It is often suggested that new thinking brought by Christianity spelled the end of ancient ideas of the city. Three Christian authors of the fifth century -- Orosius, Augustine, and Salvian -- have much to say on cities and citizenship. Despite the shock of the sack of Rome, all three are convinced of the value of Roman citizenship, and respond resiliently to the troubles of Rome and other cities of the empire. Augustine’s treatise, the City of God, while offering the Heavenly City and a citizenship in faith as the ultimate aspiration, see it as entangled in the terrestrial world of cities. Salvian is scathing about the moral failings of the city elites, to which he attributes the divine wrath of barbarian devastations, and vividly portrays urban corruption, but in a plea for better cities rather than abandonment of cities.

This chapter offers an overview of the arguments and key contributions of the book. The book has shown that while clientelism and resource constraints have rationed the provision of public goods and social benefits, across the past century, Indians have engaged in deliberate debates about what an Indian ‘welfare state’ should look like. The ideas and principles on which earlier policies were conceived have remained influential. India’s welfare regime today is shaped by decisions taken and resources allocated in the past. Even moments of expected rupture such as the onset of economic reforms in 1991 - or, as this chapter goes on to show, the 2014 Lok Sabha elections which brought the Narendra Modi-led BJP to power on a platform promising an end to a culture of ‘entitlements’ - have seen underlying stability in the context of India’s welfare regime. This said, there have been substantial areas of divergence over time in both the approach to social policy implementation and the philosophy of citizenship that underpins welfare commitments. The chapter ends by looking ahead to the future of welfare, underlining the continued significance of state-level policy innovation.

The wheels came off the Japanese economy in the early 1990s, throwing into question the expos that had emerged from and contributed to the previous two decades of growth. The first casualty was the Tokyo World City Expo, planned in the late 1980s and cancelled in 1995. By the end of the decade, there was a wave of nostalgia for Expo 70, as middle-aged creatives mourned the betrayal of its promises, or bemoaned its continuing hold on the present. But expos continued to have their uses. Alongside the laments, this chapter explores how the national bureaucracy and local authorities continued to use a new system and new kinds of expos to coordinate and foster development in the regions. It argues that the complicated genesis and unexpected success of Expo 2005 in Aichi, which evolved from a spur for regional development to the first eco-expo recognized by the United Nations, shows how expos remain a tool in the armory of development, even if observers in the West and intellectuals in Japan think their time has passed.

The rise of the European Union elicits both theoretical and practical questions about notions of citizenship, and citizens’ duties, that transcend nation-state boundaries. Indeed, its supranational nature invites reevaluation of the concepts of citizenship and political community more generally. In a similar vein, this chapter considers the European Court of Justice’s (ECJ) practice of horizontal application in light of republican theory. The fact that the ECJ has introduced horizontal application in EU law at all is itself a point of interest, given the debatable status of the Union as a political community in the republican sense. This book’s republican framework points toward a conceptual relationship between the development of horizontal application and the fate of the European Union as, in fact, something more than a loose union of nation-states. Put differently, a full flowering of horizontal application is theoretically tied to wider acceptance of the European Union as a fully fledged political community, complete with citizens’ duties to one another and a common good of which to speak.

This chapter explores denationalization, focusing on Indonesian foreign terrorist fighters (FTFs). Post-9/11 and during the Arab Spring, Western democracies tightened border control to combat terrorism, enabling the stripping of citizenship from involved individuals. Denationalization, via law or public-authority decisions, emerged as a contentious counter-terrorism tool. Indonesia, as a Muslim-majority Southeast Asian nation, partially embraced denationalization, refusing to repatriate Indonesian FTFs. This aligns with global security concerns but raises statelessness questions. The chapter examines denationalization’s legal framework, international obligations, and the blurred line between de jure and de facto statelessness. Critics argue that disproportionately applying denationalization to Muslims undermines human rights, inter-state cooperation and international justice. Refusal to repatriate Indonesian FTFs raises concerns about long-term consequences and due process. Understanding denationalization nuances is vital, considering its impact on the citizenship rights of individuals involved in terrorism.

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper work has helped reshape Civil War literary studies and illustrates the field’s larger preoccupations. This chapter centers on “Bury Me in a Free Land,” a poem that demonstrates the craft of a writer uniquely adept at using and subverting expectations in a literature that was highly conventional, thus illustrating for contemporary readers both the patterns and their breach. Harper’s poem speaks to the core preoccupations that scholars have been tracing as they identify an ever-broadening archive of Civil War literature, namely the importance of slavery and abolition, the role of death and suffering in the context of spirituality and sentimentality, the shifting understandings of race and gender, and the exploration of how the conflict would be remembered. Poetry was the period’s predominant genre, and this example points to current scholarly interest in works that are ephemeral, conventional, and written to appeal to a broad popular audience. Instead of asking what great works of literature writers in general and combatants in particular produced, as previous scholars had done, recent inquiries have considered a greater diversity of writers and taken an expansive approach to this large question: What is Civil War literature, and what cultural, social, and political contributions did it make?

This chapter examines the emergence of Reconstruction literature as a field of study within nineteenth-century American literature. What can we learn from the appearance of Reconstruction literature as an area of research now, given the troubled landscape of our own twenty-first century? I suggest an answer by focusing on the public political function that this body of writing represented: Reconstruction literature constituted the playing field for fierce debates surrounding Black citizenship and enfranchisement, federal government oversight, and Confederate punishment. Case in point is Albion W. Tourgée’s novel A Fool’s Errand (1879), which, when it appeared in 1879, was hailed as the “Uncle Tom’s Cabin of Reconstruction.” Deploying Tourgée as a representative Reconstruction writer, I ask what his novel’s varied reception by diverse Americans can teach us about the significance that fictional works held for postbellum policy debates, and what this state of affairs illuminates about the place of Reconstruction literature in the twenty-first century, particularly given the disappearance of nineteenth-century American literature as a dedicated hiring field in the academy today. Ultimately, I argue that to realize the promise of Reconstruction literature requires time and resources, and a reinvigoration of the role of the university in democratic society.

While statelessness remains a global phenomenon, it is a global issue with an Asian epicentre. This chapter situates the book within the context and multi-disciplinary scholarship on statelessness in Asia by reviewing the causes, conditions and/or challenges of statelessness. It recognizes statelessness in this region as a phenomenon beyond forced migration and highlights the arbitrary and discriminatory use of state power in producing and sustaining statelessness. The chapter reviews the ‘state of statelessness’ in Asia, including applicable international, regional and national legal frameworks. It also maps some of the core themes that emerge from the contributors’ examination of the causes and conditions of statelessness in Asia. These include: the relationship between ethnic, religious, cultural and linguistic diversity and statelessness; the legacies of colonialism; contemporary politics surrounding nation-building, border regimes and mobilities; as well as intersecting vulnerabilities. The chapter concludes with some preliminary thoughts on frameworks of analysis and future research agendas, including challenges and prospects for reform.

This chapter discusses the 1953 legal challenge to Ceylon’s (present-day Sri Lanka) voter registration laws before the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in London, one of the first against domestic legislation on citizenship from a former British colony. The Kodakan Pillai appeal, as the case was known, was part of multiple challenges to the immigration, nationality and citizenship regime in Ceylon at the time which discriminated against people who had migrated to Ceylon from India but had permanently settled there for multiple generations. The appeal ultimately failed, and the malaiyaha thamilar – plantation laborers and their descendants – form part of minority populations in Sri Lanka today, stigmatized as ‘migrants’ and outsiders, frequently lacking documentation and evidence of citizenship, and consequently, to land ownership or welfare benefits. Drawing on a rich legal archive of citizenship applications filed before the Commission for Indian and Pakistani Residents in the 1950s, alongside the Kodakan Pillai appeal, this chapter serves as an illustration for why the legal history of statelessness in Asia is important. Given this historical context, it also cautions against solutions to statelessness in the region that solely rely on improved documentation of political belonging.

Chapter 4 examines issues of citizenship and religion, with a particular focus on the status of non-Muslims and women. After discussing the problematic notion of citizenship in the Arab world, the chapter analyzes the specific meaning and scope of citizenship in the post-2011 constitutional systems. The chapter shows, on the one hand, that despite significant improvements with respect to the past, non-Muslims and women are still excluded from full citizenship, which remains a prerogative of male Muslims. On the other hand, however, over the past few years, prominent religious leaders and institutions have called for a more equality-based approach toward citizenship’s rights for all people, irrespective of one’s sex and religious belief. Given the profound influence that religion exerts on law and society in Arab countries, these calls might well lead to the adoption of legal reforms aimed at reducing discrimination against women and non-Muslims, and might represent a first step toward replacing the differentiated citizenships that currently exist in Arab countries, with one single, full, and inclusive citizenship.

Chapter 5 discusses the postwar international struggle for and against restitution carried out by the Romanian government and the local and international Jewish organizations that aimed to convince the Allies who prepared the peace treaty with Romania. On the one hand, it shows the local Jewish leaders’ and organizations’ efforts to obtain restitution, reparations, and restoration of rights by enlisting support from international Jewish organizations and Allied (Western) politicians. On the other hand, it highlights how most of the Romanian politicians and diplomats tried to limit restitution in favor of the Jews. In this chapter, the author also discusses other reparative justice measures adopted by the post-Antonescu governments, including the payment of limited reparations (pensions to some categories of survivors of camps, ghettos, and pogroms) and the return of citizenship.

Several chapters in this volume draw attention to the multiple human rights violations that international migrants face on their journey. This chapter argues that simply calling for a strengthening of migrants’ rights is not enough. If we want to combat the de facto lawlessness of modern migration regimes and the resulting rightlessness of international migrants, we need to enhance not only migrants’ legal rights, but also their political agency and hence develop new political institutions which are accountable to both citizens and migrants. Yet, rather than advocating a global reform, this chapter proposes a model of demoi-cratic migration governance. Migrants’ mobility and membership rights should no longer remain within the absolute discretion of single states or nations but should become the object of reciprocal decision-making between them. Compared with both national and global reforms, demoi-cratic decision-making has a double advantage. It protects the continued existence of bounded political communities which form its central building blocks while at the same time strengthening the voice of international migrants by transforming the citizens of all participating states into potential migrants who, via their national representatives, can codetermine the rights that they will be granted in other member states.

Citizenship and taxation are closely related. While only two countries tax on the basis of citizenship, residency as it is implicated in abode and domicile, determines taxation obligations, criteria, and rates. Countries tax on the basis of residency, applying a 183- day presence rule together with other tests that cluster around definitions of ‘the home’ to establish abode and/or domicile which are invoked to classify taxpayers and their payments. Since 1984, a number of countries have been offering Citizenship by Investment (CBI) and Residence by Investment (RBI) programmes as incentives to encourage High Net Worth Individuals (HNWIs) to migrate and settle within their jurisdictions. Competition for CBI and RBI has intensified since the turn of the twenty-first century. These programmes allow both states and their HNWI clients to negotiate abode, domicile, and home to reduce tax obligations. While anthropologists have long since abandoned assumptions that fix culture to specific places, tax authorities struggle to accommodate the mobile livelihoods that are instantiated in CBI and RBI programmes. While the majority of citizens continue to pay tax in place, HNWIs, with multiple homes in multiple places, treat citizenship as a commodity to reduce, and even entirely escape taxation.

Tax is both an aspect of everyday life for people round the globe, bound up in political governance, and central to the organisation of our resources and any efforts to promote equality. While tax is studied across multiple disciplines, in anthropology it has received less attention. This introduction argues that an anthropological approach to tax, which centres ethnographic data and non-normative understandings of fiscal relations, is crucial to a comprehensive appreciation of taxes and key to building more equitable futures. The introduction is structured around three main questions: what is tax, what is taxable, and what do taxes do? It maps out why it is important to talk about tax now, the crucial influences of an anthropology of tax, the current landscape of this small but growing field of work, and the future of anthropological approaches to tax.

This chapter investigates tax payments and self-making amongst Romanian migrants in London. Vicol demonstrates how taxation is a mode of anchoring oneself in a moral order premised on self-sufficiency. Although the UK’s mainstream media cast Romanian migrants through tropes of welfare dependency, Romanian self-narrations as hard working, taxpaying subjects enabled interlocutors to constitute themselves as good migrants. However, becoming a taxpayer in practice was also an exercise in a particular type of bureaucratic literacy. A host of digital barriers, language deficiencies, and unhelpful bureaucrats drove many to seek out private consultants who made a business of helping their co-nationals decode their obligations to HM Revenue and Customs. Thus, this chapter also explores taxpaying as a technical exercise of making oneself legible through the language of the fiscal authority. Taxation becomes part of the making of the migrant subject. It is about the paradoxical ways in which a digitising state premised on self-reliance prompts affirmations of independence at the level of discourse, while simultaneously generating new networks of dependency in practice.