Citizenship: A Very Short Introduction PDF Download

Author: Richard Bellamy
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0192802534
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 153

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Book Description
Interest in citizenship has never been higher. But what does it mean to be a citizen in a modern, complex community? Richard Bellamy approaches the subject of citizenship from a political perspective and, in clear and accessible language, addresses the complexities behind this highly topical issue.

Author: Niraja Gopal Jayal
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674070992
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 454

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Book Description
Breaking new ground in scholarship, Niraja Jayal writes the first history of citizenship in the largest democracy in the world—India. Unlike the mature democracies of the west, India began as a true republic of equals with a complex architecture of citizenship rights that was sensitive to the many hierarchies of Indian society. In this provocative biography of the defining aspiration of modern India, Jayal shows how the progressive civic ideals embodied in the constitution have been challenged by exclusions based on social and economic inequality, and sometimes also, paradoxically, undermined by its own policies of inclusion. Citizenship and Its Discontents explores a century of contestations over citizenship from the colonial period to the present, analyzing evolving conceptions of citizenship as legal status, as rights, and as identity. The early optimism that a new India could be fashioned out of an unequal and diverse society led to a formally inclusive legal membership, an impulse to social and economic rights, and group-differentiated citizenship. Today, these policies to create a civic community of equals are losing support in a climate of social intolerance and weak solidarity. Once seen by Western political scientists as an anomaly, India today is a site where every major theoretical debate about citizenship is being enacted in practice, and one that no global discussion of the subject can afford to ignore.

Author: Amy E. Lerman
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022613797X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 343

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Book Description
The numbers are staggering: One-third of America’s adult population has passed through the criminal justice system and now has a criminal record. Many more were never convicted, but are nonetheless subject to surveillance by the state. Never before has the American government maintained so vast a network of institutions dedicated solely to the control and confinement of its citizens. A provocative assessment of the contemporary carceral state for American democracy, Arresting Citizenship argues that the broad reach of the criminal justice system has fundamentally recast the relation between citizen and state, resulting in a sizable—and growing—group of second-class citizens. From police stops to court cases and incarceration, at each stage of the criminal justice system individuals belonging to this disempowered group come to experience a state-within-a-state that reflects few of the country’s core democratic values. Through scores of interviews, along with analyses of survey data, Amy E. Lerman and Vesla M. Weaver show how this contact with police, courts, and prisons decreases faith in the capacity of American political institutions to respond to citizens’ concerns and diminishes the sense of full and equal citizenship—even for those who have not been found guilty of any crime. The effects of this increasingly frequent contact with the criminal justice system are wide-ranging—and pernicious—and Lerman and Weaver go on to offer concrete proposals for reforms to reincorporate this large group of citizens as active participants in American civic and political life.

Author: Vera Schatten Coelho
Publisher: Zed Books Ltd.
ISBN: 1848139152
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 214

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Book Description
Mobilizing for Democracy is an in-depth study into how ordinary citizens and their organizations mobilize to deepen democracy. Featuring a collection of new empirical case studies from Angola, Bangladesh, Brazil, India, Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa, this important new book illustrates how forms of political mobilization, such as protests, social participation, activism, litigation and lobbying, engage with the formal institutions of representative democracy in ways that are core to the development of democratic politics. No other volume has brought together examples from such a broad Southern spectrum and covering such a diversity of actors: rural and urban dwellers, transnational activists, religious groups, politicians and social leaders. The cases illuminate the crucial contribution that citizen mobilization makes to democratization and the building of state institutions, and reflect the uneasy relationship between citizens and the institutions that are designed to foster their political participation.

Author: Ayelet Shachar
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192528424
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 854

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Book Description
Contrary to predictions that it would become increasingly redundant in a globalizing world, citizenship is back with a vengeance. The Oxford Handbook of Citizenship brings together leading experts in law, philosophy, political science, economics, sociology, and geography to provide a multidisciplinary, comparative discussion of different dimensions of citizenship: as legal status and political membership; as rights and obligations; as identity and belonging; as civic virtues and practices of engagement; and as a discourse of political and social equality or responsibility for a common good. The contributors engage with some of the oldest normative and substantive quandaries in the literature, dilemmas that have renewed salience in today's political climate. As well as setting an agenda for future theoretical and empirical explorations, this Handbook explores the state of citizenship today in an accessible and engaging manner that will appeal to a wide academic and non-academic audience. Chapters highlight variations in citizenship regimes practiced in different countries, from immigrant states to 'non-western' contexts, from settler societies to newly independent states, attentive to both migrants and those who never cross an international border. Topics include the 'selling' of citizenship, multilevel citizenship, in-between statuses, citizenship laws, post-colonial citizenship, the impact of technological change on citizenship, and other cutting-edge issues. This Handbook is the major reference work for those engaged with citizenship from a legal, political, and cultural perspective. Written by the most knowledgeable senior and emerging scholars in their fields, this comprehensive volume offers state-of-the-art analyses of the main challenges and prospects of citizenship in today's world of increased migration and globalization. Special emphasis is put on the question of whether inclusive and egalitarian citizenship can provide political legitimacy in a turbulent world of exploding social inequality and resurgent populism.

Author: U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services
Publisher: Government Printing Office
ISBN: 9780160831188
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 36

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Book Description
"Learn About the United States" is intended to help permanent residents gain a deeper understanding of U.S. history and government as they prepare to become citizens. The product presents 96 short lessons, based on the sample questions from which the civics portion of the naturalization test is drawn. An audio CD that allows students to listen to the questions, answers, and civics lessons read aloud is also included. For immigrants preparing to naturalize, the chance to learn more about the history and government of the United States will make their journey toward citizenship a more meaningful one.

Author: Dimitry Kochenov
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262537796
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 346

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Book Description
The story of citizenship as a tale not of liberation, dignity, and nationhood but of complacency, hypocrisy, and domination. The glorification of citizenship is a given in today's world, part of a civic narrative that invokes liberation, dignity, and nationhood. In reality, explains Dimitry Kochenov, citizenship is a story of complacency, hypocrisy, and domination, flattering to citizens and demeaning for noncitizens. In this volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, Kochenov explains the state of citizenship in the modern world. Kochenov offers a critical introduction to a subject most often regarded uncritically, describing what citizenship is, what it entails, how it came about, and how its role in the world has been changing. He examines four key elements of the concept: status, considering how and why the status of citizenship is extended, what function it serves, and who is left behind; rights, particularly the right to live and work in a state; duties, and what it means to be a “good citizen”; and politics, as enacted in the granting and enjoyment of citizenship. Citizenship promises to apply the attractive ideas of dignity, equality, and human worth—but to strictly separated groups of individuals. Those outside the separation aren't citizens as currently understood, and they do not belong. Citizenship, Kochenov warns, is too often a legal tool that justifies violence, humiliation, and exclusion.

Author: Ronald Beiner
Publisher: UBC Press
ISBN: 9780774809870
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
Liberals believe that the purpose of politics is to guarantee that individuals do not face unfair impediments in pursuing the lives they choose for themselves. Nationalists believe that the purpose of politics is to ensure that a people's sense of authentic nationhood wins full expression in powers of collective sovereignty or self-rule. Both of these forms of political commitment yield world-transforming political philosophies, but do either of these visions do adequate justice to a philosophically robust ideal of shared citizenship and civic membership? In Liberalism, Nationalism, Citizenship, Ronald Beiner engages critically with a wide range of important political thinkers and current debates in light of the Aristotelean idea that shared citizenship is an essential human calling. Virtually every aspect of contemporary political experience - globalization, international migration, secessionist movements, the politics of multiculturalism - pose urgent challenges to modern citizenship. Beiner's work on the philosophy of citizenship is essential reading not just for students of politics and political philosophy, but for all those who rightly sense that these kinds of recent challen

Author: Ming Hsu Chen
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 1503612767
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 239

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Book Description
Pursuing Citizenship in the Enforcement Era provides readers with the everyday perspectives of immigrants on what it is like to try to integrate into American society during a time when immigration policy is focused on enforcement and exclusion. The law says that everyone who is not a citizen is an alien. But the social reality is more complicated. Ming Hsu Chen argues that the citizen/alien binary should instead be reframed as a spectrum of citizenship, a concept that emphasizes continuities between the otherwise distinct experiences of membership and belonging for immigrants seeking to become citizens. To understand citizenship from the perspective of noncitizens, this book utilizes interviews with more than one-hundred immigrants of varying legal statuses about their attempts to integrate economically, socially, politically, and legally during a modern era of intense immigration enforcement. Studying the experiences of green card holders, refugees, military service members, temporary workers, international students, and undocumented immigrants uncovers the common plight that underlies their distinctions: limited legal status breeds a sense of citizenship insecurity for all immigrants that inhibits their full integration into society. Bringing together theories of citizenship with empirical data on integration and analysis of contemporary policy, Chen builds a case that formal citizenship status matters more than ever during times of enforcement and argues for constructing pathways to citizenship that enhance both formal and substantive equality of immigrants.

Author: Thomas Janoski
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108148093
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 1412

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Book Description
Political sociology is a large and expanding field with many new developments, and The New Handbook of Political Sociology supplies the knowledge necessary to keep up with this exciting field. Written by a distinguished group of leading scholars in sociology, this volume provides a survey of this vibrant and growing field in the new millennium. The Handbook presents the field in six parts: theories of political sociology, the information and knowledge explosion, the state and political parties, civil society and citizenship, the varieties of state policies, and globalization and how it affects politics. Covering all subareas of the field with both theoretical orientations and empirical studies, it directly connects scholars with current research in the field. A total reconceptualization of the first edition, the new handbook features nine additional chapters and highlights the impact of the media and big data.