CITIZENSHIP AND HUMAN RIGHTS1

Citizenship and Human Rights may be seen as discrete concepts in the sense that both have
distinct historical trajectories, ideological strands, debates and contests. Yet, in terms of their
philosophical bases and the manner in which they have unfolded in practice, they show an
intermeshing, since both are concerned with issues of permissible actions, and social and
political arrangements. A strange ambivalence has, however, informed their relationship.
The philosophical principles of human rights have historically served as the basis of
expansion of citizenship, indicating mutuality and reciprocity. Yet, tension has woven itself
into the relationship with the constituent elements of citizenship posing limits on human
rights. Thus the relationship may be described as both of collusion and contest. It is
important, therefore, that we not only examine the manner in which each of these concepts
has unfolded historically, but also identify moments of interdependence and contradiction. It
would also be important to see then, how these moments bring up new debates pushing for an
opening up of each concept for rethinking and reformulation.

It may also be worthwhile to note here that debates around concepts are generated within
specific contexts or referential fields. In recent times, for example, the ideas of freedom and
liberty were opened up for debate with reference to ‘global terrorism’ and the question of
‘national security and integrity’..Equality was prised open for debate vis-à-vis issues of social
justice, compensatory discrimination, and affirmative action in the late nineteen eighties
when the MandalCommissions’s recommendations were made part of state policy for
employment in the public services. Debates around citizenship emerged in the nineteen
nineties amidst proposals that the context of globalisation has compelled a rethinking of the
notion of citizenship and how it needs to be incorporated in international legal regimes and
the domestic laws of countries.

The decade of the nineties saw a hitherto unprecedented interest in the notion of citizenship,
manifested in a deluge of writings on citizenship, heralding what Kymlicka has called the ‘return
of the citizen’.2 A large proportion of these writings isembedded in the globalisation framework

1
The author has taken some of the excerpts of this lesson from her works: Roy, Anupama,
Gendered Citizenship: Historical and Conceptual Explorations (Delhi: Orient Blackswan,
2013); Mapping citizenship in India. (New Delhi: Oxford University Publications, 2010);
Citizenship in India: A Very Short Introduction (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2016).
2
In an article titled ‘Return of the Citizen: A Survey of Recent Work on Citizenship Theory’ in the journal
Ethics, Will Kymlicka and Wayne Norman propose that a concept that had supposedly ‘gone out of fashion’
among political scientist and social theorists returned in the nineteen nineties and has become the ‘buzz word’

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that alludes to the changes that characterise the late twentieth century viz., globalisation of
economy, the unprecedented large-scale movement of populations, especially workers and
refugees, displacement of class politics by identity politics, changing position of women and the
cataclysmic effects of technological and economic expansion. These changes, the writings
argue, have led to the displacement of two categories that had hitherto been the core of the
theory and practice of citizenship viz., the individual as the bearer of rights and the nation-state
as the unit of membership and citizenship identity. Following from this, they point towards the
necessity of talking of human rights and world citizenship in place of national citizenship and
cultural and community rights instead of individual rights.

What needs to be noted, however, is that the claims of human rights and community rights
counterposed to citizenship are ridden by contradictions. For alongside the claims of the rise of
the world citizen, human rights, and right of cultural communities to self-determination, can be
identified a dissonant note manifested in the lament and anxiety over the ‘crisis’ in citizenship.
The lament of crisis is evident not only in some writings on global citizenship, but also in state
practices, which perhaps more vehemently than ever before, have striven to reinforce nation-
state boundaries, restricting the inflow of foreigners, immigrants and refugees. Citizenship itself
gets defined in exclusionary terms and emerges as the bastion on which the nation-state asserts
its sovereignty and fortifies itself against the ‘hoards of starving people’ (Ferrajoli 1996: 151-
154).
Far from making it permeable, a direct outcome of movement of populations, therefore, has
been the fortification of national-cultural-political boundaries against the inflow of people.
Moreover, the rise of political conservatism in most countries has seen the intensification of
exclusionary nationalism, where assertion of ideological and cultural difference is seen as
disruptive. In France, for example, adherence to the idea of a homogeneous political community
has led to a denial of assertions of difference in public places through cultural symbols, e.g., the
wearing of headscarves by Muslim girls in schools. In other places, as in Canada, Sikh men
claimed, after a prolonged struggle, the right to be exempted from wearing the helmet, an
integral part of the uniform of the Royal Canadian Mounted Constabulary.

The tensions between a transcendental universalism which the idea of human rights encapsulates
and the exclusions that may be dictated by the legal and cultural terms of membership in the

among thinkers on all points of the political spectrum (Kymlicka and Norman 1994: 352). The ‘buzz word’
among thinkers on all points of the political spectrum (Kymlicka and Norman 1994: 352). For more, see, Will
Kymlicka, and Wayne Norman, “Return of the Citizen: A Survey of Recent Work on Citizenship Theory,” Ethics
104, no. 2 (1994): 352 – 381.

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nation-state i.e., citizenship, are evident. Again, however, the relationship has not always been
one of contest and conflict, but interspersed with moments of reciprocity and mutuality. Thus
throughout the development of citizen’s rights, whether in the eighteenth century when civil
rights against absolutist monarchical regimes were being claimed, or in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries when national liberation struggles against colonial rule were being waged in
countries of Latin America, Asia and Africa, the idea that there were certain inalienable rights
that belonged to all human beings, provided the impetus for the expansion of citizen’s rights,
both notionally and legally. Similarly, struggles by women and the working class and their
gradual inclusion into the ambit of civil and political rights of citizenship took place through
struggles, which claimed specific civil and political rights e.g., the right to vote, by emphasising
their inalienable human rights.

Most conflicts between the two as the development of human rights instruments and institutions
in the interwar and post war years would show, has ultimately been rooted in what a specific
state sees as having primacy in its own laws – manifested at times in terms of ideological
differences among nations, and at others, cultural differences that are seen as fundamental and
unbridgeable. The latter prompts the assertion that far from being universal, human rights are
actually relative and dependent on specific ideological, political, and cultural contexts.

Thus L.G.Macfarlane in his work The Theory and Practice of Human Rights modified
Maurice Cranston’s definition of human rights as ‘rights that belong to all people at all times
and in all situations’. Macfarlane suggested that it should be recognised that the concept of
universal human rights embodies values which not only conflict with other strongly held
values and conceptions (political or cultural) but which are incompatible with certain forms
of society and social institutions. The paradoxical implication of this is perhaps to be found
in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) which ‘professes to be a
statement of human rights, irrespective of the particular social and political order under which
they happen to live’, but which goes on to enumerate a detailed list of rights which
presuppose the values and institutions of a certain kind of political order, namely liberal
democratic’.

The contest over assumption of universality of values associated with specific political
ideology and culture, made itself manifest in the two separate human rights covenants that
came in 1966 – the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the

3
International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR). While the two
covenants represented two perspectives on rights, and the East-West divide of the Cold War
politics, they also reflected the historical emergence of two sets of rights. These rights have
largely been seen in terms of two generations of rights that had already come to exist, to
different degrees of emphasis in the citizenship rights of various countries. Civil and political
rights - the first generation of rights - a legacy of the bourgeois revolutions in France,
England and America, had been established in the legislations of various countries viz., the
right to ownership of property, the right to vote, freedom to participate in the associational
life of the community and the political process, were considered worthy of respect and
protection by the state apparatus they themselves controlled. These rights were, however,
largely rights of some (propertied and white) men, and did not apply to all races or classes, or
to women. The history of citizenship rights, to a significant degree has been the history of
the battle to end discrimination and to extend these rights to all. The central actors in this
struggle have been workers, women, peasants, the colonised etc, who based their claims on
the notion of an inalienable humanity. The idea of citizenship as a ‘momentum concept’ and
an ‘expanding circle of rights’, derives largely from these struggles.

Definitional concerns and relationship between the two concepts:

Citizenship: equal membership

The idea of citizenship as condition spelling continuous propulsion towards equality and
universality was presented in T.H. Marshall’s lectures on ‘Citizenship and Social Class’
delivered in Cambridge in February 1949. In his lectures Marshall presented a paradigm for
explaining the development of citizenship in England from the 18th to the 20th centuries in a
peculiar relationship of conflict and collusion with capitalism, as a process of expanding equality
against the inequality of social class. Marshall identifies three constituent elements of
citizenship viz., civil, political and social, and traces their development in correspondence
with specific state structures/institutions in a process of ‘continuous progress for some two
hundred and fifty years’ (Marshall 1950, 10 [emphasis added]). The definition of citizenship
as ‘full and equal membership in the political community’, attributed to Marshall, has been
inferred from the following elucidation:
Citizenship is a status bestowed on those who are full members of a
community. All who possess the status are equal with respect to the rights and
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 duties with which the status is endowed. There is no universal principle that
determines what those rights and duties shall be, but societies in which
citizenship is a developing institution create an image of an ideal citizenship
against which achievement can be measured and towards which aspiration can
be directed. (Marshall 1950, 28-29)

Evidently, in Marshall’s framework, citizenship is a status of full membership, and all those
who have such a status are equal with respect to their entitlement to rights and obligations. It
may be assumed, therefore, that the camaraderie of equals which citizenship bestows will be
dependent on a prior status of full membership, and the demarcation, therefore, of citizens
from non-citizens. The association of citizenship with status may be seen as a continuing
legacy of passive citizenship as a legal status became prevalent with the emergence of
absolutist states concerned with imposing their authority over heterogeneous populations.
Yet, the passivity of status is broken by the dynamism implicit in the ‘image of ideal
citizenship’ towards which aspirations for citizenship are directed – herein lies the promise of
citizenship.

Human Rights: universal humanity

Human Rights are rights to which people are entitled by virtue of being human. Human rights
are ‘universal’ in the sense that they belong to all humans being rather than to members of
any particular state, race, religion, gender or other group. They are also ‘fundamental’ in that
they are inalienable; unlike civil rights, they do not depend on the freedoms and status
accorded citizens in particular societies. Supporters of human rights portray them as
universally applicable moral principles that stand above the traditional ideological divide.
Opponents on the other hand, argue that it is nonsense to suggest that individuals have rights
that are separate from the traditions, cultures and societies to which they belong. Thus, as
Michael Freeden puts it, a human right is a conceptual device, expressed in linguistic form,
that assigns priority to certain human or social attributes regarded as essential to the adequate
functioning of a human being; that is intended to serve as a protective capsule for those
attributes; and that appeals for deliberate action to ensure such protection.

What is the relationship?

Harmony in historical trajectories:
5
Historically citizenship developed in the form of movement of resistance against royalism,
with the claims of rights of individuals (citizens) against ascriptive privileges and hierarchies
based on status. The English, French and American revolutions threw up ideas of rights as a
space of realignment of relationship between state authority and autonomy of the individual.
The idea of a social contract between the ruler and the ruled installed notions of a ‘reciprocal
relationship’ between the ruler and ruled: ruler - duty to act in accordance to principles of
fairness - ruled - duty to respect law and authority of the state. Ideas of reciprocal relationship
grounded in consent of the ruled which in turn determined the legitimacy of the state. By the
nineteenth century consent and legitimacy within the framework of constitutional government
took roots. Consent was most likely to expressed through elections, but it also lay down the
grounds for withdrawal of consent and the right to rebel against unconstitutional/arbitrary
rule.3

The Declaration of the Rights of the Man and of the Citizen of 1789 may also be construed as
a human/civil rights document. Undergirded by the doctrine of ‘natural right’ (of liberty,
property, security and resistance to oppression), the Declaration became the basis for a nation
of free individuals protected equally by the law. The principle of popular sovereignty as
distinguished from the divine right of kings (and political authority) made equality among
citizens effective: ‘All the citizens, being equal in the eyes of the law, are equally admissible
to all public dignities, places, and employments, according to their capacity and without
distinction other than that of their virtues and of their talents’.4 The declaration of rights as
natural and human made their way into the constitutions of most nations as fundamental
constitutional rights, with a higher order of protection than statutory rights.

The idea of transformative constitutionalism and citizenship rights

Citizenship as a condition of freedom and equality was integral to the constituent moment in
all societies which made transitions from various forms of authoritarian rule. Citizenship as a
manifestation of popular sovereignty and self-governance recognised the rights which inhered
in each person and was implicit in transformative constitutionalism. A central motif of
transformative constitutionalism was a conscious and meticulous sequestering from the past.

3
For more, refer to, Henry J.Steiner and Philip Alston, International Human Rights in Context (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1996).
4
ibid.

6
Indeed, it is the re-figuration of the relationship with the past, which distinguishes the
‘temporal register’ (Mehta 2010, 16) on which constitutions are etched. If the national
liberation struggles held on to an idea of a past, which was used as a resource to trace a
distinctive identity for the new nation, constitutions embodied the momentous present, from
where a vision of a future, emphatically different from the past, could be professed. In order
for the present to transform itself into a constituent moment, a remarkable capacity for being
autochthonous in the domain of law and government, and liberation from domestication and
subjection, which characterised colonial rule, had to be displayed. The demonstration of a
capacity to transform was imbricated with a vision of future in which the significance of the
present lay in how firmly it could promise an enduring rupture from the past towards a future
of equal citizenship. Discussing the historically specific moments of the transformative in
three countries embarking on a new journey of democratic constitutionalism – the post-
apartheid moment in South Africa, the post-authoritarian moment in Brazil, and the post-
colonial moment in India, Upendra Baxi stresses the distinctiveness of the constituent
moment in each of the three countries (Baxi 2008). Not only was the vision of the future
society distinct in all three countries, the precise modes through which the future sequestered
itself from a troubled past, was a significant component of the transformative moment in
each. In South Africa, for example, the constitution was seen as ‘a historic bridge’, between
the past of a deeply divided and wounded society, and a future in which the injustices of the
past were to be erased through a therapeutic healing of the wounds inflicted by it. The spatial
metaphor of the bridge was important for envisioning the crossing over to a society which
was different from the institutionalized state racism and injustices of the past. The making of
the constitution constituted the first and crucial step in creating a ‘distinctive constitutional
and societal we-ness’ for realizing the imaginary of the new society (Baxi 2008). This
crossing over was especially significant because the responsibility of envisaging a collective
future was not transferred to an unelected oligarchy, but in a spectacular and incomparable
articulation of popular sovereignty, entrusted to an elected body. 5The post-authoritarian
democratic constitution of 1988 in Brazil was a signpost, which was reached through a
chequered history of constitutional experiences. 6 The transformative moment in the history of

5
In the Preamble of the Constitution of South Africa, the ‘people of South Africa’ recognise the ‘injustices of
the past’, ‘honour those who suffered for justice and freedom’, and ‘through [their] freely elected
representatives’, adopted the constitution to ‘heal the divisions of that past, and establish a society based on
democratic values, social justice and fundamental human rights; lay the foundations for a democratic and open
society….’.Preamble, The Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, 1996 (Act 108 of 1996).
6
As pointed out by UpendraBaxi (2008), the 1988 Brazilian Constitution succeeded seven or eight constitutions,

7
constitutionalism in Brazil, lay not simply in the transition to a new political culture, but also
to a fraternal, pluralist and unprejudiced society, based on social harmony, elimination of
poverty, political pluralism and a pan Latin American solidarity.

The contradiction/Paradox

Yet, the relationship between citizenship and human rights is fraught with contradictions.
The idea of citizenship as full and equal membership, associated citizenship with a legal
status - all those who have this status are equal with respect to their rights; but rights are
dependent on a prior condition of membership. All constitutions make a distinction between
rights which belong to citizens and those that do not. However, they also identify rights
which belong to both citizens and aliens – recognising thereby the idea of universal
personhood and rights which cannot be dissociated from persons because it is integral to life
itself.

To illustrate, the Indian Constitution guarantees certain fundamental rights to only citizens,
for example, Articles 15 (Right to Equality – Anti-discrimination), 16 (Right to Equality of
Opportunity) and 19 (Right to Freedom – speech, association etc.) are guaranteed only to
citizens. Article 21 (Right to Life) is guaranteed to all ‘persons’. In the Constituent
Assembly, the fundamental rights were discussed in the Sub-Committee on Fundamental
Rights which had three sittings from February to April 1947. There does not appear to have
been a sustained debate on why the distinction between ‘person’ and ‘citizens’ was to be
made in the enumeration of the rights to equality and freedom, and who would be the bearers
of specific rights. Much of the discussion on equality focused on a different set of
distinctions: between the ‘negative’ and ‘positive’ figuration of rights and the nature of
obligation they imposed on the state, rights which were justiciable and those which were
‘merely intended as guide and directing objectives to state policy’. Indeed, the points where
the distinction between persons and citizens is discussed, are not many, and do not seem to
have animated the members as much as questions of minority rights (in the right to equality),
concerns around due process (in the right to life and personal liberty), and free speech (in the
right to freedom). It is in the context of the discussion on due process, however, that Alladi

‘depending on how one distinguishes changes of, as contrasted with changes in, constitution’, taking the 1824
Imperial Constitution as the starting point. The 1988 constitution succeeded two major periods of authoritarian
rule - 1937-1945 and 1964-1985.

8
Krishnaswami Ayyar (Note on Fundamental Rights, 14 March 2016) brings up the distinction
between the US Constitution and its protection of freedoms in the First Amendment, the
equal protection guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment, and the ‘elastic interpretation’ of
due process by the US Supreme Court. For Ayyar, the question before the Constituent
Assembly of India was whether to follow the model of the United States or of the later
constitutions. The later constitutions differed from the US Constitution in that they merely
referred to the right of citizens while providing for the law of citizenship. The US
Constitution on the other hand, guaranteed certain human rights to all people for the time
‘resident in or under the protection of the United States’. Whereas certain rights were secured
only to citizens (e.g., fifteenth and nineteenth amendments pertaining to franchise), most of
the rights secured by the first 8 amendments, including the fifth amendment, giving
protection to life liberty and property, were shared by all persons in the United States (Shiva
Rao, Vol II, p.68). It may be said that the Constituent Assembly followed the inclusive model
of the United States, by not limiting all fundamental rights to citizens, but only those which
required a relationship of obligation between citizens and the state, as K. T. Shah was to note
in his submission of 23 December 1946. Shah would argue that over the past 200 years ‘civil
rights’ had become standardized and were incorporated in varying terms in the constitutions
of the leading countries of the world. These rights were founded on the conception of justice
between man and man, and could not be secured without equality in the social system and
before the courts of law. The most important of these rights to Shah were the rights to the
liberty of persons and to privacy, which were, however, not confined to citizens but were the
rights of ‘humanity in general’. The right to life, therefore, so far as mere sanctity of life was
concerned would apply to both ‘citizens and strangers’. But as far as the conditions enabling
persons to enjoy the ‘fullness of life’ and opportunities for self-expression and self-
realization’ were concerned, they required provision of facilities (education, health,
entertainment etc.), which in turn required an outlay, the wherewithal (e.g. through taxes) of
which would come from citizens. These rights will, therefore be for citizens and strangers,
but preferentially for citizens. On the other hand, for Shah, political rights, required a
different kind of obligation, so that ‘While the general level of civilization and the amenities
of life provided thereunder would be common to citizens and strangers, certain rights of
citizens which become the obligation of the state are necessarily confined or at least primarily
belong to the citizen (Shivarao, Vol. II, p.43).

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The question of exclusion:Borders and citizenship

Refugees, stateless persons and illegal migrants

The case of the Syrian refugee Hasan Al Kontar, who for several months now has been
stranded in a holding area in an airport in Malaysia, reminds us of the restrictive regimes of
entry that countries follow and the plight of those who do not, for various reasons, including
long-drawn conflicts, fear of violence and ideological persecution, do not have a country to
return to. The policing of borders and restrictions of entry for those who may require a right
to stay has led to a range of liminal categories – of refugees and stateless persons, for
example, who have protection under international human rights regimes, which countries are
expected to respect. The example of the Rohingya refugees is relevant here. Deprived of
recognition as an ethnic group for inclusion as citizens in Myanmar, the Rohingyas fled from
Myanmar to neighbouring countries to escape violence. They have, mostly since 2015, living
in camps in different countries, and are considered refugees in some (e.g., Bangladesh) and
illegal migrants in others (e.g., Indian). We may recall that on 18 August 2017, the National
Human Rights Commission (NHRC) of India issued a notice to the Ministry of Home Affairs
over its move to deport 40,000 illegal Rohingya immigrants back to their native country since
they were a threat to national security. The notice by NHRC emphasized that while the
Rohingyas were not Indians citizens, they were human beings, and would face persecution if
they were pushed back to Myanmar. The NHRC pointed out that the fundamental right to life
and personal liberty in Article 21 of the Indian Constitution applied to the Rohingyas. This
was in correspondence with the position of the United Nations (UN) on refugees and stateless
persons. The UNHCR believed that the fact that India had not signed the UN conventions
pertaining to refugees and stateless persons did not mean that India did not have obligations
under international law to extend protection to the Rohingyas as a matter of “basic human
compassion.” Indeed, customary law, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights
which India had ratified, and its obligations of due process and the universal principle of non-
refoulement, obliged it to notforce them to return to a place where they were at risk of their
lives and violation of their human rights.7

Global cities and the deception of flexible citizenship

7
Ujjwal Kumar Singh, “The Inside-Outside’ Body,” Economic and Political Weekly 53, no. 2 (2017).

10
The contexts of globalisation are seen as having produced far-reaching changes, which have
disaggregated and disarticulated from each other, the relationships which were hitherto seen
as integral to citizenship. The globalisation of economy, the unprecedented scale of
transnational movement of workers and refugees, the cataclysmic effects of technological
expansion and rapid flow of information and images, is seen as having displaced the nation-
state as the primary unit of citizenship identity, and as the sole source of citizen’s rights.
Further, the escalation in the movements of people across national borders and the subsequent
cohabitation of the national territorial space by culturally distinct communities, have
displaced the masked individual as the locus of rights, to give co-equivalence to groups and
cultural communities as bearers and claimants of rights.

While the relevance of (human) rights and laws beyond/without the state, and the rights of
communities under conditions described as ‘specifically’ late twentieth century cannot be
denied, it must also be emphasised that the claims for human rights and community rights are
ridden by contradictions, especially as they continue to place themselves within the
exclusionary discourse of difference-deferral. Moreover, alongside the apotheosis of the
world citizen, and the individual-in-community, co-exists an anxiety over a crisis in
citizenship, which is seen as having emanated from the disarticulations and disassociations in
contemporary citizenship. This anxiety is visible in state practices, which, perhaps more
vehemently than ever before, have striven to reinforce national-boundaries restricting the
inflow of foreigners, immigrants and refugees. Again, notions of ‘global risks’8notably
‘terrorism’ have rendered certain communities ‘suspect’. These suspicions make themselves
manifest in extraordinary laws, for example, anti-terrorism laws like the (now repealed)
Prevention Of Terrorism Act (POTA 2002) in India, and the Patriot Act (2002) in the USA,
that are based on a jurisprudence of suspicion. Yet, as Ong argues, the new forms of
exchanges generated by the changing relationship between markets, technologies and people,
have produced mutations in citizenship. These mutations are not merely manifested in the
disassociation of citizenship from its embeddedness in the nation-state, but also in the ‘new
spaces of entangled possibilities’, which propel a re-articulation of citizenship in the global
assemblages. The ‘entangled possibilities’ generated by the re-articulation of a ‘new
citizenship’ embodies a distinct set of fault-lines, which have injected fresh contests in the
theory and practice of citizenship.

The new context of global risks (financial, environmental, and those which emerge from global terrorism), as
8

Ulrich Beck has put it, ‘is the way of being and ruling in the world of modernity’ (Beck, 2006, p.330).

11
Rather than the territory of the nation-state, it is the space of the assemblage, which for Ong
becomes the site for new political mobilisations and rights claims, made by a range of actors
not all whom are citizens in sense of membership in the nation-state. Ong sees the mega city
as a site of assemblage, which captures most effectively the new landscape of citizenship –
post-national, flexible, technological, cyber-based, and biological (Ong 2006). Significantly,
Ong traces the emergence of the global/mega city in South-East Asia where a competitive
globalisation has resulted in a relentless pursuit of human capital and consequently
entrepreneurial citizenship, characterized by a relentless hunt for talented expatriates, the
‘nomadic’ professionals who, irrespective of their ‘pied-a-terre’ status, enhance the
generation of wealth in cities.9 The unambiguous adoption of neoliberal values in the thriving
megacities like Shanghai and Beijing and city-states like Hong Kong and Singapore is based
on the conscious organisation of the city (as distinct form the nation-state) as a zone of
entitlements. The zoning of the city as a source and site of entitlements is considered
necessary its figuration as an important node in transnational networks of capital, which
allows for the creation of complex and flexible affiliations by ‘elite mobile actors’. These
affiliations are made possible through conditions in the city in which the expatriate
populations may claim citizenship-like entitlements and yet retain a ‘flexible citizenship’,
which does not tie them down, and enables them to respond ‘fluidly and opportunistically’ to
borderless market conditions (Ong 1999, 19). These mobile citizens, choose to maximise
their gains and opportunities through flexibility with movement, rather than rigidity with
stability. While paving the way for flexible and entrepreneurial citizenship, the megacity is
also the space where the presence of citizenship-like rights does not necessarily require
deeper bonds of belonging. Indeed, the global megacity, are spaces of ‘graduated
sovereignties’ (Ong 2000, 2006), where entrepreneurial expatriates claim the rights and
benefits which hitherto belonged exclusively to citizens, and on the other hand the space of
stable (distinct from mobile/flexible) citizenship, is fraught with discrimination.

9
For Ong the prefix ‘mega’ in the megacity does not refer to the size of the urban population, but the massive
investment in the city by the state, and the scale of political ambition it manifests, for competitive edge,
involving investment for the urban accumulation of foreign talent and creative know-how. The prominent Asian
cities embody the ‘the imprint of enormous state investments’ as planned sites for attracting ‘nomadic’
professionals. While crucial to the identity of the megacity, these mobile professionals, exist in what Ong calls
a position ‘betwixt and between’, as a ‘pied-a-terre’ in the host city, to which they have a limited commitment,
and which constitutes for them a place of work, and not a primary place of residence (Ong 2007, 83).

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Conclusion

Citizenship and human rights have a paradoxical relationship, exhibiting reciprocity

sometimes, but often also mutual exclusion and antagonism. It may be possible to see human
rights pushing at the boundaries of citizenship, to elaborate its meaning and content, making
it more substantive. This elaboration may come about as a result of interpretation of
citizenship rights by courts in a way that the human rights and citizenship may appear to
come closer. The recent judgements of the Supreme Court of India including the right to
privacy within the ambit of fundamental right to life is an example of how the idea of life
itself is buttressed through the vocabulary of universal personhood constituted by dignity and
personal integrity. The decriminalisation of consensual sexual relations within the same sex,
gave more substance to the meanings of privacy and dignity, and thereby to life itself. Often
the elaboration of rights comes from non-institutional spaces. The ‘global street’ – as
SaskiaSassen calls the non-ritualised spaces of protest, which make public appearance – so
essential to the constitution of an enduring public space, a source of collective empowerment.

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Beck, Ulrich. “Living in the World Risk Society.” Economy and Society 35, no. 3 (2006): 329
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Ferrajoli, Luigi. “Beyond Sovereignty and Citizenship: A Global Constitutionalism.” in

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Kymlicka, Will and Wayne Norman. “Return of the Citizen: A Survey of Recent Work on
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Macfarlane, L.J. The Theory and Practice of Human Rights. London: Maurice Temple Smith,
1985.

Marshall, T.H. Citizenship and Social Class. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1950.

Ong, Aihwa. Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logic of Transnationality. Duke University
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----. Neoliberalism as Exception. Duke University Press, 2006.

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