ABSTRACT

Thinking about citizenship studies globally requires charting the complex and diverse ways in which people constitute themselves politically. To the same degree, the global perspective also exposes and exasperates the strains and discords in the concept as we understand it today. The chapters of this Handbook are collected into two thematic sections, four broad geographic regions, and two deterritorialized groupings (‘Diasporicity’ and ‘Indigeneity’). Beyond the convenience of compiling and reading, these divisions represent little more than one of the few mutually exclusive ways of clustering the chapters. Even then, we talk of ‘Africas’, ‘Asias’, and so on. The plural denotes the multiple ways in which such conceptions are actually rendered. In terms of what they say about citizenship, the chapters can also be drawn together into many overlapping, sometimes jarring, sets of topics. The following guide aims to identify the most striking of those other groupings in order to indicate to the reader more detailed areas of interest and also to suggest trends of current and future concern. The themes identified below are by no means comprehensive; instead they reflect the multifarious nature of citizenship itself as it is experienced across the globe.