Making Sense of Citizenship (Reply to Commentators)
Posted: 26 Nov 2012
Date Written: 2011
Abstract
Response to Commentators Denaturalizing Citizenship: A Symposium on Linda Bosniak’s The Citizen and the Alien and Ayelet Shachar's The Birthright Lottery Issues In Legal Scholarship, Volume 9, Issue 1 2011 Article 12
I am immensely fortunate to have the opportunity to respond to this group of probing and sympathetic comments on The Citizen and the Alien. The responding authors are all intellectual heroes of mine, and it’s a privilege to exchange ideas with them here about my book. The Symposium’s pairing of The Citizen and the Alien with Professor Ayelet Shachar’s brilliant volume, The Birthright Lottery, gives an intellectual ballast and depth to the discussion that it could not otherwise have had. Special thanks to Professor Leti Volpp for conceiving of the publication of these books as an occasion for interdisciplinary reflection on the state of legal and political theory on citizenship, and for painstakingly shepherding this project to completion. These ten essays raise a confluence of questions about the book’s substance, method, and normative stance. In light of length constraints, and in the interests of synthesizing, my approach here is to address three broad categories of questions presented: one concerning the book’s purpose, scope and method; a second, concerning issues of nationalism and territoriality; and a third concerning the possibilities and limitations of the concept of citizenship. Proceeding this way permits reflections on themes arising across the comments. I am truly grateful to be pressed to clarify and further develop my thinking on these issues.
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