Trevor Stack “Citizenship and Civilization: Civil Horizons of Political Community”

My longstanding research on citizenship as focused on the exercise of political authority, and specifically on how and when the governed engage and are engaged in the exercise of authority over them, to the extent they are considered members of a polity, which is how I understand political community. To study political community requires keen attention to who or what exercises political authority, and over whom, prior to appraising the myriad ways in which those subject to political authority are variously invoked and involved in its exercise – complicating any attempt to sort authority’s exercise into simple binaries like “democratic” and “authoritarian” (Stack and Luminiello 2022). This approach leads us to rich accounts of how political authority is exercised, and of how those subject to political authority are engaged in its exercise over them: in ways that vary not only between citizens and non-citizens but between diverse categories of citizen, and which shift over time (Holston 2008).

To enrich further my understanding of citizenship and political community, I draw on Jeffrey Alexander’s work The Civil Sphere (2008), which helps me to apprehend what I term political community’s civil horizons. Alexander draws our attention to discourses of moral civilization, which hold up standards of proper conduct and mutual treatment, understood to bind actors deemed civilized, even if they differ and conflict in every other way. States, for example, commonly claim that the standards of conduct they demand of citizens are not sui generis but reflect widely accepted civilizational norms. Citizens may pitch their expectations of states, and of each other, in similar terms. Further, states and citizens alike may call for treatment of non-citizens as civilized beings, for example, as political refugees. Conversely, they may distinguish between more and less civil citizens – this is one way in which citizens are differentiated. Thus, the civil horizons of political community stretch beyond but also cut across political community, as they shape the relationship between those who govern and the governed.

I will demonstrate the value of my approach to political community’s civil horizons through empirical examples.