Description

As a number of scholars have commented, citizenship or ‘nationality’ studies as a field of scholarship has historically suffered from an ‘Atlantic’ or ‘Northern hemisphere’ bias. There have been few attempts to develop conceptual models for understanding citizenship which work also for the global south or for continents such as Asia. As a counterpoint to the traditional approach, much of which is focused on immigration to ‘western’ countries or anglophone settler societies, the speaker argues in her research that we need to put factors such as decolonialisation and challenges such as democracy deficits front and centre when developing a conceptual model to understand citizenship on a global scale. This paper introduces the ‘citizenship regimes’ approach to studying citizenship, focusing in particular on challenges to the classic model of citizenship understood as an ideal of equality and democracy, making use of examples from across Asia.

About The Speaker

Jo Shaw holds the Salvesen Chair of European Institutions at the University of Edinburgh. During 2017-2018 she was a EURIAS Fellow at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies. Her research on citizenship has been supported by a variety of funders, including the European Research Council, the Nuffield Foundation and – currently – the Leverhulme Trust, where she currently holds a Major Research Fellowship (2018-2020).