bundle of mobility rights and is open for access by migrant stakeholders.