Semi-Citizenship in Democratic Politics

This book introduces the concept of semi-citizenship into debates about people who hold some but not all elements of citizenship.

Elizabeth F. Cohen (Author)

9780521768993, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 26 October 2009

248 pages
23.5 x 16 x 2 cm, 0.47 kg

'In this cogently argued and carefully written work, Elizabeth F. Cohen explores how modern citizenship as a system of entitlements inevitably creates fuzzy and ambiguous bounders around inclusion and exclusion. Cohen generates a new vocabulary to throw sharp analytical light on these conundrums. A work of considerable intellectual maturity, it offers an innovative framework for examining the necessary compromises of liberal democracy around the uncertainties of modern political membership via the legal framework of citizenship. The result is a creative and productive work on the contemporary inadequacies of both the theory and the institutions of citizenship.' Bryan S. Turner, Wellesley College

In every democratic polity there exist individuals and groups who hold some but not all of the essential elements of citizenship. Scholars who study citizenship routinely grasp for shared concepts and language that identify forms of membership held by migrants, children, the disabled, and other groups of individuals who, for various reasons, are neither full citizens nor non-citizens. This book introduces the concept of semi-citizenship as a means to dramatically advance debates about individuals who hold some but not all elements of full democratic citizenship. By analytically classifying the rights of citizenship and their various combinations, scholars can typologize semi-citizens and produce comparisons of different kinds of semi-citizenships and of semi-citizenships in different states. The book uses theoretical analysis, historical examples, and contemporary cases of semi-citizenship to illustrate how normative and governmental doctrines of citizenship converge and conflict, making semi-citizenship an enduring and inevitable part of democratic politics.

1. Introduction
2. The myth of full citizenship
3. An introduction to semi-citizenship
4. Logics of semi-citizenship
5. Nationalities within nation-states
6. The disaggregation of relative rights
7. Conclusion
Bibliography.

Subject Areas: Political structures: democracy [JPHV], Political science & theory [JPA], History of ideas [JFCX]