H14(b) - Institutions and Citizenship in the Long View
Date: Jun 3 | Time: 03:45pm to 05:15pm | Location:
Chair/Président/Présidente : Ella Street (University of Toronto)
Discussant/Commentateur/Commentatrice : Christopher Bennett (University of Waterloo)
Against Intergenerational Preventive Justice: Michael Sullivan (St. Mary's University)
Abstract: In this paper, I argue that political communities should not deny citizenship and its protections to children based on their parents’ allegiances or alleged offenses at the time of their child’s birth. Citizenship deprivation is an intergenerational punishment when children lose entitlement to citizenship at birth based on their parent’s denationalization, as is the case for stateless children born abroad to parents affiliated with a terrorist organization like ISIS (Zedner 2019, 328). As for the collateral consequences of anti-terrorism sanctions, my primary concern in this article is to ensure that the dependents of suspects and offenders do not lose status-based entitlements to citizenship and its rights based on their parents’ actions. Second, I question whether harsh retributory punishments including citizenship deprivation, banishment, and execution are warranted for political crimes (Beck, Britto and Andrews 2007; Lenard 2018; Gibney 2019). Here, I draw distinctions between beliefs and actions, or rather, suspicions and thoughts of disloyalty, and acting upon these beliefs in a way that causes harm to individuals (Lacey 2016, 152-154).
Sexual Citizenship and the Limits of Multiculturalism: Leonard Halladay (Carleton University)
Abstract: This paper argues for a rethinking of the relationship between sexuality and citizenship by revisiting multiculturalism theory and the state policies it seeks to explain. In February 2012 the Government of Canada updated Discover Canada: The Rights and Responsibilities of Canadian Citizenship – the guide used by newcomers to prepare for the citizenship test – by including gays and lesbians in its description of a modern multicultural Canada. Emphasizing marriage equality and a common Canadian identity, this change acts to normalize an historically deviant population while depicting Canada as a bastion of liberal progress. By connecting multiculturalism, understood as a recognition-based theory of liberal pluralism through the work of Will Kymlicka and Charles Taylor, to the literature on sexuality and citizenship, the concept of citizenship regime is here applied to the expansion of LGBTQ2+ rights in Canada. I then challenge the extent to which multiculturalism can adequately accommodate difference based in gender and sexuality by arguing that these sources of identity are incompatible with the categories central to multiculturalism’s accommodation framework. Drawing on conceptions of culture as narrative and culture as contestation, the paper situates queerness in relationship to the sociopolitical and institutional structures that give meaning to LGBTQ2+ difference with the aim of reimagining Canadian diversity beyond the boundaries set by multicultural citizenship.
There is No Such Thing as a Short-Term Issue: Michael MacKenzie (University of Pittsburgh)
Abstract: The idea that there are “long-term” issues in political affairs implies that there are also “short-term” political issues, but this is not obviously the case. It is surprisingly difficult to identify political issues that are exclusively short- or long-term ones. Climate change is a long-term issue because what we do today — or fail to do — will affect the future for hundreds or thousands of years, but what we decide to do about climate change now will affect us over the near-term. And many issues that appear to be exclusively short-term ones, such as food production or waste removal, also have both short- and long-term dimensions. If our food systems fail, people will starve in the near-term, but how we grow food, which foods we grow, whether we use genetically-modified foods to increase yields, and how and where we transport foods, are decisions that will have long-term consequences. In this paper, I draw on examples of temporally-complex issues to argue that there is no such thing as a short-term issue in political affairs. Every political issue or decision will have costs and benefits that are distributed in time in various complex ways. This work has implications for how we might design future-regarding political institutions. Instead of adopting special institutions or procedures to deal with specific long-term issues, such as climate change or budget deficits, we need to think about how we can design general-purpose political institutions that are capable of dealing with the temporal-complexities inherent in all political issues.
Pettit's Neo-republican Coup: Rescuing the Legitimacy of the Modern Democratic State: Len Ferry (Niagara College)
Abstract: In a series of recent texts, including <