Theorizing and Analyzing Citizenship in Multicultural Societies

I argue that sociologists have directed insufficient attention to the study of citizenship. When citizenship is studied, sociologists tend to concentrate on just one facet: rights. I elaborate four conceptual facets of citizenship. I link two—citizenship as rights and belonging—to theoretical elaborations of multiculturalism. Considering multiculturalism as a state discourse and set of policies, rather than a political or normative theory, I outline linkages between multiculturalism and two additional facets of citizenship: legal status and participation. Over the last 15 years, the idea of multiculturalism has come under withering criticism, especially in Europe, in part because it is claimed that multiculturalism undermines common citizenship. Yet countries with more multicultural policies and a stronger discourse of pluralism and recognition are places where immigrants are more likely to become citizens, more trusting of political institutions, and more attached to the national identity. There is also little evidence that multicultural policies fuel majority backlash, and some modest evidence that such policies enlarge conceptions of inclusive membership. By studying claims‐making and the equality of immigrant‐origin groups, we see that the participatory aspect of citizenship needs to take center stage in future work in political sociology, social theory, social movements, immigration, and race/ethnicity.     

Legal pluralism and the Shari'a: a comparison of Greece and Turkey

The creation of a national and unified legal system was an important aspect of the rise of the modern state and national citizenship. However, this interpretation of legal rationalization has been challenged by sociologists of law such as Eugene Ehrlich (1862–1922) who claimed that this juridical theory of state‐centred law masked the presence of customary laws outside this formal system. In critical theories of the law, legal pluralism is proposed against the idea of legal sovereignty or legal centralism. In this article we explore the implications of the growth of the Shari'a as an example of legal pluralism. We take Turkey and Greece as two interesting but different examples of legal pluralism and consider the implications of these case studies for debates about liberalism, multiculturalism and citizenship in multi‐faith societies.     

(En)countering terrorism: multiculturalism and Singapore

With national security concerns dominating the agenda for many states and with the management of cultural diversity under close scrutiny, can the agenda of multiculturalism—with its desire to accommodate cultural differences—survive? By assessing Singapore's review of its multiculturalism policy in this ‘age of terror’, this paper argues that the project of multiculturalism is far from over. Moreover, it argues that, if performed well and permitted to evolve constantly, multiculturalism may instead be a bulwark against the allure of what has become termed ‘home-grown’ terrorism. The argument progresses in broadly three parts. The first part defines the terms multicultural and multiculturalism, and presents a continuum of different approaches to multiculturalism. This section is keen to stress the diversity present in policies of multiculturalism in order to highlight the different policy options available to the management of difference. In the second part, Singapore's policy of multiculturalism is located on the continuum and assessed. Finally, by tracing recent alterations to Singaporean multiculturalism, the final part of the paper suggests possible adaptations that may be required of plural societies when (en)countering extremist ideology.     

Representing harmony and diversity: media representations of multiculturalism and ethnicity in Singapore

This article investigates multiculturalism and ethnicity in Singapore. The study conducted a qualitative content analysis of articles appearing in the Straits Times newspaper over a three month period in 2010. It was found that multicultural harmony tended to be represented as unnatural, fragile, and requiring government intervention. There also tended to be a focus on distinct and fixed ethnic identities, reflecting an essentialist understanding of ethnicity. These beliefs about the nature of multiculturalism and ethnic identity were reflected in the coverage of three major social issues. These were the perceived needs to maintain the ethnic composition of Singapore’s population, efforts to prevent cultural corruption or neglect, and concerns about the impact of immigration on multicultural harmony.     

Cultural mediation through vernacularization: framing rights claims through the day‐off campaign for migrant domestic workers in Singapore

Scholarship on civil society in Singapore has tended to emphasize the structural and institutional constraints on civil society space. Conversely, little attention is paid to the broader cultural and discursive realms in which civil society and state actors operate. This article seeks to address this gap by analysing the day‐off campaign for migrant domestic workers in Singapore. We demonstrate that by employing the cultural mediation strategy of vernacularization, civil society was able to frame migrant rights claims in a manner that resonated with the institutional logics and cultural repertoire of Singapore society. Civil society actors gained headway by adapting the discourse on migrant rights to Singapore's socio‐cultural and political context in three ways: by reframing rights claims into a moral appeal; by appealing to the cost‐benefit logics of Singaporean employers of migrant domestic workers; and by situating the provision of migrant labour protections as a relative market position.     

Asian multiculturalism in communication: Impact of culture in the practice of public relations in Singapore

This study aims to understand the role of cultural values in influencing public relations practice in Singapore. Given that Singapore exhibits a hybrid of cultures, it purposes to comprehend how multiculturalism is operationalized and to uncover if the values that have a greater influence on organizational communication resemble those in individualistic or collectivistic societies. Using Gudykunst’s (1998) seven dimensions that influence individualism-collectivism on communication as a guide, this study interviewed 20 public relations practitioners in Singapore. Our findings showed that although the patterns expressed is slightly more consistent with those found in collectivistic cultures, it does not resemble collectivism in entirety. Multiculturalism in Singapore displays a blend of certain cultural hybridity, which is aligned with it being a multicultural cosmopolitan city that embodies Western modernity while retaining its Asian values. Our findings further reinforced the idea that public relations professionals need to be multicultural themselves to effectively communicate with culturally diverse stakeholders in today’s globalizing era of multiculturalism.     

Reply to davis

The basic premise of this article is that the revival and increasing acceptance of the concept of cultural pluralism (and its contemporary variant, multiculturalism) in popular and academic discourses today should be investigated as a problem in the sociology of knowledge. In this context, this article discusses briefly how cultural pluralism is used in popular and academic discourses today. Then, it identifies the normative structure of, and the domain assumptions underpinning, the concept. The article constructs an argument that the concept lacks conceptual precision and analytical rigor; that its ontological claims for race and ethnicity cannot be justified; and that it is epistemologically incoherent, as shown by its internal contradictions. The article concludes that the ideological implications of the concept should be investigated and that discourses on cultural pluralism, generally, would benefit by resurrecting Milton Gordon's concept of the eth - class.     

Multiculturalism at play: young people and citizenship in Australia

This article analyzes an Australian theatre program that engaged diverse youth in (re)visioning citizenship and multiculturalism by creating new notions of belonging and altering perceptions of Aboriginal culture and its value in Australia. This kind of work – where young people's understandings of inclusion and diversity can be unsettled, critiqued, and developed – is crucial because current approaches to Australian multiculturalism tend to rely on Anglo-centric norms and fail to account for indigeneity. Drawing on participant observation and semi-structured interviews, I argue that youth theatre based on reflexive practices and cross-cultural sharing may offer a useful tool for young people's education for inclusive citizenship in a multicultural, super-diverse context. When practiced thoughtfully, such programs can offer space for rethinking citizenship and belonging in ways that recognize the centrality of Indigenous culture and critically reflect on the limitations of the dominant culture's reliance on Anglo cultural norms and ideas.     

Ethnic mobilization,multiculturalism and the political process in two Belgian cities: Antwerp and Liège

Next to discussing aspects of the political and social situation of migrant ethnic communities in two Belgian cities, this article provides interesting insight into identity politics in contemporary Belgium divided between the Flemish emphasis on cultural and linguistic homogenization and hegemonization and the Walloon focus on citizenship. This fundamental ideological split influences also how multiculturalism is discussed and practiced in the two parts of Belgium in general and in Antwerp and Liege in particular.     

Ethnic Resurgence,Minority Communities,and State Policies in a Network Society: The Dynamics of Malay Identity Formation in Postcolonial Singapore

While much has been written about identity formation and the politics of ethnicity among minority communities in various parts of modern-day Southeast Asia, the same cannot be said regarding the Malay community of Singapore. This article seeks to address this scholarly neglect by bringing into sharp focus the dynamics, processes, and circumstances that shaped Malay identity in postcolonial Singapore during the 1980s. By interweaving historical data with theoretical insights derived from the works of Andrew Willford, Manuel Castells, and Richard Jenkins, among others, this article provides an analytical reading of the global, regional, and local developments that brought about an ethnic resurgence within one of the largest minority groups in this island city-state. Such developments prompted the Singapore government to devise new laws and employ multi-faceted strategies to regain its legitimacy in the eyes of a certain segment of the population, and to enhance its ruling capacity. The problematics embedded within the state's interpretation of Malay identity and the effects of citizen resistance against state policies are considered in detail in the final sections of this article.     

Talks and disputes of racism in Colombia after multiculturalism*

ABSTRACT

This article examines the terms that shape the notion of ethnic group for black communities. This notion allows one to understand the singularity of Colombia’s turn to multiculturalism in the 1990s, and how it has impacted the political and theoretical imaginations of cultural otherness. I will argue that this shift to multiculturalism has not meant the disappearance of the talks and disputes of racism and the beginning of a kind of ‘post-racial’ social formation. On the contrary, old and new forms of talk and disputes of racism could be traced after this shift to multiculturalism, not only in relation to the dense legislation for the recognition of black communities as ethnic groups, but also in regard to other realms such as social media, activist struggles and academic paradigms.     

A curious trajectory of interrace relations: the transformation of cosmopolitan Malay port polities into the multiethnic divisions of modern Malaysia

This article aims to examine several interrelated issues pertaining to the historical development of pluralism in areas forming today´s Malaysia. Firstly, it intends to analyze the transformation of the formerly cosmopolitan populations of Malay port polities into the highly ‘racialized’ society of modern Malaysia. It also seeks to clarify the roots of ethnicity-based issues and relations in the country. Lastly, it attempts to challenge the very concept of Malaysia as a society primarily consisting of three ethnic pillars, dominated by the Malays, and ‘complemented’ by the Chinese and the Indians. I argue that the main driving force behind these tensions is the segregational colonial policies and the postcolonial arrangements of the Malay ethnocentrist governments, rather than ethnic and cultural factors as the ruling politicians tend to stress. I also contend that religious issues, especially those stemming from the dakwah movement, are gradually becoming an increasingly important factor in interrace strife.     

Precarious nostalgia in the tropical smart city: transmedia memory,urban informatics,and the Singapore Golden Jubilee

The memory of loss in Asia's leading global cities has been shaped by recurrent projects of urban renewal, which have sought to deliver economic prosperity and social order at the expense of longstanding spaces and practices. Singapore's Golden Jubilee in 2015, which commemorated its triumphant postcolonial development, was accompanied by the proliferation of public expressions of nostalgia across a variety of media platforms. Amid the rise of the participatory culture of media convergence, this article examines how nostalgic longing is no longer necessarily articulated as an antagonistic critique of the precarious present of neoliberal capitalism, which withdraws into a timeless image of a congenial past. Departing from this conventional understanding of nostalgia in the scholarship of Singapore, it explores how the ruling government since independence has reconfigured its dissemination of historical and cultural knowledge to manage its transition from a global city defined by rapid growth to a smart nation reliant on perpetual adjustment by cultivating a form of citizenship centred on entrepreneurship and innovation. Through immersive spatialization, commissioned mobile video games oblige players to internalize the protocols of knowledge and agency of the Singapore Story, the official narrative of economic success and national progress. Two other state-run interactive digital platforms, the National Library's online archive the Singapore Memory Project and the National Museum's art installation The Story of the Forest, are designed to cultivate a new openness to the inevitability of iterations in urban informatics. Helping to assuage popular anxiety over the constancy of change and the failure of risk-taking, the latter frames perpetual adjustment as a vital component of the cosmic cyclicality of deep time, in which vanished realities are recreated with different permutations.     

Politics of quantifying people and 2017’s census of Pakistan

Pakistan is a postcolonial multilingual, multicultural, and multireligious state. Different cultural collectivities struggle for the preservation of their social identity and procurement of their fair share in the economic and political resources of the state. Numbers provide these ethnic groups the knowledge about their own strength relative to other ethnic groups and accordingly to make demands. In Pakistan, a decennial is conducted to know the exact number and nature of its demography and accordingly make policies. Pakistan since 1947 till date has conducted six censuses in total and all are mired in controversy concerning the counting of competing ethnicities. This article using case study method and taking 2017's census as a case investigates two fundamental questions: why does the state of Pakistan keep an uncertainty around the numbers, and why do competing ethnic groups never trust the process of counting numbers and call it a manipulated process?     

“Flexible Citizenship” or Familial Ties that Bind? Singaporean Transmigrants in London

Easier travel and communication technologies, together with the global demand and supply labour market exchanges occurring under post-Fordist capitalism, create the conditions that make transnational family formations more common than before. Geographically dispersed family members are governed by different citizenship regimes that affect familial interactions and the possibility of family reunification. Such family formations have significant implications for the nation-state framework and the way that citizenship is practised in a transnational world. Singapore, a young city-state in Southeast Asia, provides an insightful case-study to examine migrant motivations and citizenship behaviour. The political leaders in Singapore represent the nation-state's internationalising drive – which includes encouraging Singaporeans to live and work overseas for a period of time – and its domestic nation-building goals as strategies that are both necessary and yet in tension with one another.
This paper draws on discourse analysis to examine the ways in which the Singaporean state plays upon familial logics and citizenship regulations as one of its strategies to bind overseas citizens to the country. I also employ findings from in-depth interviews with Singaporean transmigrants in London to discuss the manner in which the above considerations frame their decisions on migration and citizenship. In doing so, I argue that research on migration and the transnational family should consider how they both articulate and are in turn articulated by the nation-state. I then show how my research results have important implications for citizenship policymaking in a transnational world, particularly with respect to gendered familial discourses and nation-building processes. I also suggest that my research findings indicate areas for further academic enquiry into the morphology, strategies and temporality of transnational family formations.     

The neoliberal multicultural state and the urban Indigenous associative model in Santiago de Chile

This article argues that since the recovery of democracy in Chile in the early 1990s, the state has been reshaping the Indigenous socio-political landscape by adopting neoliberal multiculturalism as a governance model. By not posing significant challenges to the state's neoliberal political and economic priorities, Indigenous cultural activity has been carefully channelled to meet state expectations of what constitutes urban indigeneity. Drawing on the minority and multicultural studies literature and ongoing ethnographic fieldwork, this article analyses how Mapuche civil society navigates the complexities of two relational models of state/ethnic minority interaction: ethno-bureaucracy and strategic essentialism. Although Mapuche associations have tried to accommodate their interests within the limits of neoliberal multiculturalism, the article argues that this governance model has established incentives for inclusion and exclusion in the socio-political apparatus, resulting in a fragmentation of the Mapuche associative landscape in urban Chile.     

Commercially arranged marriage and the negotiation of citizenship rights among Vietnamese marriage migrants in multiracial Singapore

Globalization and increased mobilities have multiplied cross-border transactions not only in the economic sphere but have also a major impact on human relationships of intimacy. This can be seen in the increased volume of differently mediated forms of international marriage, not just straddling ‘east’ and ‘west’, but within Asia and across different ethnicities and nationalities. International marriage raises a host of social issues for countries of origin and destination, including challenges relating to the citizenship status and rights of the marriage migrant. This paper examines the negotiation of citizenship rights in the case of commercially matched marriage migrants – namely Vietnamese women who marry Singaporean men and migrate to Singapore as ‘foreign brides’. While they are folded into the ‘family’ – what is often thought of as the basic building block of the nation in Asian societies – they are not necessarily accorded full incorporation into the ‘nation’ despite Singapore's claims to multiculturalism. This is particularly salient at a point when cross-nationality, cross-ethnicity marriages between Singapore citizens and non-citizens are on the increase, accounting for over a third of marriages registered in Singapore in recent years. Vietnamese women who marry Singaporeans are positioned within the nation-state's citizenship regime as dependents of Singaporean men, having to rely on the legitimacy of the marriage relationship as well as the whims of their husbands in negotiating their rights vis-à-vis the Singapore state. Drawing on interviews and ethnographic work with 20 Vietnamese women who are commercially matched marriage migrants, the paper first focuses on the vulnerable positions these women find themselves, particularly given difficulties in forging their own support networks as well as weaknesses of the civil society sector in what has been called an ‘illiberal democracy’ characterized by a political culture of ‘non-resistance’. The paper then goes on to examine the way they negotiate rights to residency/citizenship, work and children within webs of asymmetrical power relations within the family and the nation-state. We draw on our findings to show that citizenship is ‘a terrain of struggle’ within a multicultural nation-state shaped by social ideologies of gender, race and class and negotiated on an everyday basis within spheres of family intimacy.     

Cultural Citizenship

This paper seeks to give a sense of the diversity of work that falls within the boundaries of 'cultural citizenship'– a term it locates as emerging from the problematisation of traditional citizenship models by issues of identity and mediation. This paper outlines three distinct strands of cultural citizenship theory, which respectively emphasise multiculturalism, the politics of cultural texts, and dialogical communication. Subsequently, this paper conducts a brief analysis and critique of these strands, enabled by an interrogation of the ways in which they each define and deploy the term 'culture'. It is argued that for cultural citizenship to develop a more coherent terminological 'face', a balance must be struck between a commitment to specificity, and the appeal of abstracted re-imaginings of civil society.     

Civil Society Efficacy,Citizenship and Empowerment in Africa

This paper contributes to the debate on the limited efficacy of civil society in Africa. It examines the complex interface between notions of civil society and citizenship within the context of the postcolonial state in Africa. It argues that the bifurcated character of citizenship is implicated in the inefficacy of civil society. This is underlined by the limited achievements in social citizenship, aggravated by the economic crisis and neoliberal reforms of the 1980s and 1990s as well as the politics of regime sustenance. Political disengagement, drain on the moral content of public life and diminished collective orientation of citizens, aggravated conflicts within society, thereby, promoting a democratisation of disempowerment and a disorganised civil society.