Citizenship Audiobook (Free)

The glorification of citizenship is a given in today’s world, a part of a civic narrative that invokes liberation, dignity, and nationhood. In reality, explains Dimitry Kochenov, citizenship is definitely a tale of complacency, hypocrisy, and domination, flattering to citizens and demeaning for non-citizens. In this volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, Kochenov clarifies the condition of citizenship in today’s world.

Kochenov offers a crucial introduction to a subject frequently regarded about Citizenship uncritically, describing what citizenship is, what it entails, how it came about, and how its role in the world has been changing. He examines four key elements of the idea: status, considering how and just why the position of citizenship can be prolonged, what function it serves, and who’s left behind; privileges, particularly the to live and work in a state; duties, and what it means to be always a ‘good citizen’; and politics, as enacted in the granting and enjoyment of citizenship.

Citizenship promises to apply the attractive concepts of dignity, equality, and human worth-but to strictly separated groups of individuals. Those outside the separation aren’t citizens as currently recognized, and they usually do not belong. Citizenship, Kochenov warns, is certainly too often a legal device that justifies assault, humiliation, and exclusion.