Rees, Peter. 2024. The nomos of citizenship: migrant rights, law and the possibility of justice. Contemporary Political Theory, 23(4), pp. 529-548. ISSN 1470-8914 [Article]

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Abstract or Description

Superficially, citizenship appears relatively simple: a legal status denoting political membership. However, critical citizenship studies scholars suggest that citizenship is first and foremost a political practice. When non-citizens, such as irregularised migrants, constitute themselves as citizens through their actions, irrespective of legal status, these practices of citizenship have transformational potential because they are extra-legal. Yet, there is an ambivalence here: rights-claiming migrants tend to frame their key demands within the terms of the law often by calling for the regularisation of their status. This article addresses this ambivalence by adopting a ‘deconstructive method’ to investigate the legal dimensions of citizenship as sites of theoretical and political intervention. It is argued that practices of rights-claiming by irregularised migrants are important to grasp because they mobilise the paradoxes inherent to the fact that universal rights are enshrined in the constitutional texts of modern citizenship in order to generate new legal meanings and horizons of justice. This hypothesis is explored through a series of illustrative examples of rights-claiming taking place within and beyond the formal confines of legal orders. In so doing, the article sets out a novel conceptual framework for analysing how migrants’ claims to justice strategically negotiate citizenship in its legal form.

Item Type:	Article
Identification Number (DOI):	https://doi.org/10.1057/s41296-023-00672-y
Data Access Statement:	Not applicable.
Keywords:	Citizenship, Migration, Human rights, Law, Deconstruction, Derrida
Dates:	Date Event 18 October 2024 Accepted 17 January 2024 Published Online December 2024 Published
Item ID:	34679
Date Deposited:	23 Jan 2024 15:29
Last Modified:	30 Oct 2024 15:47
Peer Reviewed:	Yes, this version has been peer-reviewed.
URI:	https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/34679

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