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This article identifies children’s rights as a neglected area in citizenship literature, both in socio-legal scholarship and in British nationality case law. It analyzes reasons for this neglect and posits that there exists a dichotomy in approaches to the wellbeing of children in the UK. The characterization of children’s interests and subsequent obligations owed by states to children are different in nationality law from other areas of law, notably, family law. Through our case study of the registration of children as British citizens, we argue that in the UK formal legal membership may appear achievable “in the books” but remains elusive in “law in action.” Children’s interests should be just as central to citizenship studies and nationality case law as to family law cases. A new approach to acquisition of British citizenship by children, with the best interests of the child as a critical evaluative principle at the heart of decision making, will usher in a new era. In the absence of such reconceptualization, children remain passive subjects of nationality law and their voices are unheard in processes of acquisition of citizenship.

This chapter discusses the extension of legal equality between male and female citizens in four states in North Africa – Tunisia, Egypt, Morocco and Algeria – through one specific lens: A married woman's legal capacity to initiate and obtain divorce without the husband's consent. Building on the works of Stein Rokkan and Reinhard Bendix on the expansion of citizenship to the ‘lower classes’, it is argued that amendments in divorce law by introducing in-court divorce for women, in addition to out-of-court divorce, is a significant institutional change that extends legal equality between men and women. The introduction of in-court divorce expands female citizenship by bolstering woman's juridical autonomy and capacity in state law. Changes in divorce laws are thus part of state centralization by means of standardizing rules that regulate family law through public administrative institutions rather than religious organizations. Two questions are addressed: First, how did amendments in divorce laws occur after independence? Second, in which ways did women's bolstered legal capacity in divorce have a spill over effect on reforms in other patriarchal state laws? Based on observations on sequences of change in four states in North Africa, it is argued that amendments that equalize between men and women in divorce should be seen as a key driver for reforms in other state laws, that reduce legal inequality between male and female citizens. In all four states, women's citizenship was extended in nationality law and criminal law after amendments in divorce law gave women unilateral legal power to exit a marital relationship.

The purpose of this paper is to critically examine and reformulate T.H. Marshall's concept of industrial citizenship, and apply the reformulated model to a case study of the UK.

Marshall's conceptualisation of industrial citizenship is criticised for neglecting the rights of unions as collective rights and for treating industrial citizenship as an aggregation of individual rights. Subsequent attempts to use the idea of industrial citizenship are similarly flawed. A case study of changes to industrial citizenship in the UK in the 1980s and 1990s is used to develop the new model and provide evidence in support of it.

An alternative conceptualisation of industrial citizenship is presented that outlines collective and individual powers, obligations, liberties, constraints, immunities and liabilities. This model is illustrated using examples from the Conservative governments' industrial relations legislation of the 1980s and 1990s.

Discussions and applications of T.H. Marshall's concept of industrial citizenship are few and far between. The paper proposes an original re‐conceptualisation specifying the collective rights of unions in the British regime of industrial citizenship. This new concept of industrial citizenship is then applied to the radical changes in industrial relations legislation in the UK in the 1980s and 1990s.

Citizenship, as Sassen notes, is embedded in the nation-state, but by that logic cannot be “denationalized,” as she also claims in a contrarian move. While we can all agree that transnational regimes of virtue or corporate largess are extending protections and services to a variety of marginalized groups regardless of national borders, these regimes do not replace but rather seek to supplement citizenship orders. Human rights regimes do not displace citizenship because they do not exist as formal legal relationship with enforceable rights and obligations to a territorialized citizenry. By contrast, only states can enforce (human rights as) citizenship rights. Certain conceptualizations of citizenship can be influenced by the discourse of human rights (as has been the case in China), but the transnational regimes of virtue cannot disembed citizenship from the state.

This chapter proposes a sociological reconstruction of the emergence of citizenship as a source of legitimacy for political institutions, and it focuses on examining the historical processes that first gave rise to this concept. It explains how citizenship has its origins in the transformation of feudal law, a process that culminated in patterns of military organization that characterized the rise of the early modern state in Europe. On this basis, it describes how the growth of constitutional democracy was integrally marked by the militarization of society and explains that military pressures have remained palpable in constitutional constructions of citizenship. In particular, it argues that, through the early growth of democracy, national citizenship practices were closely linked to global conflicts, and they tended to replicate such conflicts in national contexts. It concludes by showing how more recent processes of constitutional norm formation, based largely in international human rights law, have acted to soften the military dimensions of citizenship.

The changing articulation of citizenship is traced, both in relation to the national and the global. Conceiving of citizenship as an incompletely theorized contract between the state and the citizen, and locating her inquiry at that point of incompleteness, the author opens up the discussion to the making of the political. The central thesis is that the incompleteness of the formal institution of citizenship makes it possible for the outsider to claim for expanded inclusions. It is the outsider, whether a minoritized citizen or an immigrant, who has kept changing the institution across time and space. Times of unsettlement make this particularly visible. The current period of globalization is one such period, even though this is a partial unsettlement. New types of political actors are taking shape, changing the relationship between the state and the individual, and remaking the political.

The prevalence of anti-EU integration and anti-immigration rhetoric across the continent, the increased presence of Eurosceptic parties in the European Parliament, and most importantly Brexit suggest that the European Union is having an existential crisis. This chapter debates the role of the EU citizenship regime on this crisis, by resting its central thesis that there is a fundamental mismatch between the way that EU citizenship is at present derived from Member State citizenship, and the transnational affinity of the EU citizenry that is invited by the internal market and migration. As a remedy, the chapter projects a supranational EU citizenship regime that coexists with the current EU citizenship regime. Focussing on the social and political imperatives, the chapter brings forward tangible policy recommendations for the proposed EU citizenship regime and expounds how it can be an effective policy instrument for the EU’s internal and external struggles.

Dual nationality rights have been historically viewed with suspicion in immigrants' receiving countries, on the grounds, among other reasons, that they impede immigrants' assimilation. The debate around dual nationality, however, has taken place largely in the absence of empirical evidence. This paper fills this gap by exploring how recognition of dual nationality rights by sending countries affects assimilation of immigrants already residing in the United States. In the 1990s, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Costa Rica, and Brazil passed dual citizenship laws granting their expatriates the right to naturalize in the receiving country without losing their nationality of origin. On data from the 1990 and 2000 US censuses, immigrants recently granted dual nationality rights are found to be more likely to naturalize relative to immigrants from other Latin American countries. They also experience employment gains and drops in welfare use, suggesting that dual citizenship rights may promote economic assimilation. The effects are the largest among more educated individuals, who also experience earnings gains and an increased likelihood to be homeowners. These findings are consistent with education being correlated with higher career and income benefits from transnational activities. Finally, when studying the effects of dual citizenship on marriage and fertility, we find a negative impact on the number of young children living in the home, suggesting that also in this respect assimilation to US norms is taking place.

The insights of T. H. Marshall and Pierre Bourdieu are drawn upon, integrated and extended to show how social spending policies have been key sites for historical struggles over the boundaries and rights of American citizenship. In the 19th century, paupers forfeited their civil and political rights in exchange for relief. Rather than break definitively with this legacy, major policy innovations in the United States that expanded state involvement in social provision generated struggles over whether to model the new policies on or distinguish them from traditional poor relief. At stake in these struggles were the citizenship status and rights of the policies’ clients. Both the emergence of such citizenship struggles and their outcomes are explained. These struggles emerged when policy innovations created new groups of clients, the new policy treated clients in contradictory ways and policy elites formed ties to social movements with stakes in the status and rights of the policy's clients. The outcomes of the struggles have been shaped by the institutional structure of the policy and the manner and extent to which the policy became entangled in racial politics. Historical evidence for these claims is provided by a case study of the Works Progress Administration, an important but understudied component of the New Deal welfare state.

Drawing on the work of Hannah Arendt, this essay seeks to show (illegal) alienage in U.S. law in new lights. First, this essay demonstrates how the emergence of a positive law of citizenship, through which the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed the importance of citizenship for rights, is a relatively recent and historically contingent development in U.S. law. Second, this essay shows how the concept of “sovereignty” plays different roles in the U.S. positive law of citizenship and (illegal) alienage. This essay seeks also to evaluate the limits and possibilities of alternatives to “sovereignty” as grounds for the rights of noncitizens in the United States. And it seeks to make the point that the apolitical valences of “territoriality” and “social productivity” vis-à-vis “sovereignty” in U.S. law render illegal alienage in particular misleadingly outside the realm of the political. Ultimately, this essay seeks also to challenge understandings of “sovereignty” in political theory by integrating law and political theory, and to recast legal discourse on illegal alienage by turning attention to “sovereignty.”