This Article addresses the general question of "why citizenship?" through the lens of children’s citizenship. It unpacks the different elements of substantive citizenship and considers what they mean for children: membership and participation; rights; responsibilities; and equality of status, respect and recognition. It then discusses the lessons that may be learned from feminist critiques of mainstream constructions of citizenship, paying particular attention to the question of capacity for citizenship. It concludes by suggesting that much of the literature that is making (...) the case for recognition of children as citizens is not so much arguing for the wholesale extension of adult rights and obligations of citizenship to children but recognition that children’s citizenship practices constitute them as de facto, even if not complete de jure, citizens. More broadly, the Article argues that this position points towards an understanding of citizenship which embraces but goes beyond that of a bundle of rights. (shrink)

A synthesis of rights and participatory approaches to citizenship, linked through the notion of human agency, is proposed as the basis for a feminist theory of citizenship. Such a theory has to address citizenship's exclusionary power in relation to both nation-state ‘outsiders’ and ‘insiders’. With regard to the former, the article argues that a feminist theory and politics of citizenship must embrace an internationalist agenda. With regard to the latter, it offers the concept of a ‘differentiated universalism’ as an attempt (...) to reconcile the universalism which lies at the heart of citizenship with the demands of a politics of difference. Embracing also the reconstruction of the public-private dichotomy, citizenship, reconceptualized in this way, can, it is argued, provide us with an important theoretical and political tool. (shrink)

Elements comprising a set of building blocks for a feminist reconstruction of citizenship might include: a critical synthesis of citizenship as a status and a practice; strengthening the inclusive side of citizenship (within and across nation-states); the principle of differentiated universalism, addressing tensions between an analysis grounded in difference and the universalism standing at the heart of citizenship; and a challenge to the binary thinking that constrains the articulation of women's claims to citizenship.

Notions of recognition and difference do not inform the mainstream debate about welfare reform, which is, instead, dominated by a dichotomous discourse of active modernization vs passive ‘welfare dependency’. The article challenges this dichotomy within the context of New Labour’s welfare reform agenda in the UK. It argues, first, that welfare reform should treat improvements in social security benefits not as promoting ‘passive’ welfare but as complementary to labour market activation policies. Second, it redefines active welfare to incorporate notions of (...) active citizenship, which construct welfare subjects as actors in the political process of welfare policy-making and delivery. As a framework for this position, the article discusses three ‘R’s of welfare reform, risk protection, redistribution and recognition, together with the further two ‘R’s of rights and responsibilities. It concludes by emphasizing the importance of a rights agenda both to tackling poverty and exclusion and to recognition politics. (shrink)

?Power, not pity? is a demand articulated by the Poor People's Economic Human Rights Campaign in the United States. The article discusses the ways in which some poverty activists are deploying an ethical discourse of human rights as a way of thinking about, talking about and mobilising against poverty and as a way of articulating concrete demands. They are staking a claim to power and to recognition as well as redistribution. It concludes that as an ethical discourse human rights performs (...) an important symbolic and mobilising function but that its effectiveness as a political tool in combating poverty is yet to be proven. (shrink)

Citizenship can be represented as both a status and a practice, reflecting the liberal/social rights and civic republican traditions but also moving beyond them in a critical synthesis. A key challenge for contemporary feminist and radical citizenship theory is how to move beyond the bogus universalism that underpinned both of these traditions, as well as that implied by the category `woman', so as to accommodate citizenship's universalist promise to the demands of diversity and difference. The article suggests how citizenship as (...) both a status and a practice can be rethought so as to respond to this challenge. Drawing on a range of social and political theorists, it offers the concept of a `differentiated universalism' as a means of encapsulating the creative tension between the universal and the particular that lies at the heart of this approach to citizenship. (shrink)

The Conservative Manifesto has to be scoured for policies which might improve the lives of women as a sex. There is a section on animal welfare but nothing on the welfare of women. Little attention is paid to women's special problems either at work or as carers in the home. Yet much Conservative social policy depends on women as unpaid carers. (St-John Brooks, 1987).