Citizenship

Citizenship-Bourdieu-international relations. This particular juxtaposition of words seems at fi rst incongruous. Can it be heuristic? In fact, I will ask two inter-related questions in this chapter. First, what can the study of citizenship bring to current debates in International Relations (IR)? There is little research and refl ection in the IR fi eld on citizenship in spite of its connections to other central concepts such as sovereignty (see Adler-Nissen, this volume). After all, the modern fi ction of citizenship is intrinsically wedded to the idea of a sovereign people living on a given territory under one rule of law. As political theorist Christine Chwaszcza put it, there is an underlying “co-extensionality thesis” that takes for granted that the state and the set of normatively relevant legal subjects are co-extensive with the individuals who constitute the people (Chwaszcza 2009: 454). This is a fi ction useful for political practice but that scholars rarely reflect upon