Professor Jo Shaw’s new book, ‘The People in Question’, is an important contribution in a time of rising populism and heated debates about migration. This event brings together distinguished scholars to discuss this interaction between constitutions and citizenship in theory and practise.

The workshop brings together scholars from around to world to trace how ideas and norms of citizenship—making und unmaking of citizens—have evolved from classical Athens to the present day, and what they can teach us about contemporary challenges.

This online session of the Schuman Centre’s Seminar Series is chaired by Liav Orgad with presentations by Émilien Fargues, Wessel Reijers and Sara Svensson.

Presentation by Émilien Fargues, PhD, Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence

Through the analysis of the condition of “professional integration” for naturalisation, the article investigates whether economic performance requirements for the granting of French citizenship stand in contradiction with the communitarian dimension of the civic turn or whether they support each other.

Presentation by Jo Shaw, Professor at Edinburgh Law School, University of Edinburgh, and holder of the Salvesen Chair of European Institutions

This lecture addresses the relationship between constitutional citizenship and the rise of populism. Is populism leading to the erosion of modern citizenship as an ideal of equality? The claim is that many populist politicians make extensive use of constitutional amendment processes to reinforce their sense of identity with the people.

Presentation by Dimitry Kochenov (University of Groningen)
and Discussion with Christian Joppke (University of Bern), Ruud Koopmans (WZB Berlin), Yasemin Soysal (University of Essex) and Ashley Mantha-Hollands (WZB Berlin)

Presentation by Dr. Jules Lepoutre, Université Côte d’Azur

What does it mean to be a European citizen? From the last couple of years, the legal doctrine of the ‘genuine link’ is becoming central to evaluate the legitimacy of the Member States policies regarding nationality acquisition and loss. This paper aims to investigate the content of the genuine link doctrine, from ancient international law to contemporary EU law.

Presentation by Prof. Liav Orgad

In his presentation, Liav Orgad claims that the Chinese Social Credit System represents a new form of citizenship governance, termed as “cybernetic citizenship”. He provides normative standards to distinguish the Chinese system from Western forms of cybernetic citizenship, and shows the manner in which civic virtue is instrumentalized in China, both in content (“what” it is) and in form (“how” to cultivate it).

Workshop

Cities and local governments around the world are struggling with contemporary challenges of active citizenship and participation. As a response, digital technologies are introduced to shape a new, digital citizenship. These include digital platforms for co-decision making, systems for the promotion of good deeds through social credit, and citizenship gamification platforms. 

The Cities, Migration and Membership Research Collaborative will hold a two-day symposium focused on the topic of cities and mobility. This event brings together scholars, practitioners and policy-makers from around the globe with the objective to advance empirical and normative research to understand and meet the challenges posed by human mobility to cities in the 21st Century.

Jelena Džankić discusses her recent monograph, The Global Market for Investor Citizenship, in which she looks at the growing practice of the sale of passports around the world through the lenses of political science. The book highlights the tension between citizenship policies aimed at immigrant integration and those that create ‘long-distance’ or strategic citizens. It raises important and timely questions on national identities and global inequalities, focusing on the new forms that they assume in an emergent regime of flexible, instrumental and commodified citizenship.

In her new book, Kalypso Nicolaïdis steps out of the bounds of traditional academia to offer a unique take both on Brexit and on the power of mythical stories to frame our democratic conversation. She conjures up three archetypes to explore the competing visions that have clashed so dramatically over the meaning of Brexit, whether as the ultimate demonstration of British exceptionalism, a harbinger of terrible truths for the EU and the West or a sacrifice on the altar of EU unity.

Over the past decade, more states have recognized multiple citizenship. Since the 19th century, the concept has evolved from being politically and socially reviled to instrumentally desirable. This reality brings about new dilemmas: Does polycivitas resemble polygamy and polyethism, or, is it more similar to multiple parental relationships? Is the problem of polycivitas the “poly” or the contemporary concept of civitas?

If Britain leaves the European Union, over 60 million British citizens face being stripped of their EU citizenship rights and 3.8 million EU 27 citizens resident in Britain face an uncertain future in the UK in terms of the continued exercise of their EU citizenship rights. The talk by Ruvi Ziegler will critically appraise the possible 'remedies'.

Michael Doyle presents the Model International Mobility Convention (MIMC), a holistic and rights-based approach to international mobility that integrates the various regimes that seek to govern people on the move.

Gerald Neuman (Harvard Law School) gives a talk on populism and human rights. Mathias Kumm and Michael Zürn (both WZB) will offer their comments.

The concept of citizenship originated in the city republics of ancient and early modern Europe. Today, after the determination of citizenship has become a monopoly of states, cities reclaim citizenship for themselves. This talk will explore the potential and limitations of new manifestations of urban citizenship in Western democratic states.

This workshop focuses on analyzing blockchain governance from a theoretical perspective, relying on the extensive body of literature on legal and political theory, identity, citizenship, collective action and game theory.

The interdisciplinary conference seeks to understand better the intercultural tensions between majority and minority rights, the reflection of these tensions in law and policy, moral and legal challenges they pose to theories of democracy, diversity and justice, and their normative consequences.

Liav Orgad (EUI Florence/WZB/IDC Herzliya) will give a short presentation before his paper on the ethical dilemmas of forcing particularly immigrants, to be "free" will be discussed.

In this Lecture, Professor Coeckelbergh argues that giving robots citizenship seems almost an insult to the very concept of citizenship. And yet, a more relational approach that takes seriously the role of the human and social appearance of robots could help us to understand why people may construct the robot’s political status in more “thick” terms in the near future.

The workshop will examine China’s emerging Social Credit System from different disciplines: political theory, social science, legal jurisprudence, and moral philosophy. It aims at improving our understanding of the system, investigating its ethics, and exploring its legal implications and the regulatory regimes that should govern it.

In this presentation, Benedetta Romano, PhD candidate at the LMU Munich, argues that immigrants do not threaten national identity if they do not share cultural traits similar to those characterizing the host community, but only if they do not share a feeling of belonging to it.

In this presentation, Yossi Harapz, Assistant Professor in Sociology at Tel-Aviv University, examines how the structure and meaning of citizenship are changing for individuals who are already citizens of a country, focusing on citizens’ duties and obligations, the acceptance of multiple citizenship and citizens who do not share a country’s national identity.

In this lecture, Michael W. Doyle presents the Model International Mobility Convention (MIMC), a holistic and rights-based approach to international mobility and a consensus among over 40 academics and policymakers in the fields of migration, human rights, national security, labor economics, and refugee law.

Birthright citizenship (jus soli) is a simple, easily-administered rule to facilitate integration of illegally-present children who are likely to spend most or all of their lives in a country. In the U.S., however, automatic citizenship at birth for such children is deeply problematic for both constitutional and political reasons. The lecture explores what the U.S. experience can teach European policy-makers.

The European Union has not developed thus far a coherent framework of common criteria for immigrant admission into EU citizenship, nor a common integration policy for newcomers. In light of this state of affairs, the Workshop will examine the pros and cons of adopting an EU Directive on Citizenship.

The WZB Berlin Social Science Center, the European University Institute and the London School for Economics and Political Science are proud to jointly organize the second annual European Junior Faculty Forum for Public Law and Jurisprudence (EJFF).

The book talk introduces Primavera De Filippi's and Aaron Wright's "Blockchain and the Law", which urges the legal systems to catch up with emerging technologies. It makes clear that the emerging technology cannot be harnessed productively without new rules and new approaches to legal thinking.

The workshop "Emerging Technologies and the Future of Citizenship" addresses the challenges and opportunities that emerging technologies pose to existing theories and practices of citizenship. The public keynote lecture "The People: Hearing Us, As Sensible" is held by Lawrence Lessig (Harvard University).

Is the genuine link doctrine still a good law for assessing membership? And what is the meaning of a genuine link in a globalized world? This event, which is dedicated to the work of Rainer Bauböck, addresses these and further questions about citizenship and belonging in a panel discussion and subsequent lecture.

The first European workshop of COALA LEX is jointly organised by the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies and the Law Department of the European University Institute. It convenes experts in blockchain technologies together with a small group of key stakeholders across government, academia and tech industry.

This event seeks to understand the varieties of citizenship in a globalised world. It celebrates the continuous geographical and thematic expansion of GLOBALCIT, the successor of EUDO Citizenship since 2017, and creates synergies with the Global Citizenship Governance Project based at the EUI and the WZB Berlin.

Opening lecture to the international workshop, "Migration, Citizenship, and Democracy”, which brings together a team of scholars from different countries and disciplines, who focus on the empirical and normative developments to the concepts of citizenship and democracy that result from global migration.

The workshop explored how migration affects constitutional identity and whether is it justified to impose immigration restrictions in order to protect constitutional essentials. It discussed national, regional, and global challenges presented by international migration.