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n 85 CHAPTER 4 Associative Citizenship Civil Society, Rights Claims, and Expanding the Public Sphere The four dimensions of the reformulated conception of citizenship I developed in the previous chapter (membership, exclusion, belonging, racialization) should not be viewed as only theoretical elements, but should also be understood as taking on meaning through the institutional contexts within which they function. Citizenship is ultimately a set of practices, the specificity of which are determined by the particular norms and characteristics of the particular institutions where these practices are enacted. In other words, we need to find a way to focus on the institutional sites and practices through which societal location and membership, and political membership mutually influence one another; where the differential pattern of belonging takes form; and where patterns and strategies of inclusion and exclusion become incorporated as ongoing practices, ideologies, and policies. We need to explore how the form of racialization as foreignness functions. These investigations address specifically the elements of membership, exclusion, belonging, and racialization as the constitutive elements of associative citizenship. Such a theory also has to be capable of accounting for the dual historical roles of citizenship regimes, that while they have been a form of control and regulation, at the same time they have provided a means to make claims for greater societal and political inclusion. 86 n Chapter Four I argue in this chapter that a specific conception and model of civil society can provide a way to ground these dimensions empirically within specific institutional contexts. This approach is suggested by some of the very works on diversity and citizenship that I critiqued earlier. However, while these perspectives are suggestive, they do not develop a specific way or approach for linking their positions to particular institutional frameworks and contexts. This is one of the reasons that the inherently reciprocal relationship between societal and political membership has not received the kind of theoretical elaboration that would illuminate how that relationship plays out empirically on the ground. The key point here is that in most of these works, the formulations, analyses, and prescriptions regarding political membership rely on the preexistence of certain kinds of qualitative relations—particularly forms of mutuality, trust, and reciprocity—in the realm of societal membership. The problem is that the latter are either not mentioned at all or are assumed to exist, without any detailed analysis. But what if these societal relations do not exist? Since they are vital to the notions of diversity and citizenship these theorists argue for, should attention not be paid as seriously to the nature of these relations, and how they can be nurtured and fostered? For example, the normative formulations that Habermas and Rawls propose as the foundation for just, democratic societies rely on the preexistence of some form of trust and/or reciprocity. If these are indeed preconditions, and if without them there can be no just, democratic society, should this dimension not be analyzed as rigorously as the other elements in the theories proposed? Much like Habermas and Rawls, most of these theorists locate the site of these societal relations within civil society. Yet they fail to develop a conception or model of civil society as part of their analyses. What I propose here, then, is to develop a model of civil society that not only incorporates the four dimensions of citizenship that I propose, but also allows us to delineate the dual function of citizenship regimes, and can provide an account of the institutional conditions necessary for the type of qualitative relations that are required for a just, democratic society. But I first want to elaborate on the need for this institutional grounding, and then address the question of how best to institutionally situate these four dimensions. Institutional Context The theorists who advance analyses of diversity and citizenship that I discussed in chapter 3 have different positions regarding the issue of institutional context. The liberal approach focuses on the primacy of individual rights and citizenship and is thus construed in terms of the individual as the bearer of these rights. These rights ensure that private individuals can pursue their self-interests through the protection Associative Citizenship n 87 of the state, whose primary function is to mediate conflict and regulate activities. But the emphasis is on the nature of these rights, and few of the theorists in this tradition elaborate in any depth as to how the actual institutional context works in terms of the practice of...

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