300675 How Much Is Your Passport Worth? How Citizenship Shapes Global Inequalities - Part 1 - in English (LEH: Soziologie der globalen Welt - LF2) (LEH) (WiSe 2025/2026)

Seen globally, citizenship is part of a “birthright lottery” (Shachar 2009). It is the accident of the birthplace which influences life chances and life conditions. Therefore, it makes a stark difference whether a person is born in Germany or Mali, and which country’s citizenship a person holds. One could further argue that the key institutional feature linking relatively lower material inequalities within wealthier countries and higher inequalities between countries is the exclusion of people from poorer countries by wealthier states. It is a process of large-scale social closure. Empirical studies show that location of birth or residence and citizenship makes a difference for life conditions. While in the late nineteenth century, around 1870, about 50 per cent of income differences, could be attributed to whether or not people owned the means of production, and about 20 per cent to location, that is, the country in which one was living, this relationship has almost reversed. In 2000, more than two-thirds of global income differences could be attributed to huge gaps in average income between countries, whereas the share attributed to class has declined considerably, to around a quarter (Milanović, 2012, 205). In other words, if we were to construct a global map of income inequality, showing where each household or individual stood vis-à-vis everyone else in the world (that is, combining information on within- and between-country inequality), the relative standing of each household or individual would be shaped in large part by whether they were born or lived in a poor or a wealthy state. This setup entails a “citizenship premium” for citizens of wealthier countries.
This “citizenship premium” has important consequences. It is very visible in the freedom to travel with or without a visa. While citizens of countries like the USA, Germany and the Netherlands, for example, can travel without a visa into 173 countries (see https://www.passportindex.org/byRank .php), the opposite holds for citizens of Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Syria and Somalia, whose passport allows them to travel visa-free into a handful of countries only (2024).
This research training class offers opportunities to trace how citizenship shapes social inequalities in social fields such as politics, education, employment, ecology & climate, religion, gender, and migration. The regional focus is open. Students develop empirical research projects individually or in small groups.

Bibliography

Literature (Ebooks available in Universitätsbibliothek Bielefeld):
Marisol Garcia and Thomas Faist, eds. 2024. Encyclopedia of Citizenship Studies. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing.
Thomas Faist. 2019. The Transnationalized Social Question. Migration and the Politics of Social Inequalities in the Twenty-First Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press