Geographies of citizenship and identity in a globalizing world

Globalizing processes of the last half a century have thoroughly reshaped social life around much of the globe. Transformations of citizenship, understood usually as membership in a political community, have been amongst some of the most tangible and contested components of this reshaping. This chapter traces the most important ways in which citizenship, the way it is governed, practiced and imagined in the everyday life, has changed. At the same time, it highlights the most important shifts in how social scientists’ understanding of citizenship has changed in the process. In a chronological fashion, the chapter opens with the early concerns about the challenges that transnational migration has been posing to citizenship, understood throughout the last century as a national institution. Following upon the critiques of the initial assessments of such challenges as amounting to the denationalization of citizenship, I discuss the relationship between contemporary cities and citizenship. Here the chapter stresses geographic and explicitly spatial approaches that have unveiled citizenship as a multi- and inter-scalar political as well as social relation between a subject and the state. The last segment discusses the implications of the integrationist turn in state–migrant population relations of the last two decades for contemporary citizenship formations, including how integrationism is tightly enmeshed with the neoliberalization of citizenship that has been profoundly changing parameters of membership and belonging for populations across the global north, migrant and non-migrant alike.