Engin Isin “Outline of a critical theory of citizenship”

Based on a forthcoming book Citizenship (Routledge, 2024), which has developed over thirty years, we will outline a critical theory of citizenship, with an emphasis on how citizenship institutes power relations and organizes the rights and obligations of those who become its subjects. Whether it is the question of the rights of animals, children, migrants, minorities, mothers, mountains or workers, and whether such rights are protected or guaranteed by national law, international law, or human rights law, citizenship has already indelibly marked the 21st century. As an institution, citizenship governs the relationship between a polity and its peoples by dividing them into citizens and noncitizens, with differentiated rights and obligations. So necessarily, we will argue, citizenship is an institution of domination and emancipation that brings into play the struggles of those who want to protect certain privileges and the struggles of those who are against being caught in either second-class or noncitizen categories. We will suggest that deconstructing and decolonising dominant theories and practices of citizenship, a critical theory of citizenship must, therefore, not only analyse intersecting rights, but also connect citizenship to these broader social struggles. For it is these struggles that give meaning to citizenship itself. This will be of interest to scholars and students in sociolegal studies, anthropology, sociology, politics, geography, and those working in citizenship, migration and refugee studies.

Engin Isin is Professor Emeritus in International Politics, School of Politics and International Relations, Queen Mary University of London. A professor of social science (1996-2002) and Canada Research Chair (2002-2006) at York University, a professor of politics at The Open University (2007-2016), and a Professor of International Politics at Queen Mary University of London (2017-2022).

Engin has written, spoken, and taught on subjectivity, performativity, enactments and movements that emancipate peoples and on how cities, states, and empires accumulate subject peoples by dispossession, colonisation, and assimilation. Engin has undertaken historical and sociological studies of British imperial and colonial practices in Africa, America, Canada, Asia and Middle East, Ottoman imperial and colonial practices in Europe and Middle East and North Africa and French colonialism in Quebec, Haiti, and Algeria. Engin has also written about data empires of the 21st century.

The driving force in all these studies has been the struggle between imperial, colonial or national designs for conduct of people and how people subvert these designs by performative acts and invent political subjectivities. Engin’s work always asks how people make themselves subjects of politics through acts, movements, and struggles and explores the tension between emancipatory possibilities of citizenship and citizenship as an institution of domination.

Engin’s books include Cities Without Citizens (1992), Citizenship and Identity (1999) with Patricia Wood, Being Political (2002), Citizens Without Frontiers (2012), and Being Digital Citizens (2020 2nd ed.) with Evelyn Ruppert. He has edited Acts of Citizenship (2008) with Greg Nielsen, Enacting European Citizenship (2013) with Michael Saward, and Routledge Handbook of Global Citizenship Studies (2014) with Peter Nyers. His latest edited books are Citizenship after Orientalism: Transforming Political Theory (2015) and Data Politics: Worlds, Subjects, Rights (2019) with Didier Bigo and Evelyn Ruppert.