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This paper examines the genealogy of Anthropology of citizenship, from a historical and philosophical perspective. It proposes to understand, beyond previous historical accounts, what Anthropology of citizenship, if taken as a legitimate approach, does to our understanding Citizenship (Studies).

Paper long abstract

This paper questions the politics underlying the forms of description, along with their underlying conceptualization process, invented and developed within past anthropologies of citizenship, which provided access to the “ordinariness” of citizenship (Neveu 2015); the uncanny actions, imaginaries, experiences and processes that make a specific situation one of citizenship. Since such a descriptive activity often requires that it be carried out beyond analytic frameworks commonly used to investigate citizenship, anthropologists are faced with the need to resort to other categories, political imaginaries or narrative dispositives as descriptive tools.

I consider such normative shifts/bifurcations as events worth telling, as they invite us to revisit the way we define citizenship by blurring our usual distinctions and connections.

These itineraries are, mainly, motivated by a shared political concern: challenging the ‘political ontologies of violence’ (Graeber 2007) that confine the political field of citizenship (im)possibilities, in imagination(s) and in practice(s), while also foreclosing the possibility of capturing other political futures being citizenshiply crafted under precarious conditions, in present times. As such, anthropology of citizenship has always critically engaged with ‘normative specters’ (statism, coloniality, imperialism, legalism, patriarchy, racism, consequentialism, etc.) haunting our imaginaries of citizenship and, when left uncritically approached or unreflexively used as heuristic devices, still continue to resist the possibility of describing alternative forms of citizenship.

Along the way, it is a unique philosophy of citizenship actions that anthropologists, each in their own way, have been tacitly developing. How can such a philosophy help us see Citizenship Studies and their own history differently?

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This paper examines the discourses, languages and vocabularies of political participation articulated by marginalized Muslim communities in India, particularly Miya Muslims in Assam. Based on ethnographic fieldwork it situates these expressions within the Indian state’s polarizing citizenship regime

Paper long abstract

The paper examines how members of the Miya community conceive of themselves as active political subjects through the act of voting, in a context where fear of not voting is intertwined with fear of not being documented and thus rendered invisible or suspect within the documentary, political, and social imagination of the Indian nation-state. This fear is believed to have shaped the community’s relationship to the Indian state.

By locating the discourses surrounding participatory democracy and political subjectivity in India, the paper aims to unsettle this trope of Muslims as a monolithic, scared or easily appeased ‘vote bank’. Fieldwork with the Miya Muslim community reveals varied motivations for voting: maintaining community belonging, avoiding social isolation, building documentation trails to facilitate mobility and avert citizenship trials, upholding neighbourhood harmony in mixed localities, or feeling anchored in the social world. These motivations are rarely framed solely in the language of rights, duties, or good citizenry. Instead, voting emerges as a textured social and political practice embedded in everyday life.

Voting thus functions as a political ritual shaped by locally grounded meanings of citizenship that do not always align with normative ideals of ‘good citizenship’. Participation often emerges from everyday concerns such as maintaining neighbourly relations, signalling one’s place in the community, and performing belonging within family, gendered households, and village life. Citizenship is thus articulated less through fear, party politics or polarized ideologies than through social expectations, relational obligations, and the desire for inclusion in both local society and the imagined nation-state.

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This paper examines how ideals of social responsibility are appropriated by professionals in the Danish social housing sector and resisted by citizens in three housing estates. It argues for understanding such disputes as value conflicts and for making ethics a part of political anthropology.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how citizens in three social housing estates of Copenhagen, Denmark, mobilize around their politically ascribed role as key agents for obtaining values of a “mixed” and “sustainable” city. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork among professionals and residents in a social housing organisation, it revolves around the relationship between recent neoliberal national policy, the organisation’s official strategy for enhancing “engagement” among residents in its estates, and the everyday political tactics through which residents in the “resident democracy” (beboerdemokrati) - an association-based structure formalizing tenants political influence over maintaining and developing their estate - resist proposed models for how to “engage” in developing their estate according to universalist ideals. While associational citizenship are discursively understood to foster a somewhat uniquely Danish trustful cohesion between state, institutions and convivial civil communities, my situational analysis of residents in three estate democracies illustrate how disagreement and conflict are integral to the citizenship of associational politics. Such conflicts are embedded in current neoliberal policy strategies aiming to enhance local democracies’ capacity to form partnerships with “the surrounding world” to solve social and technical issues previously financed by public welfare schemes. Fruitful understandings of resident’s resistance against such ascribed values, I argue, can be gained from recent anthropological debates on ethics and social movements and favours a substantivist view on values as the outcome of specific collective, political processes (Graeber 2013, Zigon 2021) rather than a formalistic cultural structure (e.g. Robbins 2017).

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The Chakmas, an indigenous refugee group from Bangladesh (CHT), are living in India for over 50 years without citizenship. This paper examines their struggle for citizenship and belonging, navigating local and ethnic tensions to position themselves as “becoming citizens” through everyday practices.

Paper long abstract

The struggle for citizenship and belonging intensifies for refugees when the local community consists of indigenous groups. The Chakmas, an indigenous refugee group from Bangladesh (Chittagong Hill Tracks) have settled in the North-eastern state of Arunachal Pradesh in India for more than 50 years without citizenship or recognition by the state. Although the supreme court of India has passed multiple judgements to grant citizenship for Chakmas, most recently in 2015, but implementation has been stalled due to local ethnic and legal issues that complicate their status in the region. Despite this prolonged struggle, the Chakmas engage in political and ethnic maneuvers to forge closer ties with local ethnic communities to create a sense of belonging in the region. This ethnographic paper explores how the Chakmas navigate citizenship (Das 2004) and local indigenous territorial claims (Li, 2010) to position themselves as “Becoming Citizens” through everyday practices. Against the backdrop of persistent ethnic and legal tensions, the paper argues that Chakmas exist in a state of perpetual liminality, where they constantly negotiate their identities and positioning their sense of belonging within a complex sociopolitical landscape to become citizens.

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This history of "citizenship" within anthropology examines the transition from engaging cultural citizenship and novel forms of belonging to theorizing diminishing rights and necrocitizenship. We ask: what does it mean to write about citizenship without simultaneously questioning "democracy."

Paper long abstract

This paper is a meditation on the history of the concept citizenship within anthropology based on our own theoretical transition from a) engaging the concept of cultural citizenship to b) theorizing these difficult times in terms of necrocitizenship. Our retrospective on the anthropology of citizenship asks: where did the concepts of democracy go? What does it mean to write about citizenship without simultaneoulsy questioning "democracy." In the first part, we explore the emergence of citizenship as a topic within anthropology in the 1990s through the introduction of the concept “cultural citizenship,” an idea that focuses on citizenship practices on the ground and in terms of a more general politics of belonging. We explain why and how this concept became a focus of anthropological theory and reflect on how anthropologists applied this concept to explore novel forms of political belonging. Looking back at the anthropology of citizenship, we discuss the marginal role of theorizing democracy and reflect upon the explosion in frames for understanding expressions of citizenship---from "insurgent" to "biological" and "ghost" citizenship. We then discuss our engagement with citizenship as deriving from primarily a U.S. perspective and reflect upon the shift in our own thinking about democracy and belonging. We call for an anthropology of citizenship that both accounts for the researchers' own positionally while questioning the concept of democracy.

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This article advances a spatial reconceptualization of citizenship, arguing that space is constitutive of citizenship practices. Drawing on long-term research on migrant-led SMOs in Italy and Germany, it applies Lefebvre’s triadic framework to analyze lived, conceived, and perceived space.

Paper long abstract

This article contributes to sociological and anthropological debates on social movements by advancing a spatial reconceptualization of Isin’s (2008) notion of “acts of citizenship.” For anthropology in particular, this concept is valuable insofar as it (a) moves beyond understandings of citizenship confined to formal public spheres – spheres that many social groups cannot materially access – and (b) foregrounds political subjects historically marginalized and ideologically excluded from dominant definitions of citizenship, such as racialized individuals and migrants’ descendants. Drawing on ten years of empirical research on the political practices of two social movement umbrella organizations (SMOs) composed of racialized activists, the article demonstrates, however, that the role of space in shaping citizenship practices remains insufficiently theorized in Isin’s framework. This long-term engagement reveals that spatial conditions are not merely contextual but constitutive of how citizenship is enacted, claimed, and contested. The analysis shows that focusing exclusively on “acts of citizenship” risks obscuring the complex entanglement of emotional, material, and ideological dimensions that structure activists’ engagements. I therefore argue for the necessity of a spatial lens, premised on the assumption that political interventions never occur outside their material, symbolic, and experiential spatial conditions. To operationalize this perspective, the article mobilizes Lefebvre’s (1991) triadic framework of perceived, conceived, and lived space. This approach enables a more precise analysis of citizenship practices by accounting for material infrastructures of everyday environments, the collectively produced meanings attached to them, and the ways these spatial configurations are subjectively lived and experienced by activists.

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The term “itinerant citizenship” theorises the activism of Southeast England’s boat-dwellers, which draws on human rights legislation and working-class rebellious custom to defend a mobile and affordable way of living on canals inherited from the industrial past, amid contemporary neoliberal crises.

Paper long abstract

Southeast England’s boat-dwellers were known for making their political organisations strategically ungraspable by the state (Bowles 2019). However, as canals face increasing enclosure and privatisation, and as more people move aboard in response to persistent housing and cost-of-living crises, the National Bargee Travellers Association (NBTA) has become a permanently conspicuous representative of the itinerant boat-dwelling population. This paper examines how, since the 2010s, the NBTA has positioned itself both “with and against” the state (Lazar 2024). On the one hand, its defence of a mobile and affordable way of life relies on consultative and judicial mechanisms, drawing on UK and European human rights legislation. On the other hand, it celebrates working-class culture and histories of struggle, and consistently opposes proposals that would “sedentarise” boat-dwelling and thereby co-opt it into the enclosure of waterways.

While the term “citizenship” is not directly used by NBTA activists, I deploy it analytically to show that these struggles extend beyond disputes over cruising patterns and boat licensing with the 'charitable trust' that manages the canals (Canal and River Trust, CRT). For NBTA activists, itinerant boat-dwelling constitutes a “rebellious custom” (Thompson 1991) that deliberately rejects the logics of exclusive ownership and asset accumulation. This radical vision on housing, however, does not receive universal embrace among boat dwellers and is largely sidestepped by the CRT. I therefore reflect on my own theoretical commitments to alternative possibilities when debates over the future of the canals are entangled with polarised views of activism and the governing institution.

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Paper short abstract

Extending on the definition of infrastructure as “matter that moves matter” through asking what happens when matter stops moving. The cessation of access to water due to aging, absent and overloaded infrastructure has influenced the citizenship of farmers in a former bantustan under dual governance.

Paper long abstract

In this paper I extend on the definition of infrastructure as “matter that moves matter” by Larkin (2013), through asking what happens when matter stops moving. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork at the Ratanang Vegetable Garden in Mankweng, Limpopo, I trace how the cessation of hydrological flows halts crops, undermines livelihoods, and stalls the democratic momentum that once animated post-apartheid South Africa. The transition to democracy promised universal access to water, electricity and other services, infusing citizens with hope. Three decades later, recurrent load-shedding, aging and absent infrastructure, uneven service delivery and lowdensity urban sprawl have produced chronic interruption rather than reliable flow. In Mankweng, within the former Lebowa bantustan, traditional authorities’ allocation of land for residential nd commercial development, combined with practices such as go ngwatha (“to take a bite”) – the diversion of social budgets and the commodification of communal land – have left women at Ratanang with arable land but no dependable water. The promise of water as a human right and in turn, people's citizenship is undermined as they navigate access. Attending to their strategies, frustrations and enduring commitments, the paper conceptualises “lost momentum” as an infrastructural condition: the slowing and stalling of both material circulation and political possibility. By foregrounding hydrological stillness rather than flow, it contributes to anthropological debates on infrastructure, the state and gendered labour, and to rethinking progress, hope and abandonment in contemporary South Africa.