Citizens and Others

Citizenship is one of the defining social and political categories of modernity. Its conceptualization is strongly tied to the emergence of nation-states and the structuring of international relations in terms of the sovereignty of nation-states. However, it is also predicated upon a deeper, racialized structuring of the social world, which rarely informs debates about its constitution. In this article, I look at the ways in which citizenship has been understood, examine its dominant intellectual genealogy, and address its deeper racialized structures. I use the perspective of “connected sociologies” with which to undertake this task.