Democracy, Citizenship, and Constitutionalism – serie

From Brown v. Board of Education to Roe v. Wade to Bush v. Gore, the Supreme Court has, over the past fifty years, assumed an increasingly controversial place in American national political life. As the recurring struggles over nominations to the Court illustrate, few questions today divide our political community more profoundly than those concerning the Court's proper role as protector of liberties and guardian of the Constitution. If the nation is today in the midst of a "culture war," the contest over the Supreme Court is certainly one of its principal battlefields.In this volume, distinguished constitutional scholars aim to move debate beyond the sound bites that divide the opposing parties to more fundamental discussions about the nature of constitutionalism. Toward this end, the volume includes chapters on the philosophical and historical origins of the idea of constitutionalism; on theories of constitutionalism in American history in particular; on the practices of constitutionalism around the globe; and on the parallel emergence of-and the persistent tensions between-constitutionalism and democracy throughout the modern world.In democracies, the primary point of having a constitution is to place some matters beyond politics and partisan contest. And yet it seems equally clear that constitutionalism of this kind results in a struggle over the meaning or proper interpretation of the constitution, a struggle that is itself deeply political. Although the volume represents a variety of viewpoints and approaches, this struggle, which is the central paradox of constitutionalism, is the ultimate theme of all the essays.

Present-day Americans feel secure in their citizenship: they are free to speak up for any cause, oppose their government, marry a person of any background, and live where they choose-at home or abroad. Denaturalization and denationalization are more often associated with twentieth-century authoritarian regimes. But there was a time when American-born and naturalized foreign-born individuals in the United States could be deprived of their citizenship and its associated rights. Patrick Weil examines the twentieth-century legal procedures, causes, and enforcement of denaturalization to illuminate an important but neglected dimension of Americans' understanding of sovereignty and federal authority: a citizen is defined, in part, by the parameters that could be used to revoke that same citizenship.The Sovereign Citizen begins with the Naturalization Act of 1906, which was intended to prevent realization of citizenship through fraudulent or illegal means. Denaturalization-a process provided for by one clause of the act-became the main instrument for the transfer of naturalization authority from states and local courts to the federal government. Alongside the federalization of naturalization, a conditionality of citizenship emerged: for the first half of the twentieth century, naturalized individuals could be stripped of their citizenship not only for fraud but also for affiliations with activities or organizations that were perceived as un-American. (Emma Goldman's case was the first and perhaps best-known denaturalization on political grounds, in 1909.) By midcentury the Supreme Court was fiercely debating cases and challenged the constitutionality of denaturalization and denationalization. This internal battle lasted almost thirty years. The Warren Court's eventual decision to uphold the sovereignty of the citizen-not the state-secures our national order to this day. Weil's account of this transformation, and the political battles fought by its advocates and critics, reshapes our understanding of American citizenship.

From anxiety about Muslim immigrants in Western Europe to concerns about undocumented workers and cross-border security threats in the United States, disputes over immigration have proliferated and intensified in recent years. These debates are among the most contentious facing constitutional democracies, and they show little sign of fading away.Edited and with an introduction by political scientist Rogers M. Smith, Citizenship, Borders, and Human Needs brings together essays by leading international scholars from a wide range of disciplines to explore the economic, cultural, political, and normative aspects of comparative immigration policies. In the first section, contributors go beyond familiar explanations of immigration's economic effects to explore whose needs are truly helped and harmed by current migration patterns. The concerns of receiving countries include but are not limited to their economic interests, and several essays weigh different models of managing cultural identity and conflict in democracies with large immigrant populations.Other essays consider the implications of immigration for politics and citizenship. In many nations, large-scale immigration challenges existing political institutions, which must struggle to foster political inclusion and accommodate changing ways of belonging to the polity. The volume concludes with contrasting reflections on the normative standards that should guide immigration policies in modern constitutional democracies.Citizenship, Borders, and Human Needs develops connections between thoughtful scholarship and public policy, thereby advancing public debate on these complex and divisive issues. Though most attention in the collection is devoted to the dilemmas facing immigrant-receiving countries in the West, the volume also explores policies and outcomes in immigrant-sending countries, as well as the situation of developing nations-such as India-that are net receivers of migrants.

An estimated one billion people around the globe live with a disability; this number grows exponentially when family members, friends, and care providers are included. Various countries and international organizations have attempted to guard against discrimination and secure basic human rights for those whose lives are affected by disability. Yet despite such attempts many disabled persons in the United States and throughout the world still face exclusion from full citizenship and membership in their respective societies. They are regularly denied employment, housing, health care, access to buildings, and the right to move freely in public spaces. At base, such discrimination reflects a tacit yet pervasive assumption that disabled persons do not belong in society.Civil Disabilities challenges such norms and practices, urging a reconceptualization of disability and citizenship to secure a rightful place for disabled persons in society. Essays from leading scholars in a diversity of fields offer critical perspectives on current citizenship studies, which still largely assume an ableist world. Placing historians in conversation with anthropologists, sociologists with literary critics, and musicologists with political scientists, this interdisciplinary volume presents a compelling case for reimagining citizenship that is more consistent, inclusive, and just, in both theory and practice. By placing disability front and center in academic and civic discourse, Civil Disabilities tests the very notion of citizenship and transforms our understanding of disability and belonging.Contributors: Emily Abel, Douglas C. Baynton, Susan Burch, Allison C. Carey, Faye Ginsburg, Nancy J. Hirschmann, Hannah Joyner, Catherine Kudlick, Beth Linker, Alex Lubet, Rayna Rapp, Susan Schweik, Tobin Siebers, Lorella Terzi.

Originally published in 2012, Dignity Rights is the first book to explore the constitutional law of dignity around the world. In it, Erin Daly shows how dignity has come not only to define specific interests like the right to humane treatment or to earn a living wage, but also to protect the basic rights of a person to control his or her own life and to live in society with others. Daly argues that, through the right to dignity, courts are redefining what it means to be human in the modern world. As described by the courts, the scope of dignity rights marks the outer boundaries of state power, limiting state authority to meet the demands of human dignity. As a result, these cases force us to reexamine the relationship between the individual and the state and, in turn, contribute to a new and richer understanding of the role of the citizen in modern democracies.This updated edition features a new preface by the author, in which she articulates how, over the past decade, dignity rights cases have evolved to incorporate the convergence of human rights and environmental rights that we have seen at the international level and in domestic constitutions.

Political theorists Jeremy Elkins and Andrew Norris observe that American political culture is deeply ambivalent about truth. On the one hand, voices on both the left and right make confident appeals to the truth of claims about the status of the market in public life and the role of scientific evidence and argument in public life, human rights, and even religion. On the other hand, there is considerable anxiety that such appeals threaten individualism and political plurality. This anxiety, Elkins and Norris contend, has perhaps been greatest in the humanities and in political theory, where many have responded by either rejecting or neglecting the whole topic of truth.The essays in this volume question whether democratic politics requires discussion of truth and, if so, how truth should matter to democratic politics. While individual essays approach the subject from different angles, the volume as a whole suggests that the character of our politics depends in part on what kinds of truthful inquiries it promotes and how it deals with various kinds of disputes about truth. The contributors to the volume, including prominent political and legal theorists, philosophers, and intellectual historians, argue that these are important political and not merely theoretical questions.

What happens when a region accustomed to violent shifts in borders is subjected to a new, peaceful partitioning? Has the European Union spent the last decade creating a new Iron Curtain at its fringes? Building Fortress Europe: The Polish-Ukrainian Frontier examines these questions from the perspective of the EU's new eastern external boundary. Since the Schengen Agreement in 1985, European states have worked together to create a territory free of internal borders and with heavily policed external boundaries. In 2004 those boundaries shifted east as the EU expanded to include eight postsocialist countries-including Poland but excluding neighboring Ukraine. Through an analysis of their shared frontier, Building Fortress Europe provides an ethnographic examination of the human, social, and political consequences of developing a specialized, targeted, and legally advanced border regime in the enlarged EU.Based on fieldwork conducted with border guards, officials, and migrants shuttling between Poland and Ukraine as well as extensive archival research, Building Fortress Europe shows how people in the two countries are adjusting to living on opposite sides of a new divide. Anthropologist Karolina S. Follis argues that the policing of economic migrants and asylum seekers is caught between the contradictory imperatives of the European Union's border security, economic needs of member states, and their declared commitment to human rights. The ethnography explores the lives of migrants, and their patterns of mobility, as framed by these contradictions. It suggests that only a political effort to address these tensions will lead to the creation of fairer and more humane border policies.

Originally published in 2012, Dignity Rights is the first book to explore the constitutional law of dignity around the world. In it, Erin Daly shows how dignity has come not only to define specific interests like the right to humane treatment or to earn a living wage, but also to protect the basic rights of a person to control his or her own life and to live in society with others. Daly argues that, through the right to dignity, courts are redefining what it means to be human in the modern world. As described by the courts, the scope of dignity rights marks the outer boundaries of state power, limiting state authority to meet the demands of human dignity. As a result, these cases force us to reexamine the relationship between the individual and the state and, in turn, contribute to a new and richer understanding of the role of the citizen in modern democracies.This updated edition features a new preface by the author, in which she articulates how, over the past decade, dignity rights cases have evolved to incorporate the convergence of human rights and environmental rights that we have seen at the international level and in domestic constitutions.

In Varieties of Sovereignty and Citizenship, scholars from a wide range of disciplines reflect on the transformation of the world away from the absolute sovereignty of independent nation-states and on the proliferation of varieties of plural citizenship. The emergence of possible new forms of allegiance and their effect on citizens and on political processes underlie the essays in this volume.The essays reflect widespread acceptance that we cannot grasp either the empirical realities or the important normative issues today by focusing only on sovereign states and their actions, interests, and aspirations. All the contributors accept that we need to take into account a great variety of globalizing forces, but they draw very different conclusions about those realities. For some, the challenges to the sovereignty of nation-states are on the whole to be regretted and resisted. These transformations are seen as endangering both state capacity and state willingness to promote stability and security internationally. Moreover, they worry that declining senses of national solidarity may lead to cutbacks in the social support systems many states provide to all those who reside legally within their national borders. Others view the system of sovereign nation-states as the aspiration of a particular historical epoch that always involved substantial problems and that is now appropriately giving way to new, more globally beneficial forms of political association. Some contributors to this volume display little sympathy for the claims on behalf of sovereign states, though they are just as wary of emerging forms of cosmopolitanism, which may perpetuate older practices of economic exploitation, displacement of indigenous communities, and military technologies of domination. Collectively, the contributors to this volume require us to rethink deeply entrenched assumptions about what varieties of sovereignty and citizenship are politically possible and desirable today, and they provide illuminating insights into the alternative directions we might choose to pursue.

Women's history emerged as a genre in the waning years of the eighteenth century, a period during which concepts of nationhood and a sense of belonging expanded throughout European nations and the young American republic. Early women's histories had criticized the economic practices, intellectual abilities, and political behavior of women while emphasizing the importance of female domesticity in national development. These histories had created a narrative of exclusion that legitimated the variety of citizenship considered suitable for women, which they argued should be constructed in a very different way from that of men: women's relationship to the nation should be considered in terms of their participation in civil society and the domestic realm. But the throes of the Revolution and the emergence of the first woman's rights movement challenged the dominance of that narrative and complicated the history writers' interpretation of women's history and the idea of domestic citizenship.In Citizenship and the Origins of Women's History in the United States, Teresa Anne Murphy traces the evolution of women's history from the late eighteenth century to the time of the Civil War, demonstrating that competing ideas of women's citizenship had a central role in the ways those histories were constructed. This intellectual history examines the concept of domestic citizenship that was promoted in the popular writing of Sarah Josepha Hale and Elizabeth Ellet and follows the threads that link them to later history writers, such as Lydia Maria Child and Carolyn Dall, who challenged those narratives and laid the groundwork for advancing a more progressive woman's rights agenda. As woman's rights activists recognized, citizenship encompassed activities that ranged far beyond specific legal rights for women to their broader terms of inclusion in society, the economy, and government. Citizenship and the Origins of Women's History in the United States demonstrates that citizenship is at the heart of women's history and, consequently, that women's history is the history of nations.

Executive orders and proclamations afford presidents an independent means of controlling a wide range of activities in the federal government-yet they are not mentioned in the U.S. Constitution. In fact, the controversial edicts known as universal presidential directives seem to violate the separation of powers by enabling the commander-in-chief to bypass Congress and enact his own policy preferences. As Clinton White House counsel Paul Begala remarked on the numerous executive orders signed by the president during his second term: "Stroke of the pen. Law of the land. Kinda cool."Although public awareness of unilateral presidential directives has been growing over the last decade-sparked in part by Barack Obama's use of executive orders and presidential memoranda to reverse many of his predecessor's policies as well as by the number of unilateral directives George W. Bush promulgated for the "War on Terror"-Graham G. Dodds reminds us that not only has every single president issued executive orders, such orders have figured in many of the most significant episodes in American political history. In Take Up Your Pen, Dodds offers one of the first historical treatments of this executive prerogative and explores the source of this authority; how executive orders were legitimized, accepted, and routinized; and what impact presidential directives have had on our understanding of the presidency, American politics, and political development. By tracing the rise of a more activist central government-first advanced in the Progressive Era by Theodore Roosevelt-Dodds illustrates the growing use of these directives throughout a succession of presidencies. More important, Take Up Your Pen questions how unilateral presidential directives fit the conception of democracy and the needs of American citizens.

In any democracy, the central problem of governance is how to inform, organize, and represent the opinions of the public in order to advance three goals: popular control over leaders, equality among citizens, and competent governance. In most political analyses, voting is emphasized as the central and essential process in achieving these goals. Yet democratic representation encompasses a great deal more than voter beliefs and behavior and, indeed, involves much more than the machinery of elections. Democracy requires government agencies that respond to voter decisions, a civil society in which powerful organized interests do not dominate all others, and communication systems that permit divergent voices to be heard.Representation: Elections and Beyond brings together leading international scholars from a wide range of disciplines to explore the twenty-first-century innovations-in voting laws and practices, in electoral systems, in administrative, political, and civil organizations, and in communication processes and new technologies-that are altering how we understand democratic representation. Featuring twelve essays that engage with national, provincial, and municipal governments across three continents, this volume tackles traditional core elements of democratic representation, such as voting, electoral systems, and political parties, while also underscoring the ways in which beliefs and preferences of citizens are influenced, expressed, and aggregated and the effects of those methods and practices on political agendas and policy outcomes. In pinpointing deficiencies in contemporary democratic practices and possibilities for reform, Representation provides an invaluable roadmap to improve democratic representation in the twenty-first century.Contributors: AndrÉ Blais, Pradeep Chhibber, Archon Fung, Jacob Hacker, Zoltan Hajnal, Matthew Hindman, David Karpf, Georgia Kernell, Alexander Keyssar, Anthony McGann, Susan Ostermann, Paul Pierson, Dennis Thompson, Jessica Trounstine, Mark E. Warren.

Citizenship has come to mean legal and political equality within a sovereign nation-state; in international law, only states may determine who is and who is not a citizen. But such unitary status is the historical exception: before sovereign nation-states became the prevailing form of political organization, citizenship had a range of definitions and applications. Today, nonstate communities and jurisdictions both below and above the state level are once again becoming important sources of rights, allegiance, and status, thereby constituting renewed forms of multilevel citizenship. For example, while the European Union protects the nation-state's right to determine its own members, the project to construct a democratic polity beyond national borders challenges the sovereignty of member governments.Multilevel Citizenship disputes the dominant narrative of citizenship as a homogeneous status that can be bestowed only by nation-states. The contributors examine past and present case studies that complicate the meaning and function of citizenship, including residual allegiance to empires, constitutional rights that are accessible to noncitizens, and the nonstate allegiance of nomadic nations. Their analyses consider the inconsistencies and exceptions of national citizenship as a political concept, such as overlapping jurisdictions and shared governance, as well as the emergent forms of sub- or supranational citizenships. Multilevel Citizenship captures the complexity of citizenship in practice, both at different levels and in different places and times.Contributors: Elizabeth F. Cohen, Elizabeth Dale, Will Hanley, Marc Helbling, Türküler Isiksel, Jenn Kinney, Sheryl Lightfoot, Willem Maas, Catherine Neveu, Luicy Pedroza, Eldar Sarajlić, Rogers M. Smith.

President Theodore Roosevelt once proclaimed, "Great corporations exist only because they are created and safeguarded by our institutions, and it is therefore our right and duty to see that they work in harmony with those institutions." But while corporations are ostensibly regulated by citizens through their governments, the firms in turn regulate many aspects of social and political life for individuals beyond their own employees and the communities that support them. Corporations are endowed with many of the same rights as citizens, such as freedom of speech, but are not themselves typically constituted around ideals of national belonging and democracy. In the wake of the global financial collapse of 2008, the question of what relationship corporations should have to governing institutions has only increased in urgency. As a democratically sanctioned social institution, should a corporation operate primarily toward profit accumulation or should its proper goal be to provision society with needed goods and services?Corporations and Citizenship addresses the role of modern for-profit corporations as a distinctive kind of social formation within democratic national states. Scholars of legal studies, business ethics, politics, history, and anthropology bring their perspectives to bear on particular case studies, such as Enron and Wall Street, as well as broader issues of belonging, social responsibility, for-profit higher education, and regulation. Together, these essays establish a complex and detailed understanding of the ways corporations contribute positively to human well-being as well as the dangers that they pose.Contributors: Joel Bakan, Jean Comaroff, John Comaroff, Cynthia Estlund, Louis Galambos, Rosalie Genova, Peter Gourevitch, Karen Ho, Nien-hÊ Hsieh, Walter Licht, Jonathan R. Macey, Hirokazu Miyazaki, Lynn Sharp Paine, Katharina Pistor, Amy J. Sepinwall, Jeffery Smith, Jeffrey L. Sturchio, Greg Urban.

In the early twenty-first century, the citizens of many Latin American countries, such as Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, and Venezuela, elected left-wing governments, explicitly rejecting and attempting to reverse the policies of neoliberal structural economic adjustment that had prevailed in the region during the 1990s. However, in other countries such as Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru continuity and even extension of the neoliberal agenda have been the norm.What were the consequences of rejecting the neoliberal consensus in Latin America? Why did some countries stay on the neoliberal course? Contributors to Latin America Since the Left Turn address these questions and more as they frame the tensions and contradictions that currently characterize Latin American societies and politics. Divided into three sections, the book begins with an examination of the political economy, from models of development, to taxation and spending patterns, to regionalization of trade and human migration. The second section analyzes the changes in democracy and political identities. The last part explores the themes of citizenship, constitutionalism, and new forms of civic participation. With essays by the foremost scholars in the field, Latin America Since the Left Turn not only delves into the cases of specific countries but also surveys the region as a whole.Contributors: Isabella AlcaÑiz, Sandra Botero, Marcella Cerrutti, George Ciccariello-Maher, Tula G. Falleti, Roberto Gargarella, Adrian Gurza Lavalle, Juliet Hooker, Evelyne Huber, Ernesto Isunza Vera, Nora Lustig, Paulina Ochoa Espejo, Emilio A. Parrado, Claudiney Pereira, Thamy Pogrebinschi, Irina Carlota Silber, David Smilde, John D. Stephens, Maristella Svampa, Oscar Vega Camacho, Gisela Zaremberg.

In Citizenship Beyond Nationality, Luicy Pedroza considers immigrants who have settled in democracies and who live indistinguishably from citizens-working, paying taxes, making social contributions, and attending schools-yet lack the status, gained either through birthright or naturalization, that would give them full electoral rights. Referring to this population as denizens, Pedroza asks what happens to the idea of democracy when a substantial part of the resident population is unable to vote? Her aim is to understand how societies justify giving or denying electoral rights to denizens.Pedroza undertakes a comparative examination of the processes by which denizen enfranchisement reforms occur in democracies around the world in order to understand why and in what ways they differ. The first part of the book surveys a wide variety of reforms, demonstrating that they occur across polities that have diverse naturalization rules and proportions of denizens. The second part explores denizen enfranchisement reforms as a matter of politics, focusing on the ways in which proposals for reform were introduced, debated, decided, and reintroduced in two important cases: Germany and Portugal. Further comparing Germany and Portugal to long familiar cases, she reveals how denizen enfranchisement processes come to have a limited scope, or to even fail, and yet reignite. In the final part, Pedroza connects her theoretical and empirical arguments to larger debates on citizenship and migration.Citizenship Beyond Nationality argues that the success and type of denizen enfranchisement reforms rely on how the matter is debated by key political actors and demonstrates that, when framed ambitiously and in inclusive terms, these deliberations have the potential to redefine democratic citizenship not only as a status but as a matter of politics and policy.

The revolution in digital communications has altered the relationship between citizens and political elites, with important implications for democracy. As new information ecosystems have evolved, as unforeseen examples of their positive and negative consequences have emerged, and as theorizing, data, and research methods have expanded and improved, the central question has shifted from if the digital information environment is good or bad for democratic politics to how and in what contexts particular attributes of this environment are having an influence. It is only through the careful analysis of specific cases that we can begin to build a more comprehensive and nuanced understanding of the role of digital media in democratic theory and practice.The essays in Digital Media and Democratic Futures focus on a variety of information and communication technologies, politically relevant actors, substantive issues, and digital political practices, doing so from distinct theoretical perspectives and methodological approaches. Individually, each of these case studies provides deep insights into the complex and context-dependent relationship between media and democracy. Collectively, they show that there is no single outcome for democracy in the digital age, only a range of possible futures.Contributors: Rena Bivens, Michael X. Delli Carpini, Jennifer Earl, Thomas Elliott, Deen Freelon, Kelly Gates, Philip N. Howard, Daniel Kreiss, Ting Luo, Helen Nissenbaum, Beth Simone Noveck, Jennifer Pan, Lisa Poggiali, Daniela Stockmann.

An ethnographic exploration of the meaning of national citizenship in the context of globalizationThe American Passport in Turkey explores the diverse meanings and values that people outside of the United States attribute to U.S. citizenship, specifically those who possess or seek to obtain U.S. citizenship while residing in Turkey. Özlem Altan-Olcay and Evren Balta interviewed more than one hundred individuals and families and, through their narratives, shed light on how U.S. citizenship is imagined, experienced, and practiced in a setting where everyday life is marked by numerous uncertainties and unequal opportunities. When a Turkish mother wants to protect her daughter's modern, secular upbringing through U.S. citizenship, U.S. citizenship, for her, is a form of insurance for her daughter given Turkey's unknown political future. When a Turkish-American citizen describes how he can make a credible claim of national belonging because he returned to Turkey yet can also claim a cosmopolitan Western identity because of his U.S. citizenship, he represents the popular identification of the West with the United States. And when a natural-born U.S. citizen describes with enthusiasm the upward mobility she has experienced since moving to Turkey, she reveals how the status of U.S. citizenship and "Americanness" become valuable assets outside of the States.Offering a corrective to citizenship studies where discussions of inequality are largely limited to domestic frames, Altan-Olcay and Balta argue that the relationship between inequality and citizenship regimes can only be fully understood if considered transnationally. Additionally, The American Passport in Turkey demonstrates that U.S. global power not only reveals itself in terms of foreign policy but also manifests in the active desires people have for U.S. citizenship, even when they do not intend to live in the United States. These citizens, according to the authors, create a new kind of empire with borders and citizen-state relations that do not map onto recognizable political territories.

More than two millennia ago, Aristotle is said to have compiled a collection of ancient constitutions that informed his studies of politics. For Aristotle, constitutions largely distilled and described the varied and distinctive patterns of political life established over time. What constitutionalism has come to mean in the modern era, on the other hand, originates chiefly in the late eighteenth century and primarily with the U.S. Constitution-written in 1787 and made effective in 1789-and the various French constitutions that first appeared in 1791.In the last half century, more than 130 nations have adopted new constitutions, half of those within the last twenty years. These new constitutions are devoted to many of the same goals found in the U.S. Constitution: the rule of law, representative self-government, and protection of rights. But by canvassing constitutional developments at the national and state level in the United States alongside modern constitutions in Eastern and Western Europe, Africa, and Asia, the contributors to Modern Constitutions-all leading scholars of constitutionalism-show that modern constitutions often seek to protect social rights and to establish representative institutions, forms of federalism, and courts charged with constitutional review that depart from or go far beyond the seminal U.S. example. Partly because of their innovations, however, many modern constitutional systems now confront mounting authoritarian pressures that put fundamental commitments to the rule of law in jeopardy.The contributions in this volume collectively provide a measure of guidance for the challenges and prospects of modern constitutions in the rapidly changing political world of the twenty-first century.Contributors: Richard R. Beeman, Valerie Bunce, Tom Ginsburg, Heinz Klug, David S. Law, Sanford Levinson, Jaime Lluch, Christopher McCrudden, Kim Lane Scheppele, Rogers M. Smith, Mila Versteeg, Emily Zackin.

The Changing Terrain of Religious Freedom offers theoretical, historical, and legal perspectives on religious freedom, while examining its meaning as an experience, value, and right. The volume starts from the premise that the terrain of religious freedom has never been easy and smooth. Across societies and throughout history, defending or contesting principles of religious freedom has required compromise among multiple interests, balancing values, and wrangling with the law.Drawing on examples from the United States and around the world, and approaching the subject from the disciplines of history, law, sociology, philosophy, religious studies, and political science, the essays in this volume illustrate these challenges. They sketch the contours of contemporary debates while showing how the landscape of religious freedom has shifted over time. They consider various stakeholders that have asserted competing claims, among them individuals and groups; members of minority and majority communities; states and corporations (including both religious organizations and businesses); and believers and non-believers. Taken together, the studies in this volume suggest that understanding religious freedom means grappling with conflicting and perhaps irreconcilable claims about whose rights should prevail over others, what religion is or may be, and how religion should relate to other cultural values.

What does it mean to claim, two decades into the twenty-first century, that citizenship is on the edge? The questions that animate this volume focus attention on the relationships between liberal conceptions of citizenship and democracy on one hand, and sex, race, and gender on the other. Who "counts" as a citizen in today's world, and what are the mechanisms through which the rights, benefits, and protections of liberal citizenship are differentially bestowed upon diverse groups? What are the relationships between global economic processes and political and legal empowerment? What forms of violence emerge in order to defend and define these rights, benefits, and protections, and how do these forms of violence reflect long histories? How might we recognize and account for the various avenues through which people attempt to make themselves as political subjects?Citizenship on the Edge approaches these questions from multiple disciplines, including Africana Studies, anthropology, disability studies, film studies, gender studies, history, law, political science, and sociology. Contributors explore the ways in which compounding social inequalities redound to the conditions and expressions of citizenship in the U.S. and throughout the world. They give a sense of the breathtaking range of the ways that citizenship is controlled, repressed, undercut, and denied at the same time as they outline people's attempts to claim citizenship in ways that are meaningful to them. From university speech policies, to labor and immigration policies, to a rethinking of the security theatre, to women's empowerment in the family and economy and a rethinking of marriage and the family, we see slivers of possibility for a more inclusive and less hostile world, in which citizenship is no longer so in doubt, so on the edge, for so many. As a whole, the volume argues that citizenship cannot be conceptualized as a transcendent good but must instead always be contextualized within specific places and times, and in relation to dynamic struggle.Contributors: Erez Aloni, Ange-Marie Hancock Alfaro, Nancy J. Hirschmann, Samantha Majic, Valentine M. Moghadam, Michael Rembis, Tracy Robinson, Ellen Samuels, Kimberly Theidon, Deborah A. Thomas.

In Democratic Failures and the Ethics of Democracy, political philosopher Adam Lovett argues that when it comes to democratic ideals, the United States is a failed democracy. Specifically, he contends that American democracy has failed to advance equality and self-rule for its citizens—qualities he identifies as essential components of democracy's intrinsic value. Drawing on rich empirical research, Lovett applies original philosophical analysis to reveal real-world democratic failures and evaluate their philosophical and ethical consequences.His research locates democratic failures at both the level of political elites and at the level of the masses. At the elite level, elected officials shape policy to prioritize the interests of their supporters, where wealthy individuals and corporations are the most influential. At the mass level, ordinary citizens are motivated to vote not to introduce specific policies but by party identification. By mapping how these failures erode equality and self-rule, he demonstrates that they in fact undermine the ethics of democracy itself. After all, Lovett argues, when a state fails to represent ordinary citizens, those ordinary citizens are not morally obligated to follow the laws of the state.Because the state fails to achieve democratic values in any meaningful way, its claim to political authority and legitimacy is diminished. However, Lovett does not conclude that American democracy is doomed—he instead proposes solutions from voting only on referendums to delegating aspects of public policy to unelected experts without partisan obligation. These reforms are vital for compelling the state to act on behalf of all citizens, not just the partisan or the powerful. Of interest to political scientists and political philosophers alike, Democratic Failures and the Ethics of Democracy sheds light on an increasingly troubled democratic ethos and proposes solutions for how ordinary citizens can work to save it.

William E. Scheuerman's book explores when, if ever, politically motivated property harms are justifiable In 2020, Black Lives Matter activists toppled Confederate monuments and occasionally vandalized police vehicles and stations. Climate activists have damaged natural gas pipelines and famous artworks. In Hong Kong, pro-democracy students targeted businesses sympathetic to the mainland government. On January 6, 2021, far-right groups at the US Capitol mistreated public and private property as part of their efforts to disrupt finalizing election results. Property damage constitutes an increasingly commonplace feature of global political protest. How then to interpret and evaluate its proliferation? The media regularly describes such acts as "violent," as do most scholars. However, William E. Scheuerman's book pushes back against conflating politically motivated violations of property rights with violence. Political violence has no place in democratic politics. Yet indiscriminately grouping property damage together with acts destructive of and harmful to persons is conceptually confusing and politically misleading. After all, Americans celebrate the Boston Tea Party. So why do most of us now categorically condemn many seemingly parallel acts?Scheuerman tackles challenging and politically timely questions. When, if ever, are politically motivated property harms justifiable? What standards should we expect of those pursuing them to meet, under democratic conditions? How are those standards undermined by the rise of authoritarian populism around the world? Focusing on identifiably nonviolent varieties of what Scheuerman calls property disobedience, his book explores a variety of real-life examples, both past and present, to understand how and why such acts may be politically justifiable—or should instead be viewed as beyond the pale.

An argument for understanding the separation of powers as a political arrangement designed to pursue the common democratic goodBeyond Checks and Balances seeks to rescue the democratic concept of the separation of powers from a popular caricature of it: that checks and balances exist between branches of government to frustrate, slow, and inhibit change. Long regarded as a legal doctrine that must be adjudicated by the federal courts, political scientists Connor M. Ewing, Benjamin A. Kleinerman, and Charles U. Zug have gathered leading scholars' analyses into a volume that argues that the separation of powers is instead best understood politically. When cast as a configuration of powers, incentives, and institutions designed to pursue the foundational ends of politics, it becomes clear that separation of powers does not exist to stymie collective action, though it certainly is capable of doing so.The book is divided into two sections: the first examines the foundations of statement-of-powers doctrine and thought. The second set of chapters analyzes the application of the doctrine and addresses more specific topics, such as the power to declare war, the scope of executive powers, and the impeachment of federal judges. The contributors spotlight the substantive constitutional goodsthat the arrangement commonly referred to as the separation of powers is designed to achieve. The collection shows that—as a concept dedicated to creating collaborative, good democratic government—the separation of powers includes, but cannot be reduced to, constraints on governmental power. By incentivizing conflict and negotiation between different constitutional offices, the separation of powers brings diverse governmental perspectives to bear on the basic problems of politics, promoting political values like deliberation, decisiveness, and inclusion across branches.Contributors: Sotirios A. Barber, Thomas R. Bell, Paul Carrese, Connor M. Ewing, Brigid Flaherty Staab, Benjamin A. Kleinerman, David J. Siemers, George Thomas, Kathleen Tipler, Jeffrey K. Tulis, Keith E. Whittington, Mariah Zeisberg, Charles U. Zug.