Recasting Citizenship for Development - File UPI

Transgressing Political Spaces and Claiming Citizenship 79
Habermas suggests that the moral legitimacy of binding laws can only
be due to their origination as the outcome of a discursive process through
which citizens engage in self-determination through open and rational
discourse (Deflem 1996). He proposes the concept of deliberative democracy,
which is built on the foundations of communicative reason and
communicative rationality (Habermas 1996). Put simply, this suggests
that all those whose basic interests are affected by a decision ought to be included
in the deliberatively democratic process. Feminist scholars have
further built on this concept of deliberative democracy to bring in a more
explicit focus on inclusion, social justice and an attention to difference as
a resource (see Benhabib 1996; Young 2000).
The feminists’ call for inclusion comes from their experiences of
exclusion in different forms—exclusion from basic political rights and
opportunities to participate, and exclusion from an unhindered vantage
point from which to re-imagine the future. In today’s context, inclusion
has to go beyond equal voting rights to the additional conditions of
deepening political inclusion, such as attention to modes of communication,
social differences and pluralism, representation, civil organising,
and the borders of political jurisdictions (Young 2000). Not only should all
those affected be nominally included in decision-making, but should also
be included on equal terms. Young (ibid.) further suggests that the path
to more socially just outcomes for deliberative democracy needs to pay
explicit attention to the values of self-development (along the lines of
Amartya Sen’s emphasis on capabilities) and self-determination. Both
self-development and self-determination are often restricted by institutional
constraints, which further entrench power differentials and the
ability to constrain the choices and actions of others. Furthering institutional
conditions for promoting self-development and self-determination
of members of society is, thus, one of the means of furthering social justice
and substantive democracy.
Deep democracy also calls for a more robust concept of citizenship, in
which citizens are active political actors at different scales, defined not only
through their relationship with the state, but also through their relationship
with each other. Yuval-Davis (1999) posits citizenship as a multilayered
construct, with the citizenship in collectivities in the different layers—
local, ethnic, national, state, cross- or trans-state and supra-state—getting
affected, and often at least partly constructed, by the relationships and