Response to Reviewers

Engin Isin, (Professor Emeritus of International Politics, Queen Mary University of London)

I’m incredibly grateful for these insightful and inspiring reviews. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed reading them and I admire their thoughtful perspectives.

At a time when authoritarianism is no longer just a threat but a rapidly coalescing countermovement against the hard-won rights of marginalised and oppressed peoples worldwide, developing a critical theory of citizenship is a collective responsibility. While this countermovement against subjugated peoples isn’t new, its strategies and technologies have evolved significantly. These include data surveillance and domestic counterinsurgency, which emerged during this century’s extractive wars occupations and invasions of colonies and are now being used in metropoles. Geographical and temporal location shapes how we experience these counterinsurgencies. Palestinians face it most tragically as genocide, Ukrainians as Russian state terrorism and those in metropoles increasingly face criminalisation of dissent in various settings like cities, universities, schools, and media. While the dominant narrative presents these struggles as fragmented and isolated, they are also driven by grand narratives of civilisational wars and existential struggles between nations. We’re increasingly drawn into a planetary war.

Writing a book under these conditions about citizenship is an estranging experience. It feels pointless to discuss citizenship as a government apparatus that simultaneously dominates and emancipates. However, these reviews are encouraging and I’m grateful for their generous thoughts. This doesn’t mean I didn’t recognise the insightful and nuanced criticisms of the book’s shortcomings. Quite the opposite; I was inspired when the reviews articulated so clearly what the book could have achieved for a stronger and more compelling argument. For example:

Pauline is right that the book leaves the planetary condition as a question and fails to explain how it may affect the function of citizenship as an apparatus of government. Pauline is also right to ask how the planetary condition, with the emergence of the non-human, affects feminist and queer thinking on citizenship. Pauline reminds me that we need to do more urgent thinking before authoritarianism appropriates the planetary condition and transforms its narrative from denialism into geo-engineering projects. As Pauline notes, without feminist and queer theorising of identity as multiple, fluid, and dynamic subject-position, a book like Citizenship would not have been possible. But now we will need to think about the non-human with all the sensibilities that we learned from not only feminist and queer scholars but also indigenous and decolonial scholars.

Koen’s delicate and precise critique of progressivism highlights the precarious situation we find ourselves in. We may have thought that the feminist and queer movements have progressed by the inclusion of their rights in the legal and political order, but we now face the prospect of not only losing those rights (especially abortion, voting, trans) but also regressing from even the protections that were there before such rights were won. What Koen forces me to ask is the hard question: what if we were actually buying time for dominant powers as they regrouped by making claims to fragmented and dissipated rights that did not coalesce into revolutionary change? Koen calls for a radical or revolutionary politics that short-circuits power structures of citizenship. We thought that feminist, queers, indigenous, and decolonial struggles were doing exactly that, but then again, we need to reconsider our histories. What Koen asks is a question that haunts many revolutionary movements: when and how do we become incorporated into structures of power and reproduce them? As Pauline asks in her review, this is perhaps where we need a revolutionary conception of citizenship. As Koen reminds us it is not only because we now recognise critique has significant limits but also the dominant conception of the revolutionary subject responding to the question ‘what is to be done’ is inadequate.

I sincerely hope that Jo’s carefully crafted message about the book will reach critical legal scholars. When the editors invited me to contribute to the book series New Trajectories in Law, my immediate reaction was that although I draw from critical legal scholarship, my work cannot be seen as legal, let alone critical legal scholarship. The editors took me to task on this, enabled me to see the internal relation of my work to critical legal scholarship, and unburdened me from this question. This left me with the challenging task of articulating a critical theory of citizenship. This was a task I accepted with more trepidation than jubilation. Jo captures this tension with a really great effect. In just a few paragraphs, Jo articulates so well how Citizenship theorises law by showing it as an apparatus of government, distinguishing between the laws of citizenship and citizenship laws, and between laws of citizenship and practices of citizenship. It is not that Jo is convinced these distinctions can be maintained successfully when studying the effects of the law. But Jo shows by making such distinctions as between ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ laws, we can conduct more subtle and nuanced studies of citizenship and law. Thus, she teases a key point from the book by saying that ‘perhaps, in fact, the whole concept of citizenship law is not as susceptible to drawing neat distinctions as might be thought at first sight.’

All this and more comes to sharper relief when Jelena and Igor illustrate a specific experience of a struggle over citizenship in Serbia. Their anatomy of a student movement is hopeful but cautious. They deftly show how the eruption of a series of events, directly resulting from students protesting, occupying their faculties, and self-organising through so-called plenums, connected all forms of oppression that remained separate and fragmented into an interconnected struggle—a scandal of politics when a movement articulates clearly what is at stake as a common ground. They show how such an eruption can start from modest and minimal demands and grow into transformative, if not revolutionary, claims. Calling for resistance as effective and enduring organising with the most mundane and thus most obvious habits and practices for transforming them into revolutionary claims, Jelena and Igor clarify the task in hand. They remind us that resistances for connecting struggles against authoritarianism for building a larger force are hard, but it is enduring work that we become aware when its results erupt.

A generation of critical scholars on citizenship has revealed its role in dividing a polity into citizens and non-citizens as categories and classes. This institution has profoundly shaped the 21st century if not our imaginary of politics in the last 25 centuries. We now better understand how it governs the relationship between a polity and its people, granting differentiated rights and obligations while simultaneously categorising and classifying the world’s peoples. A critical theory of citizenship demonstrates its dual nature as both an institution of domination and emancipation. This involves examining the struggles of those who protect privileges and those who oppose being categorised or classified as second-class or non-citizens. We are collectively developing such a theory by analysing intersecting rights and connecting them to broader social struggles, which provide meaning to citizenship itself. As my reviewers amply demonstrate, if the book contributes to this collective endeavour, it also highlights the immense theoretical and practical challenges ahead.