While useful in the understanding of
various theories and practices of citizenship
rights and obligations across various postwar
democratic states, these typologies and
theories no longer capture the changing nature
of citizenship in the twenty-first century. In
the last two decades of the twentieth
century, postmodernization and globalization
challenged the nation-state as the sole
source of authority of citizenship and
democracy. Under these twin pressures, the
blurred boundaries of citizenship rights and
obligations and the forms of democracy
associated with them brought citizenship on
to the political and intellectual agenda,
broadening the way in which citizenship is
understood and debated. Rather than merely focusing on citizenship as legal rights, there
is now agreement that citizenship must also
be defined as a social process through which
individuals and social groups engage in
claiming, expanding or losing rights. Being
politically engaged means practicing substantive
citizenship, which in turn implies
that members of a polity always struggle to
shape its fate. Such developments have led
to a sociologically informed definition of citizenship
in which the emphasis is less on legal
rules and more on norms, practices, meanings,
and identities. Over the past several
decades, the sheer mass of the academic
literature on citizenship each year attests not
only to the breadth of scholarly interest in it,
but also to the extent that citizenship issues
have become interwoven across academic
disciplines. Citizenship studies is therefore
decisively interdisciplinary.