On denationalization as neoliberalization: Biopolitics, class interest, and the incompleteness of citizenship

Abstract

How is the global embedded in the national? How do national institutions enable global relations? And how in turn is citizenship being transformed as a social, political, and legal institution amidst these two-way ties? These are some of the important questions at the heart of Saskia Sassen's paper examining the “denationalization” of citizenship. Drawing on a wide diversity of theoretical literatures, and complicating simple sound bites with her sensitivity to the contested character of key concepts, Sassen here offers inspiration and provocation in equal amounts. Her approach is inspiring in part because of the insistence from the start that it is the always-incomplete nature of citizenship that allows for it to be both developed and studied as an outcome of diverse insurgencies against the exclusion and marginalization of the non-citizen or sub-citizen. Sassen thus models a way of theorizing citizenship that problematizes its enclosure as a fixed and finalized socio-legal institution. Instead, she shows how it can be explored as a congeries of ongoing and open-ended citizenship struggles or projects. These ongoing processes of redefinition, she suggests, have a tendential trajectory, and it is with Sassen's attempt to chart this trajectory that her paper makes its particular provocation: namely the argument that today, in the context of globalization, we are seeing citizenship becoming increasingly denationalized.

Citation

Sparke, M. (2009), "On denationalization as neoliberalization: Biopolitics, class interest, and the incompleteness of citizenship", Davis, D.E. and Go, J. (Ed.) Political Power and Social Theory (Political Power and Social Theory, Vol. 20), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 287-300. https://doi.org/10.1108/S0198-8719(2009)0000020017