Taken as a whole, this book argues that the very idea of what it means to be a “citizen” in our global, cosmopolitan world is no longer as clear as it may have been for an Athenian democrat of the fifth century BC, a Roman Republican of the first century BC, a British coloniser of the eighteenth century, or an American patriot of the nineteenth century. Given the now undeniable fact of pluralism highlighted by globalisation and the massive movement of peoples across borders (alongside the legal expansion of rights to minority groups in Western democracies throughout the twentieth century), the idea of citizenship now immediately implicates the problem of inclusion. Pluralism and migration also make identity an increasingly fragile and important concept that is only loosely tethered to the meaning of citizenship. This book shows that the very idea of what it means to be a citizen of a state was complex and uncertain. And that the concept of citizenship was being actively rethought from the different disciplines represented at the conference: sociology, anthropology, literary studies, communication studies, and political science to name a few.
