Afterword: citizenship in pandemic times

Though focused on the pandemic, the authors of this special issue all dwell on a longstanding concern of the field of Citizenship Studies: how citizenship has so often fallen short of what it seems to promise, even as it continues to inspire people to make demands on states. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights sets out what was in effect a blueprint for how states should treat their citizens, phrased in terms of political and civil rights, and then, and more controversially, in terms of social and economic rights, as well as cultural rights. Later treaties sought to stipulate how states should treat non-citizens in their territory, yet not all states have signed these, and even those that do have seldom made good on all their treaty obligations. International bodies including the UN are, meanwhile, deeply reluctant to prescribe when states are to admit people to citizenship in the first place, or to other statuses such as permanent residency. The pandemic – with its implications for health and well-being and for basic freedoms – brought sharply into perspective all these aspects of how states are to treat citizens and non-citizens alike. The authors demonstrate that non-citizens fared poorly in many contexts, although Bazurli and Campomoti observe that forced migrants’ treatment varied considerably across Italian regions, while Kim, Choi and Seol were surprised to find that undocumented migrants in South Korea received more attention than expected. Other authors find disparities in how states treated different groups of their own citizens. The Roma’s experience in Slovakia described by Surova is the most chilling, while Mookerjee recounts the ill-treatment of informal workers in India returning to their rural homes. It may transpire that marginal citizens received little better treatment than non-citizens in many global contexts. States’ ill-treatment of both non-citizens and marginal citizens was often applauded by citizens who considered them to be ill-deserving of state protection, blaming them for their own predicament or stigmatizing them as a source of contagion. The same citizens who objected vociferously to state surveillance on the population at large, often approved their states’ use of harsh measures that purported to contain the spread of the virus among and out of specific groups. Slovakia is again an example, where police and army were deployed to lock down Roma neighborhoods. Another is the US, where Hallett and Otero-Asmar record how an Ohio sheriff appealed to local voters by sub-contracting with ICE to detain and deport undocumented migrants, before and during the pandemic. This, too, is citizenship.