Extending Citizenship, Reconfiguring States

Citizenship has come under intense discussion recently because of threats to welfare and shifting immigration policies. The European Union has opened transnational citizenship rights and fledgling democracies throughout the world are struggling to establish their own versions of citizenship.

Extending Citizenship, Reconfiguring States connects all these current discussions and places them in historical perspective. The book presents a thematically unified analysis of changing citizenship practices over two centuries—from the eve of the French Revolution to contemporary China. Showing how rights emerge with the appearance of new social groups and the reconfiguration of states, the authors identify conditions under which rights and citizenship expand as new groups develop within consolidated states as well as how rights and citizenship emerge within fragmented states with cross-cutting legal jurisdictions.