Social Science Research Council

The Social Science Research Council has developed a comparative and cross-regional initiative on “Belonging, the Crisis of Citizenship and the Nation-State” that seeks to identify, articulate and promote spaces of innovative research and debate in the social sciences on the changing landscapes of belonging and exclusion, the transformations of the nation-state, and the emergence of new and re-articulation of old political/territorial identities across a number of the world’s regions. While these sociopolitical processes vary widely both between and within particularly regions and nation-states, there is consensus among social scientists that a number processes associated with late capitalist globalization—the intensification of capital flows, the transnationalization of production and consumption, the emergence of new and intensified patterns of labor migration and the decentralization policies that have accompanied structural reforms in many parts of the world—are fundamentally redefining the contours of belonging and transforming the nation-state’s position in the organization of social, political and economic relations.

Given the geographic and historical diversity of the processes that we seek to address and the wide array of analytic frameworks through which these are currently understood, we have identified three broad, intersecting themes—law, land and longing—as strategic points of entry which we believe will enable us to advance debate and scholarship across a range of fields, disciplines, institutions and regions.

In the current phase, we seek to synthesize this work by commissioning new essays from a subset of the participants in the first two conferences of this project. An authors’ meeting, entitled “Citizenship, ‘Rhetorics of Security’ and Vernacular Violence,” took place on January 26-27, 2007 at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul, Turkey. While our previous work in this arena focused on the complex relationships between globalization, inequality, and emerging modes of belonging and citizenship, the Istanbul workshop sought to advance these research agendas by asking participants to consider the ways in which conflicts over citizenship and inequality are being influenced by both longstanding and more recent discourses of security at the national, regional and global levels. While the “securitization” of particular identities, social struggles and political conflicts certainly predate the events of 9-11, the global “war on terror” and its ancillary discourses have intensified a particular form of globalization that is transforming, in different ways and to differing degrees, the manner in which conflicts over belonging and inequality are framed in various national, regional and global contexts. Through this workshop we have sought to examine the implications of these processes for conflicts around citizenship and inequality in a number of the world’s regions.

Staff are now preparing the manuscript of an edited volume which will be published by the new SSRC Books imprint in 2007.