300660 Citizenship: Anthropological Perspectives (MA: Soziologie der globalen Welt) (S) (SoSe 2025)

The clash of two distinct conceptions of citizenship focalizes much of the peril roiling democratic societies in the current conjuncture: As membership in political communities in the Aristotelian sense, "citizenship" refers to the faculty to weigh in on public affairs. Yet in the human rights framework established during the twentieth century, civil and citizenship rights stand in for an array of imperatives that shift power from the realm of political deliberation to technocratic jurisdictions. Migration and the "populist" rebellion against it occur in the force field of tension between "the right to have rights" (Hannah Arendt) and the civic capacity to decide about the contours of the political community. But other political projects, such as the plurinationalism formulated in Bolivia in response to the neoliberal consensus of the turn of the twentieth century, indicate that the defense of citizenship against technocratic reason need not be a right-wing cause.

In the context of war, authoritarianism, migration, and deepening inequality, many people are deprived of the rights of citizenship promised by the modern state. At the same time, the rise of political movements channeling popular resentment toward "aloof elites" points to the persistent problem of organizing democracy around the citizen-subject. This seminar examines citizenship both as the rights bestowed by states and as participation in political communities. Using a social anthropological approach, we will read ethnographic case studies from around the world (with an emphasis on Latin America) to understand how citizenship is regulated, denied, contested, practiced, and redefined.