CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2010
| Author | Sindrestean, Alexandra |
|---|---|
| Title | The Post, the Trans, and the Cosmo of Citizenship. A critical Study on Seyla Benhabib |
| Summary | This paper is concerned with recent theoretical developments that seek to address state citizenship in the context of migration. The scholarly preoccupation is twofold: on one hand, there is a sociological interest in tackling with actual changes of state practices in terms of citizenship and immigration laws; on the other hand, new conceptualizations regard the analytical level and are directed towards questioning conceptual categories we rely on when we reflect upon reality. Contemporary migration appears as a challenge to the nation-state. Migrants are supposed to disturb the assumption on which the nation-state functions: the coincidence between people, territory and political authority. If we take for example the case of Gellner, one of the most influential theoreticians on nation state, nationalism is a political principle that assumes the political unit, i.e. state, to be coterminous with the cultural unit – nation. This becomes especially relevant when one considers the aspect of citizenship. Citizenship, therefore, is not strictly just a legal concept, and can lend itself to various interpretative schemes. My stake in this paper concerns the scholarship that reflects, questions, and re-configures citizenship as a conceptual category in the ambit of political theory. In this sense, I focus broadly on conceptualizations that explicitly read into citizenship national identification, national attachment or national belongingness and proceed from thereon to indicate how migration has a de-nationalizing effect on how citizenship is understood. More particularly, I concentrate on Seyla Benhabib and her cosmopolitan re-writing of citizenship. The reason for choosing Benhabib is twofold. First of all, I intend to question how her professed moral-political analysis (moral universalism and moral-political equality) spells out citizenship. Secondly, I try to partially vindicate what I think is innovative in Benhabib’s work: her argumentative line of cosmopolitan justice leads her to address the just distribution of political membership and envisage naturalization as human right. |
| Supervisor | Szabolcs Pogonyi |
| Department | Nationalism Studies MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2010/sindrestean_alexandra.pdf |
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