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Abstract The two foundational subjects for membership in the modern nation-state, the citizen and the alien, are undergoing significant changes in the current period. The effect is a partial blurring of each the citizen subject and the alien subject. Some of these changes are not formalized and hence become particularly evident in certain types of contexts, foremost among which are cities. These can be seen as productive spaces for informal or not-yet-formalized politics and subjects. In this examination of emergent possibilities, I first outline these changes vis-à-vis nationality and citizenship. Second, I dissect notions of national membership in order to create a set of tools for reconstructing citizenship analytically. In the third section, I delineate two key, incipient kinds of repositioned membership: unauthorized yet recognized subjects, and authorized yet unrecognized subjects. Fourth, I situate these repositionings within contemporary currents of citizenship theory. In the final section, I theorize the landscape of the global city as an especially salient site for the repositioning of citizenship in practice. At the scale of the city, and the particular urban space of the global city, there are dynamics that signal the possibilities for a politics of membership that is simultaneously localized and transnational.
Saskia Sassen (Sun,) studied this question.