The Future of Citizenship

Contributors from a range of disciplines discuss the evolving meaning of citizenship, and the possible future of a global “citizenship by voluntary association.”

The ongoing expansion in the field of citizenship studies is one of the most important and remarkable recent trends in social sciences and humanities research. Some scholars raise questions about citizenship within a larger critique of liberalism and its institutions; others point to citizenship's inherently exclusionary nature. This volume examines—without advocating any ideological agenda—the evolving meaning of citizenship, with an eye to the future. The contributors—writing from the perspectives of anthropology, sociology, psychology, law, history, and other disciplines—examine four modes of citizenship in comparative global context: Differentiated, Divided, Dispersed, and Deterritorialized. The future of citizenship, they argue, may be a worldwide “citizenship by association,” tantamount to a global civic interface.