Citizenship and Territoriality

Citizenship and Territoriality

Veranstalter
Unsere Zeit magazine: unserezeit.eu
Veranstaltungsort
Ort
Berlin
Land
Deutschland
Vom - Bis
20.03.2017 - 10.05.2017
Deadline
10.05.2017
Von
Brandes, Sören; Mercer, Peter

This Call for Essays by Unsere Zeit magazine encourages students and scholars from various disciplines, including historians, to compose analytically sound and stylistically engaging essays on the relationship of citizenship and territoriality. Bridging the gap between academic and public discourse, the CfE aims at laying the intellectual groundwork for progressive politics and activism.

Citizenship and Territoriality

We live in the age of globalisation – but also in an age of walls. While international migration is at an all-time high, we observe a new trend of enforcing political borders to block people from leaving their country and seeking their fortunes elsewhere in the world. Walls – increasingly visible and solid – are only the most obvious manifestation of this development. This contradiction leads us to fundamental questions on the relationship between the geographical and the political order of our world: How, why, and to what extent is citizenship of modern states connected to and defined by territorial boundaries? And is this a necessary conjunction?

Public debates often assume a natural relationship between citizenship and territoriality, but both reality and theory are much murkier: While some states grant citizenship by birth on a territory (ius solis), others build on the idea of a consistent bloodline to construe their demos (ius sanguinis). While the taxation systems of most modern states rely on their territories, intensified migration leads to an increase in taxation without representation – many people are taxed within a territory in which they are not allowed to vote. While naturalisation in many states requires longstanding residence on the state’s territory, alternative models are not only imaginable, but have already been practically enacted: Estonia is pioneering a model of virtual online citizenship; other states are granting citizenship status to non-residents on the basis of alleged ethnic ties. Meanwhile, the status of supranational entities such as the European Union in relation to citizenship is under debate.

All of this leads to a multitude questions: Does citizenship necessarily depend on (territorial?) states? Which alternatives can be imagined, and how could they be implemented? Which elements of citizenship do not require a territory, which ones do (if any)? How does territoriality affect citizenship – whether in physical, cultural or yet in other terms? These questions touch on issues relevant in academic disciplines ranging from history, sociology, and political science to geography, law, philosophy, anthropology etc. We aim for an open and multifaceted, intelligent and intelligible debate about what citizenship means and could mean in our times of globalisation and territorialism.

Programm

Format: Files editable in a common text editor (.doc, .odt, …); no table of contents, no footnotes, no bibliography. Evidence (quotes, numbers, facts) via hyperlinks.

Length: up to 2500 words

Deadline: 30 April 2017

Submission to: cfe@unserezeit.eu

Language: English – if you want to contribute in another language, please let us know beforehand

Kontakt

Sören Brandes

IMPRS Moral Economies, Max-Planck-Institut für Bildungsforschung
Lentzeallee 94, 14195 Berlin

soeren@unserezeit.eu

unserezeit.eu/blog
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Englisch
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