Citizenship and Bleakness

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Abstract
Responding to the editors’ prompt: ‘Has your relationship to the study of citizenship changed?’ I ask in this brief essay whether the language of citizenship possesses the resources to contend with the fairly dire set of circumstances we currently face. I suggest that the concept’s analytical and normative force relies on certain democratic and universalist horizons which are under siege or in some state of collapse, and I therefore wonder whether continuing to frame social analytics in citizenship terms might not presuppose as backdrop a political world that is vanishing. I also query, in preliminary terms, how much a conceptual project so often conceived and embraced as world-building in spirit can help make instructive sense of the proliferating devastations of this current moment.

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