Chair: Silke Trommer, Department of Political and Economic Studies, University of Helsinki and Network Institute for Global Democratisation (silke.trommer[at]helsinki.fi)
Coordinators: Giuseppe Caruso, Network Institute for Global Democratisation (giu.caruso[at]gmail.com), Timo Kallinen, Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Helsinki (timo.kallinen[at]helsinki.fi), and Teivo Teivainen, Department of Political and Economic Studies, University of Helsinki and Network Institute for Global Democratisation (teivo.teivainen[at]helsinki.fi)
Room: 312 (Friday only)
Since the recent political upheavals in North Africa and the Middle East, protests across the African, American and European continents seem to connect diverse social and cultural realities to similar or comparable political demands. Among them are employment, democracy, equality, dignity and freedom. These claims are connected with structural transformations of the global society. Social realities that have been experienced in the South over various decades are today more obvious than before also in the North, including, for example, the precarity of labour or disciplinary power of financial institutions. These phenomena are typically associated with being a developing rather than a developed country.
Our workshop addresses the question of what such structural transformations mean for notions of citizenship across the globe. Seeing as protesters on Wall Street claim to be inspired by events on Tahrir Square, are citizens in the global North learning from their global Southern counterparts in reshaping their own notions of citizenship? What political economy structures undergird transformations of the notion of citizenship? Do structural transformations, such as labour precarity and power of financial institutions, have constraining effect on the notion of citizenship? What kinds of citizenship do they enable?
PRESENTATIONS
(1) Indigenous peoples organizations as international political actors
Tamara Semenova, Helsinki University (tamara.semenova[at]helsinki.fi)
Indigenous peoples’ organizations (IPOs) have been recognised as international political actors in various international, including high-level bodies. IPOs as an agency participate in the decision-making processes that affect their members’ lives at the local, national and international levels. The study of these NGOs and their international political activities are highly relevant to the study of international relations where we are witnessing a large scale transformation from industrial to knowledge societies which are increasingly ruled by knowledge and expertise. In this context, indigenous politics (as a world of practice) produce analytical as well as normative concepts and discourses. Moreover, scientific knowledge and citizenship networks are of growing importance for political practitioners. Production and transfer of knowledge becomes a central political activity as well as a core category for understanding politics and governance in the knowledge society. At the same time, however, although the latter implies increasing interdependence between those realms, international politics and the respective academic disciplines, such as International Relations (IR), remain different fields and continue to draw on different discourses and practices. How to study such international non-state activities appropriately? Ontological, epistemological and methodological challenges of studying international activities of indigenous peoples in Russia are discussed based on application of the IR theory via producing knowledge about this interrelationship and via providing an approach to overcome these challenges.
(2) Water privatisation and social citizenship: The case of urban water sector in Ghana
Marja Hirvi, University of Helsinki (marja.hirvi[at]helsinki.fi)
Transformations in the global society and in the global structure of authority shape accountability relations and possibilities for exercising citizenship rights in local contexts. This paper explores social citizenship and accountability through the case study of Ghana, where urban water supply was privatised through a management contract in 2006. As a universal policy prescription stemming from international donors and currently prevalent ideas of market-driven development, privatisation is an example of a global policy which potentially reconfigures relationships between states and citizens. The paper addresses these questions through thematic analysis of data collected in Ghana in 2008 and 2009 (policy documents, reports, and interviews with citizens), and through a review of secondary literature. Theoretically the paper draws from Marshall’s (1950) classification of citizenship into civil, political and social rights, Soysal’s (1994) notion of citizenship as a historically developed institution, and Nyamu-Musembi’s (2005) actor-oriented approach. Specifically, the paper explores whether and how water privatisation alters social citizenship and public sector accountability in Ghana, and argues that in a post-colonial context in the global South, privatisation entails as much continuity as it brings about change.
(3) Problematic alliance of migration and citizenship – internal and external migratory movements and precarisation of citizenship in Europe
Magdalena Kmak, Erik Castrén Institute of International Law and Human Rights, University of Helsinki (magdalena.kmak[at]helsinki.fi)
Refugee crisis caused by the events of the Arab spring has revealed the crisis of the principle of free movement of persons within the common European area. Fear of mass influx of refugees from North African countries has prompt Denmark and France to introduce border controls. But the crisis of the principles of solidarity and freedom of movement is not a new phenomenon. Legal measures on immigration adopted at the EU and national levels show changing appreciation of those principles in relation to immigrants from both new EU Member States and from third countries. One dimension of this crisis is precarisation and relativisation of understanding of European and national citizenship.
This paper will therefore focus on the relationship between citizenship and immigration on both national and European levels. It will analyse changes in understanding of European citizenship by looking at treatment of Bulgarian and Romanian Roma in EU Member States as well as relativisation of national approaches to citizenship taking as an example measures proposed in France with the aim to remove citizenship from foreign-born French citizens in case of committing certain crimes.
(4) Citizenship and the ideology of democracy
Halil Gurhanli, University of Helsinki (halil.gurhanli[at]helsinki.fi)
Popular participation in the liberal democracies as we know is essentially a twoway street between the citizens and political institutions: bringing citizens into politics and taking politics to the citizens (Canovan 2002). While the existence and availability of those channels which would enable the first process is fundamental for any regime to be “inclusionary”, its realization is simultaneously dependent on the second one. In the contemporary global world where the channels of popular empowerment and decisionmaking mechanisms are increasingly complicated and opaque, there is more than ever a need for an ideology of democracy that would take politics to the citizens, enabling them to have a “cognitive mapping” of the system by necessarily simplifying its functioning (Jameson 1990). Prevalent liberal narrative of the contemporary politics as being “post-ideological” seems to have largely ignored this second lane by emphasizing almost solely on the issues of new politics, such as questions of identity and recognition, that are considered to be of “beyond left and right” (Mouffe 2000). As a remedy for this crisis of participation, this paper makes, somewhat polemically, a plea for a new ideology of democracy which, like all ideologies, needs to respond to a number of essential political questions: what went wrong; who is to blame; and what is to be done to reverse the situation (Betz and Johnson 2004). It further proposes that this is possible only by introducing an antagonistic division between “us” and “them” which would bring politics back into the game while welcoming multiple social identities as constitutive parts of a new democratic political subjectivity – be it citizenship or some other name.
(5) Reflective universalism: Citizenship with a plurality of aspirations for justice
Ville Päivänsalo, University of Helsinki (ville.paivansalo[at]helsinki.fi)
Aspirations for universal justice have become interesting in a fresh way in the era of intensified globalization. Yet any attempt to universalize norms, e.g. nationally or globally, also excludes perspectives and persons and is thus potentially disruptive of inclusive dialogues and social belonging. In the current article, I aim at rescuing the best aspects of both universal and contextual strategies in justice-discourses by defending the importance of a plurality of universal aspirations. My ‘reflective universalism’ approach owes a lot to John Rawls’s world-famous account of reflective equilibrium: Rawls aimed at integrating politically liberal citizens’ considered convictions of justice into a theory that also assumes modest human rights universalism. Reflective universalism, however, allows the citizens of any decent democracy to begin with contextually respectable understandings of justice and encourages aspirations to balance several universal criteria in inclusive ways. With references to Onora O’Neill, Jack Donnelly, Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen, I will show how Rawlsian human rights universalism can be dynamically complemented by other forms of universalism in the West as well as in India. Special attention is paid to certain tensions related to liberal understandings of religious and society.