Citizens Without Frontiers

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States define who their citizens are and exert control over their life and movements. But how does such power persist in a global world where people, ideas, and products constantly cross the borders of what the states see as their sovereign territory This groundbreaking work sets to examine and interprets such challenges to offer a new way of thinking about citizenship. Abandoning the sovereignty principle, it develops a new image of citizenship using the connectedness principle. To do so, it interprets acts of citizenship by following "activist citizens" across the world through case studies, from Wikileaks and the Gaza flotilla to China's virtual world and Darfur. Written by a leader in the field, this accessible and original work imagines citizens without frontiers as a politics without community and belonging, inclusion without exclusion, where the frontier becomes a form of otherness that citizens erase or create. This unique work brings forth a new and creative way to approach citizenship beyond boundaries that will appeal to anyone studying citizenship, social movements, and migration.

Reviews

Isin provides a trenchant and imaginative reading of proliferating forms of political action and engagementmostly progressive, sometimes reactionarywhich traverse and subvert the nation-state. Combining a diverse set of case studies with rich interpretive reflection, the book examines various boundary-bending acts of citizenship in order to highlight a vital new frontier in the development of the contemporary political subject. * Linda Bosniak, Distinguished Professor of Law, Rutgers University School of Law, USA *
Isin passionately embraces the paradoxes of citizenship in order to problematize its frontiers: physical, territorial, conceptual, and affective. Apart from bringing to the fore, mapping, interpreting, and contextualizing a myriad of heterogeneous acts that traverse these frontiers, he magnificently performs the reflexive intellectual act of creating the field in which a new figure of political subjectivity, citizens without frontiers, is empowered. Crucially, this is reflected both in the content and in the truly innovative form of his writing. * Yannis Stavrakakis, School of Political Science, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece *
Engin Isins Citizens Without Frontiers provides a politically and intellectually powerful and engaging narrative of activist citizens who are disregarding the imperatives of the nation and frontiers on behalf of alliances often overlooked by contemporary mainstream and left scholarship alike. * Jacqueline Stevens, Professor, Northwestern University, USA *

Author Bio

Engin F. Isin holds a Chair in Citizenship and is Professor of Politics in Politics and International Studies (POLIS) at the Faculty of Social Sciences, The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK. He was director (2007-2009) of the Centre for Citizenship, Identities and Governance (UK) and is the author of Cities Without Citizens (1992), Citizenship and Identity with Patricia Wood (1999) and Being Political (2002).