Citizenship and Sovereignty

Course goals

• To analyse the themes of citizenship and sovereignty through using anthropological perspectives and to apply these to understand empirical case-studies.
• To discuss and evaluate anthropological approaches to citizenship and sovereignty.  
• To critically evaluate and compare various arguments and to develop one’s own independent, critical, and scientifically sound position

Content

This course provides an ethnographic and conceptual overview of citizenship and sovereignty debates in anthropology. We will explore the various conceptual tools that have developed in anthropology to analyse questions of authority, the everyday enactment and contestation of power, and the ways in which citizenship is defined and practiced across contexts and scales. To understand how citizenship is exercised and experienced, we will focus on particular conceptual avenues, such as violence, security, sovereignty, and statehood. Through interactive lectures and section meetings, we will explore questions, such as: How can we understand citizenship and sovereignty beyond the notion of the (Westphalian) state? How can we understand the various relations and subjects that are produced through everyday processes of state-making? How can the conceptual framework of sovereignty allow us to understand how power is both claimed and questioned? How do formal and informal notions of citizenship take form amidst contesting power structures? And what is the role of violence in the everyday enactment of power? In answering these questions, we will also consider the various ethical implications of ethnographic research and discuss what an anthropological lens, both conceptually and empirically, entails and provides. By doing so, this course will familiarize you with various theoretical approaches, allow you to distinguish between them, to critically reflect upon them, and to apply them to real-life case-studies that are both theoretically and socially relevant.