2 - Victims of Citizenship

Summary

This contribution introduces the concept of ‘victims of citizenship’, encompassing the majority of the world’s population for whom citizenship is a set of liabilities and obstacles rather than a bundle of rights, who are caged in spaces of no opportunity by border-crossing and visa rules designed to keep them out of the ‘First World’, and who thus find themselves on the ‘other side’ of the concept of citizenship, behind its Western façade of equality, political self-determination and rights. The global status quo that citizenship is there to perpetuate does not work in their favour: they are kept out for others to be ‘free’. The whole point of citizenship is to perpetuate the victims’ of citizenship exclusion from dignity and rights without any justification defensible in terms of the values officially underpinning any modern constitutional system. The path to the sale of citizenship is thus paved with the status’s conflicted nature. Marketisation is helped by the uneven pace in the growth of global wealth when compared to the dynamics of the quality of particular citizenship statuses. Simultaneously, the same processes allow the normative compatibility of citizenship with the ideals alleged to underpin contemporary constitutionalism to be called into question as such.