Editorial: Being Political 20 years later: thinking with Engin Isin

In the introductory article to a 2023 special issue of the journal Citizenship Studies marking the 20 th anniversary of the publication of Engin Isin's Being Political (2022), I suggested that this event marked "a break in the study of citizenship," one that "a generation of critical scholars of citizenship continue to respond" (Morrison, 2023, pp. 293-294). Through "critically distancing" the field of citizenship studies from what Isin (2005, 374;1994, 184, 187) considered "the stale categories of perception" and "historical ignorance" of a field of study that "remained firmly within the Marshallian theoretical framework," Being Political not only offered new conceptual and methodological tools for the study of citizenship but problematized the object of inquirycitizenship -itself. In doing so, Being Political furnished the grounds for the emergence of the field of critical citizenship studies, one which over the past two decades has grappled with the complexities of defining and understanding citizenship not only beyond mere legal status or a set of obligations but as the historically specific product of struggle. As such, it always elides any attempt to establish an identity with any given regime or tradition of governance or belonging. In Being Political, what is defined as citizenship is historically and contextually malleable, labelled as labelled as such by dominant actors who are able establish a narrative that retroactively depicts the social and political arrangements that they have established as a continuation or reemergence of others that are said to be definitive of citizenship. What marks Isin's problematization and radical historicization of citizenship as a break or a rupture is not simply that he offered a novel approach to studying citizenship but that his intervention meant that it was no longer possible for scholars of citizenship to approach a given practice or regime of citizenship as a variation or historical manifestation of an essential citizenship form. As such, to remain faithful to Isin's rupturing of citizenship studies has required scholars to continuously generate new questions, concepts and avenues of inquiry.The articles that make up this special issue are exemplary of this legacy of BP. While some use Isin's work to gain insights into particular cases and practices of citizenship, and others identify and seek to address questions emerging from their reading of his approach, the authors contributing to this volume do not merely apply concepts or approaches developed by Isin. Rather, they engage in a dialogue with Isin's writing -and particularly Being Political -one in which their research is both informed by and attentive to the contradictions and limitations within Isin's concepts and approaches. As such, the authors think with Isin in order to advance the study of citizenship.To advance our understanding of citizenship in contemporary socio-political contextswhere articulations of sameness and difference play a pivotal role in constituting social groups and subject positions -a number of scholars at Tallinn University have undertaken the task of exploring the theoretical and empirical applications of the relational approach to citizenship. Three of these scholars have contributed to this special issue. In "Comparison without Othering: A Meta-Viewpoint Model of Equivalence," Raivo Vetik, addresses a methodological problem generated by Isin's innovations in Being Political: how to construct equivalence between structurally unequal positions without reproducing the very hierarchies one aims to analyse. To address this question, Vetik develops a Meta-Viewpoint Model of Equivalence (MVM) that engages, on the one hand, with Max Weber's ideal-typical comparative strategy and Isin's genealogical-phenomenological approach, and, on the other, with John Berry's programme of strict measurement invariance and Aaro Toomela's structural-systemic critique of cross-cultural measurement. The MVM distinguishes between difference in degree and difference in meaning in defining the ontology of the research object, relocates invariance from universal constructs to the relational form of asymmetric fields, and grounds equivalence in procedural norms at the meta-viewpoint level.In "Alterity-Space: National spatiality in Lasnamäe Estonia," Nawal Shaharyar places Isin in dialogue with Henri Lefebvre to draw out both the spatial nature of alterity and the process through which spatiality is produced. Shaharyar develops the concept of alterity-space -"a distinct spatial category in which the constitution of citizenship is inscribed on socially produced space" -and demonstrates how Lefebvre's triad of representations of space, representational space, and spatial practices can serve as a methodological roadmap for tracing how state strategies, symbolic codings, and everyday practices co-constitute hierarchies of space and belonging. In doing so, Sharharyar offers a compelling spatialisation of Isin's thesis that citizenship and its alterity always constitute each other, and concretises the special issue's emphasis on sameness and difference as embedded in practices, technologies, and scales of space rather than solely in discourse or law.In "Patching identity: How Russian language media in Estonia reconstitutes our understanding of citizenship," Ivan Polynin presents content analysis of two major Russian-language web portals in Estonia to demonstrate how a "lack of shared citizenship practices between the Estonianspeaking majority and Russian-speaking minority causes a voluntary grouping along the lines of legal status, language, space and ethnicity." Drawing on Isin's concept of citizenship in practice, Benedict Anderson's "imagined communities," and Vetik's field-relational account of the Estonian ethnopolitical field, Polynin treats identity not as a nominal category but as a "complex sequence of relationships between groups and narratives." He thereby gives empirical texture to Isin's notions of acts, ruptures, and practices, and underlines their elusiveness: acts are often less visible than the long-term ruptures they cumulatively produce.In the final article, "Solidarities of Citizenship," Jacqueline Stevens traces Isin's own evolving engagement with the concept of citizenship since the publication of Being Political, showing that his subsequent writing can be read as an ongoing dialogue with that text. Stevens identifies what she characterises as a radical alteration in Isin's definition of citizenship post-Being Political, one that enables a critique of the anti-citizenship claims of Coulthard and Brandzel. As the contributions to this special issue demonstrate, and in keeping with Isin's own practice, thinking with Engin Isin means engaging both within and against his writingsprompting new questions and eliciting further interventions (Morrison, 2023, pp. 297-298).Taken together, the four articles move the study of citizenship beyond both static legalism and untheorised invocations of 'identity.' Stevens re-opens the normative stakes of reclaiming citizenship against its critics; Polynin and Shaharyar demonstrate, in complementary discursive and spatial registers, how citizenship and its alterities are co-produced in an asymmetric field; and Vetik offers a formal methodological architecture for comparing such positions without either erasing asymmetry or dissolving equivalence into incommensurable accounts. Collectively, they suggest that, if it wishes to honour the spirit of Being Political while confronting contemporary ruptures in citizenship and belonging, the next generation of citizenship studies will need to be simultaneously relational in ontology, genealogical in empirical strategy, and meta-procedural in its handling of comparison.