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Group Differentiated Citizenship Essay



Roman citizenship reflected a struggle between the upper-class patrician interests against the lower-order working groups known as the plebeian class.[14] A citizen came to be understood as a person "free to act by law, free to ask and expect the law's protection, a citizen of such and such a legal community, of such and such a legal standing in that community".[17] Citizenship meant having rights to have possessions, immunities, expectations, which were "available in many kinds and degrees, available or unavailable to many kinds of person for many kinds of reason".[17] The law itself was a kind of bond uniting people.[18] Roman citizenship was more impersonal, universal, multiform, having different degrees and applications.[18]




group differentiated citizenship essay



The 1918 constitution of revolutionary Russia granted citizenship to any foreigners who were living within the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, so long as they were "engaged in work and [belonged] to the working class."[32] It recognized "the equal rights of all citizens, irrespective of their racial or national connections" and declared oppression of any minority group or race "to be contrary to the fundamental laws of the Republic." The 1918 constitution also established the right to vote and be elected to soviets for both men and women "irrespective of religion, nationality, domicile, etc. [...] who shall have completed their eighteenth year by the day of the election."[33] The later constitutions of the USSR would grant universal Soviet citizenship to the citizens of all member republics[34][35] in concord with the principles of non-discrimination laid out in the original 1918 constitution of Russia.


Lior Volinz is a PhD candidate at the University of Amsterdam. His research, as part of a larger research group working on the emergence of public-private security assemblages, focuses on the privatization and pluralization of security and military functions in Jerusalem and its relations to the (re)production of differentiated citizenship in a divided city.


Classroom management to coordinate flexible groupings and projects is a key component of applying differentiated instruction. Following are some ideas for creating and coordinating groups in a multi-level, differentiated class:


The global trend toward democratization of the last two decades has been accompanied by the resurgence of various politics of "identity/difference." From nationalist and ethnic revivals in the countries of east and central Europe to the former Soviet Union, to the politics of cultural separatism in Canada, and to social movement politics in liberal western-democracies, the negotiation of identity/difference has become a challenge to democracies everywhere. This volume brings together a group of distinguished thinkers who rearticulate and reconsider the foundations of democratic theory and practice in the light of the politics of identity/difference. In Part One Jürgen Habermas, Sheldon S. Wolin, Jane Mansbridge, Seyla Benhabib, Joshua Cohen, and Iris Marion Young write on democratic theory. Part Two--on equality, difference, and public representation--contains essays by Anne Phillips, Will Kymlicka, Carol C. Gould, Jean L. Cohen, and Nancy Fraser; and Part Three--on culture, identity, and democracy--by Chantal Mouffe, Bonnie Honig, Fred Dallmayr, Joan B. Landes, and Carlos A. Forment. In the last section Richard Rorty, Robert A. Dahl, Amy Gutmann, and Benjamin R. Barber write on whether democracy needs philosophical foundations.


In this essay, I focus on conflicts specific to these entanglements of citizenship. Foremost, I want to show that these insurgent citizenships confront the entrenched with alternative formulations of citizenship; in other words, that their conflicts are clashes of citizenship and not merely idiosyncratic or instrumental protest and violence. In making this point, my aim is also to show that although insurgent citizenships may utilize central civic space and even overrun the center, they are fundamentally manifestations of peripheries. In so far as the urban civic square, for example, embodies an idea of centrality and its sovereignties, its architectural design, institutional organization, and use represents the hierarchies, legalities, segregations, and inequalities of the entrenched regime of citizenship that the insurgent contests. The forces of centrality are entrenched in the civic square by design and that entrenchment establishes the terms of an official public sphere. Insurgent movements may adopt these terms to frame their protests - property rights, urban infrastructure, justice, even motherhood, for example. But whereas the center uses the structuring of the public to segregate the urban poor in the peripheries and to reduce them to a bare life of servility, the very same structures of inequality incite these hinterland residents to demand a life worthy of citizens.


To follow the emergence of this new urban citizenship, we need to understand the existing conditions of working-class citizenship within which alternatives developed. This is a complex historical problem, as it is in the case of every city and its slums. The working-class development of São Paulo is grounded in a reiteration of centuries-old relations between land, labor, and law: in land policies designed to anchor a certain kind of labor force and in illegalities that initiate settlement and precipitate the legalization of property claims. The residential illegalities of today's peripheries repeat these old patterns. But they do so with an unexpected outcome that, ultimately, generates new formulations of citizenship. Given the historical depth of these patterns and the limitations of space in this essay, I can only give the briefest sketch.8


To consolidate their rule of the new nation-state at the beginning of the 19th century, Brazil's landed elites formulated a regime of citizenship using social differences that were not the basis of national membership -differences of education, property, race, gender, and occupation -to distribute different treatment to different categories of citizens. It thereby generated a gradation of rights among them, in which most rights are available only to particular kinds of citizens and exercised as the privilege of particular social categories. I describe it, therefore, as a differentiated citizenship that uses these social qualifications to organize its political, civil, and social dimensions and to regulate its distribution of inequalities. The citizenship system thus created was universally inclusive in membership but massively inegalitarian in distribution.


To maintain this differentiated citizenship in response to independence in 1822 and the abolition of slavery in 1888, ruling elites developed a two-fold solution. To control political citizenship, they made suffrage direct and voluntary but restricted it to the literate in 1881. This restriction immediately reduced the electorate to a fraction of the population (about 1 %). Moreover, in the Republic's founding constitution (1891), they eliminated the right of citizens to a primary education that would have given them the rudiments of literacy and that had been enshrined (though not much realized) in the independence charter (1824). Enacted with the stroke of a pen, the literacy restriction denied most Brazilians their political citizenship for an entire century, until it was repealed in 1985. To dominate civil and economic matters, elites created a real estate market to legitimate the ownership of private property and finance the immigration of free labor. Adapting the English theorist of colonialism E.G. Wakefield, they kept land prices high and wages low to deny the working masses legal access to land and independent production and to force them, as a result, to remain a source of semi-servile cheap labor. Thus, political and civil citizenship developed in step: both became more restrictive as Brazil changed from an imperial nation based on slave labor to a republican nation based on wage labor over the course of the 19th-century.


Subsequent regimes in the 20th century perpetuated this paradigm of an inclusively inegalitarian citizenship by giving it modern urban industrial form, incorporating the new urban workers into a public sphere of labor law without equality or autonomy. As a result of the persistence of this paradigm of differentiated citizenship, most Brazilians in 1972 -when the court official was beaten -had been denied political rights, excluded from property ownership, estranged from law, incorporated into the labor market as servile workers, and forced into segregated and often illegal conditions of residence in hinterlands that lacked infrastructure.


The paradigm of differentiated citizenship remains contemporary, having survived -indeed nourished -every political regime over the last 200 years, thriving under monarchy, military dictatorship, and electoral democracy. It perdures through its enabling conditions: exclusion from property, denial of political rights, residential illegality, misrule of law, servility. However, these conditions changed after the 1940s as the majority of Brazilians moved to cities and built the peripheries. In the autoconstructed city, these very same historical sites of differentiation fueled the irruption of an insurgent citizenship that destabilized the differentiated, as the urban poor gained political rights by becoming functionally literate, established claims to property through house building, established rights to urban infrastructure, made law an asset through their struggles with eviction, became modern consumers, and achieved personal competence through their experience of the city. These achievements validated their standing as citybuilders. Moreover, they produced an unprecedented involvement in law that made their leaders confident to confront justice officials with legal reasoning.


The public spheres of citizenship that emerged in Brazilian peripheries forced the state to respond to their new urban conditions by recognizing new kinds and sources of citizen rights. These rights concerned issues of both substance and scope that the state's existing laws and institutions had generally neglected. In that sense, they developed on the margins of the established assumptions of governance: they addressed the new collective and personal spaces of daily life among the poor in the urban peripheries; they concerned women and children as well as men; they established duties to provide state services. Without doubt, the greatest historical innovation of these rights is that they initiate a reconceptualization: their advocates began to conceive of them as entitlements of general citizenship rather than of specifically differentiated categories of citizens, such as registered worker. In these ways, the emergence of new participatory publics in the peripheries not only expanded substantive citizenship to new social bases. It also created new understandings and practices of rights.


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