Contested spaces of citizenship: camps, borders and urban encounters

Abstract

As citizenship regulations have tightened across the world, protest and activist movements have also emerged to challenge the violence of border and migration control. Positioned at the intersection of citizenship studies and critical geography, this special issue explores how space is conceived, mobilised, used and, in turn, shaped by these political struggles. The authors argue that citizenship is inextricably and irreducibly spatial, and therefore entangled with the material and discursive dimensions of geographical places and scales. Drawing on a rich set of examples, the contributions of this issue trace how space is actively and strategically used within multiple processes of political subjectivation. Focusing on critical sites through which exclusionary logics materialise – such as camps, borders and the urban space, the papers investigate how marginal(ised) political subjects claim their rights in and through space in different and often ambiguous ways, including contestation and solidarity.