Meanings and expressions in an

Although the idea of citizenship is nearly universal today, what it means and how it is experienced are not. Nor have they ever been. As a reading of the literature quickly reveals, the history of citizenship in both North and South has been a history of struggle over how it is to be defined and who it is to include. However, what is also clear is that a great deal of the theoretical debate about citizenship today is taking place in an ‘empirical void ’ (Lister and others, in Chapter 7), where the views and perspectives of ‘ordinary ’ citizens are largely absent. We do not know what citizenship means to people – particularly people whose status as citizens is either non-existent or extremely precarious – or what these meanings tell us about the goal of building inclusive societies. The contributions to this volume go some way towards addressing this void. They explore the meanings and experiences of citizenship in different parts of the world, giving particular attention to the perspectives of the poor and socially excluded. Their contributions thus touch on the different mechanics of exclusion which consign certain groups within a society to the status of lesser citizens or of non-citizens, and on the struggles by such groups to redefine, extend and transform ‘given ’ ideas about rights, duties and citizenship. They therefore help to shed light on what inclusive citizenship might mean when it is viewed from the standpoint of the excluded. They also touch on some of the important debates in the field of citizenship studies. These debates have tended to be conducted as a series of binary oppositions, in which one term in the opposition is associated with classical liberal theory, and, by extension, ‘Western ’ theory, while the other term reflects a critique of that theory from a variety of different political, cultural and philosophical traditions (see Stammers, in Chapte