statelessness

Society, Security, Sovereignty and the State in Somalia: From Statelessness to Statelessness?
$29.95
Somalia has gone from a pre-colonial, stateless society through independence, modern state formation and collapse, to the present time where (partly much more stable) new states emerged that are embedded in both, Somali traditional security and conflict resolution mechanisms and modern state structures. Dr. Brons (International Organization for Migration) rewrites the contemporary political history of Somalia, describes the multiple identities within Somali society, and concentrates on topics as state-society relation and sovereignty and security.

State of Statelessness
$0.99

Citizenship and Statelessness in Sri Lanka: The Case of the Tamil Estate Workers
$99.00
Citizenship and Statelessness in Sri Lanka examines the loss of citizenship and statelessness of Indian Tamil estate workers in Sri Lanka. The loss of citizenship this community suffered over 60 years ago continues to dominate and disrupt their lives, contributing to poor working conditions, impoverishment and general marginalisation. By analysing the context of the formal agreement between the Indian and Sri Lankan government that led to the loss of citizenship Kanapathipillai reveals the economic, electoral and ideological issues that influenced the decision, and introduces gendered notions of citizenship and the agency of the workers into the discussion of the phenomenon.

Citizenship and Statelessness in Sri Lanka approaches the issue from a Sri Lankan perspective, thereby bringing a distinct new voice to scholarship on this subject, which has previously focussed on the inter-governmental and foreign policy implications of the agreement. By breaking the ¡Æview from above¡Ç approach, and listening to the ¡Ævoices from below¡Ç of the Indian Tamil workers who have suffered as a result of the agreement, Kanapathipillai successfully reframes the parameters of scholarship on this subject.

Genealogies of Citizenship: Markets, Statelessness, and the Right to Have Rights (Cambridge Cultural Social Studies)
$34.99
Reprinted by author from the Economic Sociology Section Newsletter of the American Sociological Association.

In the course of the debates over the last few months about bailouts and tax cuts one familiar face has raised its head: the anti-statist conservative out to warn us that social provision is a helping hand onto the path to dependency and total lack of responsibility for the self. It's an argument so hackneyed that one is tempted to ignore it, but Margaret Somers' new book Genealogies of Citizenship frames such arguments as emblematic of a larger set of discourses about citizenship and statelessness, the perils and promise of the free market, and the possibilities of civil society. Somers' project is intended as a contribution to public sociology as well as a foundation for a new sociology of rights. An avowedly political book that rejects the binary of normative, ethically prescriptive scholarship and apolitical "empirical" social science, it is a clarion call for us to see how letting market logic colonize the state and civil society leads to "citizenship betrayed" and imperils the foundations of democracy. To take the place of hegemonic market logic she provides an ideal of democratic socially-inclusive citizenship rights that draws its power from a civil society strong enough to maintain a favorable balance of power between state, market, and citizens.
A scholar of history, sociology, and law, Somers' looks back to Locke and Hobbes while remaining firmly focused on the present, especially the lessons to be learned from what she calls Hurricane Katrina's "unnatural disaster. Somers' main analytic mode is her "historical sociology of concept formation," which views concepts as socially-produced artifacts in need of historicization and reflexive examination. Substantively, three theorists are central to her project. Somers draws from Hannah Arendt's formulation of "the rights to have rights" to explain the perils of contractual citizenship, uses TH Marshall's idea of social citizenship, and employs Karl Polanyi's concepts of embeddedness and instituted process as the foundation for her entire attack on market-driven governance.
Somers' central thesis is that society must be fearful of market fundamentalism, an "ideational regime" that sees free market logic as the best way to organize all other realms of social life as well as a political movement spreading the gospel of marketization. This marketization of the public sphere is problematic because then wealth is allowed to be converted into clout in civil society, resulting in the abrogation of social citizenship rights. Marketization is of particular concern for Somers' sociology of rights, because it leads to the contractualization of citizenship whereby rights become conditional upon quid pro quo exchange. Specifically, moral worth and equality are defined by participation in the work force. In a society where full employment is not guaranteed, this produces a superfluous and expendable population who become the internal stateless, denied recognition as moral equals and thus disavowed by the state designed to protect them. This redefinition of citizenship reveals the gravity of Arendt's "right to have rights," which asserts that viewing all members of a society as moral and social equals is a precondition of a democratic citizenship regime. Coupling this with Marshall's idea of social citizenship, leads Somers to promote a "citizenship livelihood" or a basic income right that replaces the social exclusion of poverty with the material foundation necessary for inclusion in civil society.
Underpinning market fundamentalism according to Somers is social naturalism, which uses binary logic to define the natural as good and artifice as bad. This results in epistemological and ontological privilege for those allied with the nature side of the binary. Looking at what she calls "Anglo-American citizenship theory," Somers argues that through Locke's social contract the market is allied with the natural and the state with artifice, which leads to a strong anti-statist current and support for the market as the site of freedom. To take social naturalism's place Somers introduces the idea of historical institutionalism, which illustrates how phenomena only function when embedded in sets of rules and institutions that define that sphere at a particular time. This requires us to embrace artifice, especially the state, as necessary to secure the equal recognition necessary for the equal exercise of rights.
Hurricane Katrina is Somers' central (and sobering) case study of how the contractualization of citizenship produces an intranational version of Arendt's "scum of the earth" by erecting internal boundaries contoured by race and class. She turns on its head any argument that Katrina was a "failure" of the state by recasting it as evidence of market fundamentalism's treacherous success in evacuating any sense of obligation in the state's relationship to its citizens. Somers describes the spectacle of the poor, people of color, and otherwise marginalized individuals stranded at the Superdome as a look behind a "thick curtain of denial" at the unemployed and underemployed were deemed expendable after by being blamed for their own poverty. While more privileged residents were able to flee the city, those whose citizenship contracts had been revoked were left to fend for themselves in the nasty and brutish conditions of New Orleans underwater. Efforts to deem this a "natural" disaster are rebutted by Somers, who takes these claims as an opening to thoroughly deconstruct the nature/artifice binary, which she sees as the base of the problems of statelessness and market fundamentalism.
Somers' hangs her hopes for the slowing of market fundamentalism's colonizing efforts on civil society. She develops the idea of an architectonics of citizenship, where the state, market, and civil society are conceived as parties to a struggle in the public sphere over the site and direction of power. The character of any citizenship regime is determined by the history of those struggles. To create a strong democratic citizenship regime requires a reinvigoration and repoliticization of the public sphere so it can resume its function of buffering the state and civil society from the evangelizing efforts of the market. Through making this argument, Somers criticizes both Jurgen Habermas and Talcott Parsons for evacuating the public sphere of any real oppositional power by collapsing it with the market on the side of the private. She avers that only a public sphere of real debate and a civil society with enough strength to fight off interlopers can move us from a condition of "citizenship imperiled" to democratically-inclusive citizenship regimes. One of her basic prescriptions is that market logic must not be allowed to leave its restricted sphere, and only efforts by both the state and citizens can keep it at bay.
While I generally was impressed by Somers' arguments and analysis, I found her concept of civil society a little underdeveloped in terms of content, specifically how tensions in that sector between ideologically different groups might be resolved. She does admit that there is a dark side to civil society where exclusionary and egalitarian groups must struggle for the position of dominant ethos, but it's never made clear exactly from where the proponents of market fundamentalism are launching their attacks. Are they headquartered in the market with forays into the state? What is market fundamentalists' relationship to civil society other than colonization? Her language of encroachment suggests the market is the home of market fundamentalism, which begs the question of the details of the interrelation of market, civil society, and the state. Somers is conscious that her architectonics of citizenship is a mere heuristic and each overlaps, but that same heuristic keeps her from confronting whether market fundamentalist proponents have any right to a place in the civil sphere, especially when they form a popular movement themselves. Arguing that the state must be involved in protecting the egalitarian and democratic ethos of civil society, she doesn't discuss just how popular yet possibly harmful groups will be allowed space in public debates while at the same time restrained to prevent a regression of civil society to a less robust character. Moreover, she doesn't outline how this will happen if those who are interested in a robust civil society are in the minority. This might merely be the legacy of a larger problem in social movement literature that doesn't tend to conceive of socially conservative mobilizations as social movements in the same way as progressive and Left groups, but it is a problem that must be resolved if her theories are to aid our practices. She provides a theoretical exposition of why society must protect civil society and the public sphere, but the details of that battle are left for others to determine.
Some people might be taken aback by the political and ethically-prescriptive character of Somers' work, and those who hold to the politically disinterested model of social science may view it as an illegitimate line of inquiry that is not excused by admitting up front her political sympathies. For others, though, it will be warmly welcomed as the sort of politically engaged yet theoretically rigorous and complex scholarship for which they have been waiting. Somers' book serves as an exemplar of how to do work that cannot be pegged as either normative or empirical but that draws from both to create a nuanced understanding of theoretical and philosophical issues that set the terms of our current debates. Nonetheless, I wonder if this is really a work of a public sociology. The book is dense and draws on an array of concepts and ideas geared toward a professional audience, and its focus on historicization rather than practice makes it mostly a theoretical tome that may be unnerving to the "public." While everyone, especially policy makers, could benefit from this book, I'm unsure if it will actually find its way into their hands.
Ultimately, though, it's a stellar analysis and one can only hope that in book it will circulate more widely than journal articles tend to. She provides a complex theoretical apparatus that can deal with political economy and citizenship, ontology and epistemology, and the present as well as the past. In our current state of crisis, Somers reminds us there is more to worry about than the state and the government - that any economic fix needs to stimulate a robust civil society built on substantive citizenship rights. Without one, the end of market "failures" and its dangerous fundamentalism is impossible.