AN EXERCISE IN WORLDMAKING 2009 - ISS

6 The Utility of the Citizen: Relating Citizenship in Social Movement Activity 63
project dedicated to these concerns where citizenship confers a sense of
responsibility and the recognition of rights to these three arenas.
CONTESTING DEFINITIONS
In a simplistic sense, a citizen is “a member of a political community
who is endowed with a set of rights and a set of obligations” (Shukla
2006: 94). Therefore, citizenship is commonly viewed to represent the
relationship between the individual citizen and the state whereby the two
are entwined with reciprocal rights and obligations (ibid). Turner (1993)
broadens this reciprocity whereby in recognizing citizenship, this shapes
the flow of resources to persons and social groups (2). T.H. Marshall is
widely acknowledged as a forefather in citizenship studies, with his distinction
of political, civil and social citizenship identifying distinct rights
and institutions in modern societies existing to service these rights. In a
general sense, Marshall’s analysis of citizenship understands social rights
as contextualized and connected with history and the subsequent operation
of civil and political rights. By degree, most mainstream approaches
address citizenship “as a complex and contextualized status giving expression
to ideals of personal autonomy, social justice, equity and inclusiveness
in modern societies” which Marshall identities as “democraticwelfare-capitalist”
formations (Roche 2002: 72). These formations are
serving and giving substance to autonomy that is presumably expressed
through political and civil rights. Marshall’s analysis accounts for complexities
and context however, must be expanded to account for additional
contexts and social formations beyond the level of the nation state
that in many ways can repress autonomy. Such formations will be discussed
further in relation to the conflicting dynamics of capitalism and
capitalist societies.
Over the past few decades, various challenges have emerged to historical
and more mainstream theories of citizenship. The typologies and
methods through which citizenship is commonly understood have been
expanded to consider it “not as a legal status but as a form of identification,
a type of political identity: something to be constructed, not empirically
given” (Mouffe 1992: 231). Recognizing the impacts of globalization
and in particular the global capitalist economy furthers the analysis
of understanding these structures in relation to the realization of citizenship.
These complexities leave the nation-state and national level considerations
of citizenship alone as inadequate, as there are forces outside of