Citizenship in the global struggles for democracy

This Special Issue explores the interplay between citizenship and democratic hardships in a global context. The ten contributions to this collection reflect on the range of contestations of citizenship resulting from the rise of right-wing populism and authoritarianism across a variety of democratic and formerly democratic contexts, as well as on citizenship claims arising from struggles for democracy in illiberal political environments worldwide. Our focus is on identity politics, political projects, and economic interests, which impact on the engineering, instrumentalisation and exploitation of citizenship regimes, respectively. By zooming in on specific times and places where democracy has faced different challenges, the contributions to this Special Issue look at how political agendas become articulated in a way that expands, contracts, or otherwise reconfigures citizenship. We seek to encourage the study of citizenship outside the Global North, and open up research avenues in those contexts where the dynamics of ‘inclusion’ and ‘exclusion’ are context-sensitive and often counterintuitive.