REVIEW

Planetary citizenship and rethinking feminisms

Pauline Stoltz, Kristianstad University

In Citizenship (2024) Engin Isin does not provide a coherent or stable concept of citizenship. Rather, he tries to understand how citizenship functions and transforms (p. viii). Isin articulates “…a concept of citizenship as an apparatus of government for partitioning, individuating, and aggregating peoples and the struggles of domination and emancipation that proceed from it” (p. 8). Accounting for both the dominating effects and emancipatory possibilities through key sites of struggle, he aims at “…articulating a concept of citizenship as a revolutionary subjectivity learning from transversal and planetary movements” (p. 9).

Isin has written a highly recommendable study on the reasons and methods of studying citizenship as an apparatus of government and what is at stake when studying citizenship in general (p. 107). It may also come as no surprise to those familiar with his work, that the study has lots to offer feminist scholars. Isin makes ample and very good use of feminist tools and approaches and engages in a serious way with feminist concerns – as he does with those of others who are involved in struggles over inequalities and injustices in relation to citizenship. Isin is an ‘activist scholar’ who performs “thinking politically about citizenship” as well as “political thinking about citizenship” (Isin 2024a and b). The current study will be as useful for feminists as his previous work (Siim and Stoltz 2024).

In addition, given my own interest in transnational aspects of memory politics, I like the original and fresh ways in which notions of time, place and space appear in the study. He does this for example, when he discusses the imaginary of the west as the originator of polis and subsequently of capitalism and how this conceals the imperial origins of the bourgeois citizen subject. Another interesting and relevant example is how the struggles for decolonising indigenous peoples have been crucial for understanding the relations between sovereignty and coloniality (pp. 29-30).

Having said this, there were two matters that slightly confused me about the book. First the concept of citizenship as a revolutionary subjectivity and second the relationship between planetary and gendered citizenship. Fortunately, my confusion stimulated me to think further which is often a good thing.

Planetary Citizenship? Still a question

The first point of confusion concerns the “… articulation of a concept of citizenship as a revolutionary subjectivity learning from transversal and planetary movements” (p. 9) and notably the part about planetary citizenship as a revolutionary subjectivity. Already reading through the table of contents, I noticed that the conclusion has the subtitle “Planetary citizenship?”. This made me expect that planetary citizenship would be (one of) the new trajectories in law that Isin had identified and perhaps even the most important trajectory in the book. Also given that the title of the book series is New Trajectories in Law. It all sounded like an exciting prospect.

However, while reading the study, – as well as the chapter in The Palgrave Handbook of Gender and Citizenship  which also ends with hints at planetary citizenship -, I was somewhat disappointed. Although planetary citizenship is mentioned on several occasions throughout the study, the argument does not seem to systematically lead up to a conclusion about it. It left me wondering how planetary politics (Manners 2024; Marsili 2020; Litfin 2003) and planetary justice (Pedersen, Stevis and Kalfagianni 2024; Kalfagianni, Pedersen and Stevis 2024; Agathangelou 2024; Ryder, Kojolab and Pellowc 2024) could be linked to planetary citizenship? What is the meaning of the planetary in contexts of authoritarian and democratic politics and citizenship, given the struggles of domination and emancipation he is concerned with?

The second point is about the links between planetary and gendered citizenship. Gendered citizenship provides a gender perspective on citizenship, where gender is understood as a social construction and category that relates to other categories such as sexuality, ‘race’, class, religion, indigeneity, nationality, and ability (Stoltz 2024). I wonder what are the advantages and disadvantages of moves towards planetary imaginaries for gendered citizenship or the other way around, for gendered, intersectional or queer imaginaries of planetary citizenship? What should be in focus and what in the background is a strategic question that influences our understanding of the revolutionary potential of citizenship.

The answers to these questions are not self-evident for me and neither do they seem to be for Isin. Consequently, at the end of the book, it is still unclear whether planetary citizenship is a new trajectory for citizenship or not. “Are we witnessing the birth of planetary citizens?”, asks Isin in the conclusion,and“can planetary citizens become revolutionary citizens?”(p. 104). He is careful, since “there are dangers in the progressive inclusion of nonhuman species in citizenship as an apparatus of government without understanding how its fractures and lines assemble this apparatus” (p. 104). Although such a birth might be dangerous, I think the argument about planetary citizenship as a way forward can be developed much further. Therefore, I found regrettable this lack of explanation or further discussion of what planetary citizenship as revolutionary could entail.

Relationship between planetary citizenship, ‘nature’, and gendered citizenship

Simultaneously, the introduction of planetary citizenship raises several questions. Most of all, it made me wonder if and, in that case, how and why a planetary perspective upon citizenship could help me, and others with an interest in gendered citizenship, in rethinking feminist and queer struggles over citizenship, justice and equality? Could and/or should a planetary perspective move activist scholars of gender and citizenship away from gender equal citizenship and gendered social justice to embrace for example planetary gender equality and planetary or ecosocial gendered justice?

Relatedly, how about the link between gender and nature in planetary citizenship, since this link can be described as constrained in struggles over citizenship over time, place and space? This seems important at the time of writing, when essentialist anti-gender movements across the globe want to see women in their ‘natural’ place at home as stay-at-home moms with preferably more and more children and when LGBTQ+ people are not considered ‘natural’ and treated as nonhumans (again). Many of us thought we had moved beyond at least some struggles about gender and sexual rights a while ago, but it turns out these partial social movement successes are not leading us in a straight line away from sexism and homophobia towards rights and recognition. The current messiness of social and political transformations of citizenship is unmistakable and confirms what Isin understands as the ways in which citizenship functions and transforms.

What I found further interesting in this context of messiness or rupture of citizenship relations is the discussion of the non-human. Both citizenship and gendered citizenship often have the human at the core of its focus of attention. However, a planetary approach to citizenship is in addition interested in the non-human (pp. 34-35). Importantly, as Isin emphasises: “citizenship as an apparatus of government is predicated upon domination of nonhuman species by human species. The modern imaginary of the citizen subject conceals this domination over not only other peoples but also other species”(p. 34). The human species has become the primary agent of climate change, he argues, through extractivism, militarism and colonialism. This has led to the emergence of planetary movements that seek to negotiate a settlement of cohabitation between human species and nonhuman species. It leaves us with questions such as if non-human species should be the subjects of citizenship as an apparatus of government and if we should develop radically transformative relations between human and non-human species and between these species and Planet Earth (p. 35)? If the partitioning of human species into various peoples and peoples into citizens and noncitizens has left non-human species outside politics, what then are the implications of including the non-human in feminist and queer thinking on citizenship?

Such an inclusion appears valid given the negative consequences of climate change for human and nonhuman species alike, but should this inclusion occur in the foreground or the background of feminist and gendered citizenship thinking and social struggles? In the context of citizenship, this also raises questions over rights and whether the rights of nature and nonhuman species contrast with gendered human rights? Epstein argues that the rights of nature can be understood as a pursuit of justice for now living and coming generations of human and non-human life (Epstein 2025, p. 59), but how are gender and related categories relevant in such an analysis?

Can feminist activist scholars engage with a planetary imaginary to rethink pursuits of gender equality and gendered social justice, without losing the core of their raison-d’etre? This seems an important question given that this raison-d’etre is quite often under attack in these days of so called ‘anti-gender’ movements, as I described above. Could the Earth or nature be added as a category to the social categories that are already part of many feminist and queer struggles, for example in intersectional approaches? How can categories of nonhuman species be included in an intersectional analysis of inequalities in citizenship relations? What happens to the social aspect of these categories in the analysis of citizenship?

The answers to these strategic questions differ depending upon the strand of feminism one looks at. In their article on “Climate change through the lens of intersectionality,” Kaijser and Kronsell point out that Black feminist, post-colonial and post-structural feminism have advanced a humanist focus on intersections of, for instance, race, class, and gender, while ecofeminist and animal studies have addressed human–nature power relations, questioning human dominance (Kaijser and Kronsell 2014, p. 419). They point out that the larger feminist community has tended to regard the ideas about human-nature relations, which are central to ecofeminist research, as essentialist and ignore it for what Gaard calls, “the fear of contamination by association” (Gaard 2011, p. 27). However, this means that intersectional thought that emerged in ecofeminism has tended to remain in the background. This is despite the observation that scholars such as Merchant already in 1980s in The Death of Nature point out the linkages between sexism, racism, speciesism, colonialism, mechanism, and capitalism in the appropriation of indigenous people, animals, and land (Merchant 1980; Kaijser and Kronsell 2014, p. 425). The link between attention for humans and the environment framed in a focus on indigeneity, feminisms, and activism is interesting, since this currently receives increasing attention in intersectional studies (see section IIC in Romero 2023).

Indigeneity, again, is also interesting, since Isin finds inspiration in struggles of indigenous peoples, such as when he uses the Idle No More uprising to explain how nonstate and indigenous peoples are subject to citizenship as an apparatus of government (pp. 83-84). He considers this as the continuation of coloniality by means of citizenship as an apparatus of government (p. 30). I concur that indigenous struggles and notably indigenous feminist struggles are highly inspiring in thinking on citizenship. This includes the ways in which such struggles could hint at imaginaries of (gendered) planetary citizenship (Inoue et al 2024; Abu-Laban 2024; Poppel 2024; Kuokkanen 2020; Bang Svendsen 2020; Dankertsen 2020; Green 2017; Tamarkin & Giraudo 2014; Wood 2003).

Final thoughts

Engin Isin has written a stimulating book about citizenship as an apparatus of government, in which he engages with the aggregating of peoples and the struggles that follow from this. He does this in rich ways, that are thought-provoking and useful for researchers with many different interests. My comments come from a selective and subjective reading and where I thought it would have been advantageous to find more elaborations on the considerations over the roles of non-human species and nature in (feminist) citizenship thinking. This is almost too much to ask, perhaps, but that is how it goes with a stimulating book, one wants to keep on engaging with Isin beyond his written word.