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Globalisation and the international humanrights regime have contributed to the creationof operational and legal openings for non-

state actors to enter international arenas that wereonce the exclusive domain of national states. Various,often as yet very minor, developments signal thatthe state is no longer the exclusive subject ofinternational law or the only actor in internationalrelations. Other actors—from NGOs and indigenouspeoples to immigrants and refugees who becomesubjects of adjudication in human rights decisions—are increasingly emerging as subjects of internationallaw and actors in international relations. That is to say,these non-state actors can gain visibility ininternational fora as individuals and as collectivities,emerging from the invisibility of aggregatemembership in a nation-state exclusively representedby the sovereign.

One way of interpreting this is in terms of anincipient unbundling of the exclusive authority overterritory and people that we have long associatedwith the national state. The most strategicinstantiation of this unbundling is probably the globalcity, which operates as a partly denationalisedplatform for global capital and, at the same time, isemerging as a key site for the most astounding mixof people from all over the world. The growingintensity of transactions among major cities iscreating a strategic cross-border geography thatpartly bypasses national states. The new networktechnologies further strengthen these transactions,whether they are electronic transfers of specialisedservices among firms or Internet-based communica-tions among the members of diasporas and interestgroups.

Do these developments contribute to theexpansion of a global civil society? These cities andthe new strategic geographies that connect themand bypass national states can be seen as constitutingpart of the infrastructure for global civil society. Theydo so from the ground up, through multiplemicrosites and microtransactions. Among them are a

variety of organisations focused on trans-boundaryissues concerning immigration, asylum, internationalwomen’s agendas, anti-globalisation struggles, andmany others. While these are not necessarily urbanin their orientation or genesis, they tend to convergein cities. The new network technologies, especially theInternet, ironically have strengthened the urban mapof these trans-boundary networks. It does not haveto be that way, but at this time cities and thenetworks that bind them function as an anchor andan enabler of cross-border struggles. These samedevelopments and conditions also facilitate theinternationalising of terrorist and traffickingnetworks; it is not clear how these fit into globalcivil society.

Global cities are, then, thick enabling environ-ments for these types of activities, even though thenetworks themselves are not urban per se. In thisregard, these cities help people experience themselvesas part of global non-state networks as they livetheir daily lives. They enact global civil society in themicro-spaces of daily life rather than on someputative global stage.

The Ascendancy of Sub- andTransnational Spaces and Actors

The key nexus in this configuration is that theweakening of the exclusive formal authority ofstates over national territory facilitates the

ascendancy of sub- and transnational spaces andactors in politico-civic processes. These are spacesthat tended to be confined to the national domainor that have evolved as novel types in the context ofglobalisation and digitisation. This loss of power at thenational level produces the possibility of new formsof power and politics at the sub-national level andat the supra-national level. The national as containerof social process and power is cracked (P. Taylor 2000;Sachar 1990). This cracked casing opens up ageography of politics and civics that links subnationalspaces. Cities are foremost in this new geography. G

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C h a p t e r 9

GLOBAL CITIES AND DIASPORIC NETWORKS:MICROSITES IN GLOBAL CIVIL SOCIETY

Saskia Sassen

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Copyright 2002 Saskia SassenOriginally published in "Global Civil Society 2002."

Edited by Helmut Anheier et. al.Oxford University Press

The density of political and civic cultures in largecities localises global civil society in people’s lives. Wecan think of these as multiple localisations of civilsociety that are global in that they are part of globalcircuits and trans-boundary networks .

The organisational side of the global economymaterialises in a worldwide grid of strategic places,uppermost among which are major internationalbusiness and financial centres. We can think of thisglobal grid as constituting a new economic geographyof centrality, one that cuts across national boundariesand increasingly across the old North-South divide. It has emerged as atransnational space for the formationof new claims by global capital butalso by other types of actors. The mostpowerful of these new geographies ofcentrality at the inter-urban level bindthe major international financial andbusiness centres: New York, London,Tokyo, Paris, Frankfurt, Zurich,Amsterdam, Los Angeles, Sydney, HongKong, among others. But this geo-graphy now also includes cities such asSao Paulo, Shanghai, Bangkok, Taipei,and Mexico City. The intensity oftransactions among these cities,particularly through the financialmarkets, transactions in services, and investment, hasincreased sharply, and so have the orders of magnitudeinvolved.

Economic globalisation and telecommunicationshave contributed to produce a space for the urbanwhich pivots on de-territorialised cross-bordernetworks and territorial locations with massiveconcentrations of resources. This is not a completelynew feature. Over the centuries cities have been atthe intersection of processes with supra-urban andeven intercontinental scaling. Ancient Athens andRome, the cities of the Hanseatic League, Genoa,Venice, Baghdad, Cairo, Istanbul, each has been at thecrossroads of major dynamics in their time (Braudel1984). What is different today is the coexistence ofmultiple networks and the intensity, complexity, andglobal span of these networks. Another markingfeature of the contemporary period, especially whenit comes to the economy, is the extent to whichsignificant portions of economies are now de-materialised and digitised and hence can travel atgreat speeds through these networks. Also new isthe growing use of digital networks by a broad range

of often resource-poor organisations to pursue avariety of cross-border initiatives. All of this hasincreased the number of cities that are part of cross-border networks operating on often vast geographicscales. Under these conditions, much of what weexperience and represent as the local level turns outto be a micro-environment with global span.

The new urban spatiality thus produced is partial ina double sense: it accounts for only part of whathappens in cities and what cities are about, and itinhabits only part of what we might think of as the

space of the city, whether this beunderstood in terms as diverse as thoseof a city’s administrative boundaries orin the sense of the public life of a city’speople. But it is nonetheless one wayin which cities can become part of thelive infrastructure of global civilsociety.

The space constituted by theworldwide grid of global cities, aspace with new economic andpolitical potentialities, is perhaps oneof the most strategic spaces for theformation of transnational identitiesand communities. This is a space thatis both place-centred in that it isembedded in particular and strategic

cities, and trans-territorial because it connects sitesthat are not geographically proximate yet areintensely linked to each other. It is not only thetransmigration of capital that takes place in thisglobal grid but also that of people, both rich—i.e., thenew transnational professional workforce—and poor—i.e., most migrant workers; and it is a space for thetransmigration of cultural forms, for the re-territorialisation of ‘local’ subcultures. An importantquestion is whether it is also a space for a newpolitics, one going beyond the politics of culture andidentity while likely to remain at least partlyembedded in it. One of the most radical formsassumed today by the linkage of people to territoryis the loosening of identities from their traditionalsources, such as the nation or the village. Thisunmooring in the process of identity formationengenders new notions of community of membershipand of entitlement.

Immigration is one major process through which anew transnational political economy is beingconstituted, one which is largely embedded in majorcities in so far as most immigrants are concentrated inG

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Global cities and the

new strategic

geographies that

connect them and

bypass national states

can be seen as

constituting part of

the infrastructure for

global civil society

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major cities. It is, on my reading, one of the constitutiveprocesses of globalisation today, even though notrecognised or represented as such in mainstreamaccounts of the global economy. It becomes, in moreand more cities, part of a massive demographictransition towards a growing presence of women, nativeminorities, and immigrants in the population.

Global capital and immigrants are two majorinstances of transnationalised actors that havecross-border unifying properties internally and findthemselves in conflict with each other inside globalcities. The leading sectors of corporate capital arenow global in their organisation and operations.And many of the disadvantaged workers in globalcities are women, immigrants, people of colour—men and women whose sense of membership is notnecessarily adequately captured in terms of thenational, and indeed often evince cross-border solid-arities around issues of substance. Both types ofactors find in the global city astrategic site for their economic andpolitical operations. We see here aninteresting correspondence betweengreat concentrations of corporatepower and large concentrations of‘others’.

In brief, large cities in both theglobal South and the global Northare the terrain where a multiplicityof globalisation processes assumeconcrete, localised forms. A focuson cities allows us to capture, notonly the upper, but also the lowercircuits of globalisation. Theselocalised forms are, in good part,what globalisation is about. Further,the thickening transactions thatbind cities across borders signal thepossibility of a new politics of traditionallydisadvantaged actors operating in this newtransnational economic geography. This is a politicsthat arises out of actual participation by workers inthe global economy, but under conditions ofdisadvantage and lack of recognition, whether asfactory workers in export-processing zones or ascleaners on Wall Street.

Peoples’ Networks: Micro-Politics for and against GlobalCivil Society

The cross-border network of global cities is aspace where we are seeing the formation of newtypes of ‘global’ politics of place which contest

corporate globalisation. The demonstrations by theanti-globalisation movement signal the potential fordeveloping a politics centred on places understood aslocations on global networks. This is a place-specificpolitics with a global span. It is a type of political workdeeply embedded in people’s actions and activitiesbut made possible partly by the existence of globaldigital linkages. These are mostly organisationsoperating through networks of cities and involvinginformal political actors, that is, actors who are notnecessarily engaging in politics as citizens narrowly

defined, where voting is the mostformalised type of citizen politics.Among such informal political actorsare women who engage in politicalstruggles in their condition asmothers, anti-globalisation activistswho go to a foreign country astourists but to do citizen politics,undocumented immigrants who joinprotests against police brutality.

We can identify at least four spe-cific types of these politics in terms oftheir objectives or focus: anti-capitalism, women, migrants, and anti-trafficking. One of their characteristics,especially of the first three types, isthat they engage in ‘non-cosmo-politan’ forms of global politics. Partlyenabled by the Internet, activists can

develop global networks for circulating not onlyinformation (about environmental, housing, politicalissues, etc.) but also political work and strategies. Yetthey remain grounded in very specific issues and areoften focused on their localities even as they operateas part of global networks. There are many examples ofsuch a new type of cross-border political work. Forinstance, the Society for Promotion of Area ResourceCentres (SPARC; see Table 9.4), started by and centredon women, began as an effort to organise slum dwellersin Bombay to get housing. Now it has a network of suchgroups throughout Asia and some cities in Latin Americaand Africa. This is one of the key forms of critical politics G

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The space constituted

by the worldwide grid

of global cities, a

space with new

economic and political

potentialities, is

perhaps one of the

most strategic spaces

for the formation of

transnational

identities and

communities

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Name

50 Years IsEnough

Third WorldNetwork

InternationalThird Position

Table 9.1: Social justice networks – detailed description

Description

50 Years Is Enough was founded in 1994, the year of the 50thanniversary of the Bretton Woods conference, by a group ofUS organisations . ‘50 Years Is Enough’ was chosen as theslogan to express the belief that the type of developmentthat the World Bank and the IMF promote should not beallowed to continue. The 50 Years Is Enough Network aims atincreasing the awareness of the US public, the media, andpolicy-makers of change at the Bretton Woods institutions. Itaims at the same time to limit the power of these institutionsand to promote a public exploration of new structures thatcould deliver relevant and appropriate assistance.

The Third World Network(TWN) is an independent non-profitinternational network of organisations and individuals involvedin issues relating to development, the Third World, and North-South issues. Its objectives are to conduct research oneconomic, social, and environmental issues pertaining to theSouth; to publish books and magazines; to organise andparticipate in seminars; and to provide a platform representingSouthern interests and perspectives at international fora suchas the UN conferences and processes. The TWN’s internationalsecretariat is based in Penang, Malaysia. It has offices in Delhi,India; Montevideo, Uruguay (for South America); Geneva;London; and Accra, Ghana. The Third World Network hasaffiliated organisations in several Third World countries,including India, the Philippines, Thailand, Brazil, Bangladesh,Malaysia, Peru, Ethiopia, Uruguay, Mexico, Ghana, South Africa,and Senegal. It also cooperates with several organisations inthe North.

The International Third Position is defined as a world viewwhich rejects and transcends the wisdom of the modern worldso as to become the political creed of the twenty-first century.The Third Position views international finance as one of thegreatest evils of the modern world, and thus hostile to itsown programme. It supports the idea of popular rule, thepreservation of the environment, the replacement of thebanking system and usury by a sound money system, analternative to both socialism and capitalism based on thewidespread diffusion of property, and supports a worldwiderevolution. It is organised all over the world, bringing togetherlike-minded organisations, groups, and individuals who shareits aims.

Website address

http://www.50years.org/

http://www.twnside.org.sg/

http://dspace.dial.pipex.com/third-position/

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that the Internet can make possible: a politics of thelocal with a big difference in that these are localitiesconnected with each other across a region, a country,or the world. Although the network is global, this doesnot mean that it all has to happen at the global level.Table 9.4 contains a list of organ-isations concerned with women’sissues and often very local concernsbut which are nonetheless part ofglobal networks.

I will also focus on two verydifferent types of networks whichhave, however, similarly been enabledby the technical infrastructure ofglobalisation. They are organisedterrorist networks and traffickingorganisations.

Anti-capitalist organisations

Tables 9.1 and 9.2 briefly present afew organisations dedicated to fight,criticise, and expose various aspectsof globalisation and capitalism generally. Most of themhave been formed only recently. Table 9.1 containsthree particular examples, and Table 9.2 a more generallist of these organisations. Together they show thevariety of issues, some broad and some very narrow,that are bringing people together in struggles andwork against global corporate capital and other sourcesof social injustice. This has clearly emerged as animportant anchor for cross-border peoples’ networks.Many of these organisations are or might becomemicro-elements of global civil society.

Women

Women have become increasingly active in this worldof cross-border efforts. This has often meant thepotential transformation of a whole range of ‘local’conditions or domestic institutional domains—such asthe household, the community, or the neighbourhood,where women find themselves confined to domesticroles—into political spaces. Women can emerge aspolitical and civic subjects without having to step outof these domestic worlds. From being lived orexperienced as non-political or domestic, these placesare transformed into micro-environments with globalspan. An example of this is MADRE, an internationalorganisation presented in Table 9.3. In Table 9.4 welist a variety of organisations concerned with women.

What I mean by the term ‘micro-environmentwith global span’ is that technical connectivity linkseven resource-poor organisations with other similarlocal entities in neighbourhoods and cities in othercountries. A community of practice can emerge that

creates multiple lateral, horizontalcommunications, collaborations,solidarities, supports. This canenable local political or non-polit-ical actors to enter into cross-border politics.

Migrants

There are a growing number oforganisations addressing the issuesof immigrants and asylum-seekers ina variety of countries (see Table 9.5).

The city is a far more concretespace for politics than the nation. Itbecomes a place where non-formalpolitical actors can be part of thepolitical scene in a way that is more

difficult, though not impossible, at the nationallevel. Nationally politics needs to run throughexisting formal systems, whether the electoralpolitical system or the judiciary (taking stateagencies to court). To do this you need to be acitizen. Non-formal political actors are thereby moreeasily rendered invisible in the space of nationalpolitics. The space of the city accommodates a broadrange of political activities—squatting,demonstrations against police brutality, fightingfor the rights of immigrants and the homeless—andissues—the politics of culture and identity, gay andlesbian and queer politics. Much of this becomesvisible on the street. Much of urban politics isconcrete, enacted by people rather than dependenton massive media technologies. Street-level politicsmake possible the formation of new types ofpolitical subjects that do not have to go through theformal political system.

It is in this sense that those who lack power andare ‘unauthorised’ (i.e. unauthorised immigrants,those who are disadvantaged, outsiders, discriminatedminorities, can in global cities gain presence, vis-à-vis power and vis-à-vis each other (Sassen 1996: Ch.1). A good example of this is the Europe-widedemonstrations of Kurds in response to the arrest ofÖcalan: suddenly they were on the map not only asan oppressed minority but also as a diaspora in their G

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Life in global cities

helps people

experience themselves

as part of global non-

state networks. They

enact global civil

society in the micro-

spaces of daily life

rather than on some

putative global stage

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Name Brief description Web address

People’s Global A global instrument for communication http://www.nadir.org/nadir/initiativ/agp/Action and coordination against the global market.

Development Research, resource, and networking http://www.developmentgap.org/Gap organisation addressing structural adjustment

and trade liberalisation issues.

Jubilee South A coalition of debt cancellation movements http://www.jubileesouth.net/from across the global South.

A SEED Targets the structural causes of the http://www.aseed.net/environment and development crisis, it campaigns against the international financial institutions and ‘free’ trade agreements.

Corporate Monitors transnational corporations’ social, http://www.corpwatch.org/Watch ecological and economic practices.

The American Aims at bringing social and economic justice http://www.aflcio.org/home.htmFederation of by enabling working people to have a voice Labor-Congress on the job, in government, in the global economy, of Industrial and in their communities. Since the late 1990s Organizations it has changed its position on immigrants and

now seeks to organise them and to work across borders.

Continental Consists of autonomous US locals working to http://cdan.org/Direct Action overcome corporate globalisation. Has the Network potential to go transnational.

Alliance for A movement to restore populist democracy http://www.afd-online.org/Democracy over corporations. Has the potential

to go transnational.

Global Global Exchange is a research, education, and http://www.globalexchange.org/Exchange action centre dedicated to advocating and

working for political, economic, and social justice on a global scale.

International An alliance of 60 leading activists to stimulate http://www.ifg.org/Forum on new thinking, joint activity, and public Globalization education in response to the global economy.

Table 9.2: More social justice networks – in brief

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Name Brief description Web address

JustAct JustAct offers programmes that link students http://www.justact.org/home/index.htmland youth in the US to organisations and grass-roots movements working for sustainable and self-reliant communities around the world.

Project Carries out focused campaigns http://www.moles.org/Underground against abusive extractive resource activity.

Phase1 A radical left group of Switzerland engaged in the http://www.phase1.net/ struggle against racism, sexism, and capitalism.

Youthactivism Dedicated to the young women and men http://www.youthactivism.org/organisation around the world taking action for a more just

and democratic world.

Student Network of progressive orgs and individuals http://www.seac.org/Environmental aimed at uprooting environmental injustices Action Coalition through action and education.

Seattle Youth Promotes youth voice through civic involvement, http://www.seattleyouth.org/Involvement leadership training, and decision-making.Network

WTO Watch WTO Watch is a website on trade and http://www.wtowatch.org/globalisation.

A-Infos A project coordinated by an international http://www.ainfos.ca/collective of revolutionary anti-authoritarian, anti-capitalist activists, involved with class and believing in revolution as necessary to bring a new classless social order.

World Bank An international grass-roots campaign building http://www.econjustice.net/wbbb/Bonds Boycott political and financial pressure on the world. who_we_are.htm

SEEN Aimed at steering the financial investments of http://www.seen.org/pages/issues.shtmlwealthy countries away from support for fossil fuels.

La Lutta A group of activists, artists, educators, and http://www.lalutta.orgMedia professionals united to promote a greater level Collective of social awareness.

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Name

MADRE

K’inalAntzetik

Q’ati’t

WangkyLuhpia

Ibdaa

Benimpuhwe

Table 9.3: MADRE and its sister organisations

Description

MADRE works to support women who are organisingagainst attacks on their rights and resources. Since1983, it has worked in partnership with community-based women’s organisations in conflict areasworldwide to address issues of health, education,economic development, and other human rights. Itprovides resources and training for its sisterorganisations and works to empower people in the USto demand changes to unjust policies. It developsprogrammes to meet immediate needs in communitieshurt by US policy and supports women’s long-termstruggles for social justice and human rights. MADRE’sinternational human rights advocacy programme aimsto make international law relevant and accountable tothe people it is meant to serve. It brings women whowork for social change at the community level into theprocess of creating and improving international law byproviding the training and resources for them toadvocate for their rights. It serves as a bridge betweenits sister organisations so that they can join forces oninternational campaigns and share ideas and strategiesto strengthen their work for social justice in theirhome countries.

In Chiapas, a cooperative of indigenous womenweavers.

In Guatemala, equips women maquila workers todocument and combat human rights abuses in factorieswhere they work.

In Nicaragua, supports programmes combating violenceagainst women, drug addiction, illiteracy, and mal-nutrition.

In the in Deheishe refugee camp in Palestine, enableschildren to develop the skills and political vision tobuild a future for themselves and their community.

An association of Rwandan women who pulledtogether in the wake of the genocide to support eachother and to rebuild their lives.

Website address

http://www.madre.org

http://www.laneta.apc.org/kinal/

http://www.dheisheh-ibdaa.net/

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Name

SPARC

The Network ofEast-WestWomen (NEWW)

The Associationfor WomenRights inDevelopment

Women LivingUnder MuslimLaw

AlternativeWomen inDevelopment

The Global FundFor Women

Women’sEnvironmentandDevelopmentOrganization

Women HumanRights Net

Black Women’sWebsite AgainstRacist SexualViolence

Table 9.4: More women’s organisations – in brief

Description

The Society for Promotion of Area Resource Centres (SPARC) wasregistered as a society and trust in 1984. Since then, it has workedwith the urban and rural poor, especially women, with the aim ofhelping them to organise themselves, develop skills, and createsustainable processes and institutions in order to participate indecisions which affect their lives. SPARC’s philosophy is that a keyelement of such capacity building is learning from one’s experiencesand those of others. Thus, peer-based capacity building is a threadrunning through all of SPARC’s activities. SPARC works closelywith women’s collectives. Savings and credit is frequently the entrypoint for these interactions. Though the amount of moneycirculated by these groups may be small, this activity allows womento extricate themselves from the clutches of exploitativemoneylenders. SPARC’s capacity- building work with these groupsenables them to handle monetary transactions, analyse economicoptions, and prepare budgets

An international communication and resource network founded bywomen across the US and the former Yugoslavia

An international organisation committed to achieving genderequality

An international network providing support for all women whoselives are conditioned by laws and customs said to derive fromIslam

A working group struggling to bring a feminist analysis to economicand social issues affecting women.

An international network of women and men committed to aworld of equality and social justice.

An international organisation working to increase women’s visibility,roles, and leadership nationally, regionally, and internationally

A partnership of women’s human rights organisations around theworld; provides links to organisations and explanations of systemsand strategies for women’s human rights work.

A point of reference for information on black, ethnic minority,immigrant, migrant, and refugee women in Britain who havesuffered rape, racist sexual assault, or other forms of violence andharassment, including women seeking asylum after being raped intheir country of origin.

Website address

www.sparcindia.org/

www.neww.org

www.awid.org

www.wluml.org

www.geocities.com/altwid.org

www.globalfundforwomen.org

www.wedo.org/

www.whrnet.org

www.bwrap.dircon.co.uk/

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own right, distinct from the Turks. This signals, for me,the possibility of a new type of politics centred in newtypes of political actors. It is not simply a matter ofhaving or not having power. These are new hybridbases from which to act. Tables 9.5 and 9.6 presentorganisations that are largely focused on a variety ofissues of powerless groups and individuals. Some areglobal and others national. While powerless, theseindividuals and groups are acquiring presence in abroader politico-civic stage .

The case of the Federation of Michoacan Clubs inIllinois (USA) described in Box 9.1 illustrates this mixof dynamics. These are associations of often verypoor immigrants which are beginning to engage in

cross-border development projects and in that processare mobilising additional resources and politicalcapital in both their countries of origin and ofimmigration.

Terrorists

But the city and the infrastructure for globalnetworks also enable the operations of militant,criminal, and terrorists organisations. Globalisation,telecommunications, flexible loyalties and identitiesfacilitate the formation of cross-border geographiesfor an increasing range of activities and communitiesof membership. The evidence that has come out sinceG

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Immigrant communities in many different parts of theworld have formed home-town associations of variouskinds over the last two centuries. But today we areseeing a very specific type of home-town association,one directly concerned with socio-economic develop-ment in its communities of origin and increasinglyengaging both governmental and civic entities insending and receiving countries in these projects. Thesehome-town associations are becoming micro-levelbuilding blocks of global civil society.

In the particular case of the Mexican immigrantcommunity in the US, home-town associations wereformed already in the 1920s and 1930s; but there waslittle if anything in the way of development efforts.These were often a one-shot affair and then the associ-ation would disappear. In the 1960s a whole series ofnew associations were formed. This corresponded partlyto a generational renewal and the increase of immigra-tion. But it is particularly in the 1980s and 1990s thatthese associations grew stronger and proliferated. Thisis partly because there are now 3 million Mexicannationals settled permanently in the US.

But it is also partly because globalisation and thenew types of transnationalisms that are emerging havecreated enabling environments for the types of projectsthese associations are launching.

Today more than 400 home-town clubs and associ-ations of Mexican immigrants have been counted inthe US. The largest single concentration of Mexican

home-town associations in the US is in Los Angeles. Thesecond largest is in Chicago, the particular focus here.

According to the Mexican Consulate of Chicago,there are seven federations of home towns organisedaccording to state of origin. In Chicago, a total of 125home-town clubs constitute these seven federations.There are several researchers working on these home-town associations in Chicago (Gzesh and Espinoza1999; Pizarro 2001; Bada 2001). A growing number ofthese are working on infrastructure and developmentprojects in their communities of origin, with severalmore probably uncounted, working quietly andunnoticed on small projects. This is a new development;there is no precedent in the Mexican community ofsuch cross-border socio-economic developmentprojects.

In their research on one particular federation ofhome towns, the Federation of Michoacan Clubs inIllinois, Gzesh and Espinoza (1999) made the followingmajor findings.

1. The formation of Mexican home-town associationsin the US is a grass-roots response to the stressesplaced on communities undergoing rapid changein a globalising society. Mexicans from Michoacanresiding in Illinois have an ethic of communityresponsibility that transcends national boundaries.

2. The 14 Mexican home-town associations whichmake up the Illinois Federation of Michoacan Clubs

Box 9.1: Immigrant communities building cross-border civic networks: The Federation of Michoacan Clubs in Illinois

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the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 have madeit clear that the global financial system also servedtheir purposes and that several major cities in Europewere key bases for the Al-Qaeda network. Manymilitant organisations set up an international networkof bases in various cities. London has been a key basefor the Sri Lanka’s Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam’sinternational secretariat, and cities in France, Norway,Sweden, Canada, and the US are home to various oftheir centres of activity. Osama Bin Laden’s Al-Qaedaterrorist organisation is known to have established asupport network in Great Britain, run through anoffice in London called the ‘Advice and ReformationCommittee’, founded in July 1994, which is likely to

have closed by now. (For more details Box 1.5 onpage 24).

Traffickers

Another example of illegal networks is thoseconcerned with human trafficking, a major source ofincome for criminal organisations, often mixed inwith trafficking in drugs and arms. Large cities arecrucial spaces both in the input (recruitment) and inthe output (insertion of the trafficked person in thedestination country labour market) process oftrafficking. Cities such as Bangkok, Lagos, Moscow,Kiev, are key sites for the top organisers from where G

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depend entirely on volunteer work and voluntarycontributions from their members. They havedeveloped high standards of accountability andserve as a model of international, grass-rootsphilanthropy.

3. Mexican immigrants who form home-townassociations are often from rural communitieswhich have lost jobs and population during theeconomic restructuring of Mexico over the pasttwo decades. The projects they undertake in theircommunities of origin are intended to mitigatethose problems and preserve community life.Projects completed by contributions from Illinois-based Michoacan clubs include construction andrepair of bridges, roads, schools, and churches, aswell as water systems and recreational facilities intheir communities of origin.

4. The Michocacan home-town associations in thisstudy have developed along similar paths, whichlikely reflect a common experience amongMexican immigrant home-town associationsacross the US.

The organisational base for the Illinois Michoacanoshas been the home-town-level association; immigrantsfrom a single community of origin often work togetheror live in the same community. These associationsoften start as soccer clubs or organisations that raisemoney to support town-specific religious festivals in

the home towns or in the US, and are run entirely byvolunteer labour. With time, these associations havecome to take on social and economic developmentprojects in their communities of origin, working inconjunction with Mexican local, state, or federalgovernment entities through various ‘matching’programmes.

The home-town clubs eventually formed state-wide federations (i.e. all of the home-town clubs fromMichoaca operating in Illinois) to increase their co-ordination, the scale of the projects which they canundertake, and their leverage with Mexican govern-ment officials. These are in turn seeking relationshipswith other entities in the US and Mexico which sharecommon interests in community and job developmentin a globalising economy.

These developments in the immigrant community inthe US parallel developments in Mexico, where there isnow a local movement searching for alternative waysto promote development at the local level in a politicalsystem which has been historically highly centralised.Further, there is a concurrent development of newtransnational politics in which migrant organisationsalong with other new political actors can play animportant role in the construction of more democraticways of promoting local development in Mexico.

Sources: the Mexico-US Advocates Network URL; Pizarro 2001;

Bada 2001.

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Name

The Platformof FilipinoMigrantOrganisationsin Europe

Kalayaan

The ChineseStaff andWorkers’Association

Table 9.5: Migrants’ organisations

Description

The Platform of Filipino Migrant Organisations in Europewas established during a Europe-wide Conference inAthens in November 1997, marking 30 years of Filipinomigration experience in Europe and celebrating theCentennial of Philippine independence. Its 120 delegatesrepresenting 75 organisations, national and Europe-widenetworks from 14 countries in Europe, developed aMigrant Agenda which aims at equality of rights inEurope and for participative development in thePhilippines. The Migrant Agenda is addressed to boththe Philippine and European governments and envisagesmigrants themselves as key actors and participants in thedevelopment of Europe and the Philippines. Priorityconcerns of the Platform also include the sectors ofwomen, youth, and second generation seafarers and theundocumented migrants.

Kalayaan actively campaigns for basic workers’ rightsfor overseas domestic workers of all nationalities and foran end to their current irregular immigration status inthe UK and Europe. Established in 1987, Kalayaan is anindependent coalition of people and organisations thatincludes migrant and immigrant support organisations,trade unions, law centres, and concerned individuals. Itswork also addresses the practical needs of overseasdomestic workers by providing initial advice to domesticworkers about their immigration status, assisting overseasdomestic workers in finding emergency housing, andrunning English classes. It also provides free legal advicesessions so that workers can make informed decisions andobtain their unpaid wages, passports, and otherbelongings from former employers.

Founded in 1979, CSWA is the only organisation in NewYork that brings together Chinese immigrant workersof all trades. It began as a small mutual assistance groupand has grown into an organisation of over 1,000members, with centres in Manhattan and Brooklyn. Itaims at guaranteeing the rights of its members in theworkplace and in the communities where they live, tochallenge the sweatshop system, to counter racism andsexism, and to work for social and economic. Most of itsmembers are low-income Chinese workers-includinggarment, domestic, restaurant and construction workers,women and men, young and old, union and non-union.Together they have developed a model of organisingthat brings Chinese workers together to claim their voicein shaping the priorities, laws, policies, and values ofthe community in which they live, and beyond.

Website address

http://www.platformweb.org/

http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/kalayaan/home.htm

http://www.cswa.org

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The IranianRefugees’Alliance

The EthiopianCommunityDevelopmentCouncil

The AfricanServiceCommittee

The RefugeeResourceGroup

The AfricanServiceCommittee

The FilipinoYouth inEurope

TheCommissionfor FilipinoMigrantWorkers(CFMW)

ImmigrantWorkersResourceCenter

KoreanImmigrantWorkersAdvocates(KIWA)

Mission forFilipinoMigrantWorkers

New YorkAsianWomen’sCenter

A Ta Turquie

A community-based organisation to promote the rightsof Iranian refugees in the US.

Serves the community of immigrants and refugeesthrough a wide range of activities locally and regionallyin the Washington, DC, metropolitan area a well asnationally and in Ethiopia.

Provides health, legal, and social services to all Africansand Middle Eastern and French-speaking Caribbeanimmigrants and refugees in the US.

Protects and promotes rights of refugees, migrantworkers in Pakistan.

Provides resettlement assistance to new Africans arrivalsthroughout the New York metropolitan area.

Operating out of The Netherlands, pursues thedevelopment of a Europe-wide network with youth andother organisations in the Philippines and Europe.

Works in partnership with the Filipino migrantcommunity in Europe and aims to develop migrantempowerment and capacity building.

Located in Massachusetts, the centre is aimed at buildingthe capacity of all immigrant workers to defend andprotect their rights in the workplace, in their unions, andin society.

A non-profit workers centre organising low-wage Koreanimmigrant workers of Los Angeles’ Koreatown.

Established in Hong Kong, the centre assists migrantworkers who are in distress.

Acts as a vehicle for placing the concerns of Asianwomen and children on the agenda in New York City.

Seeks to strengthen links between the Turkishcommunity in France and the host society.

www.irainc.org

www.ecdcinternational.org

www.africanservices.org

www.rwcz.tripod.com

http://www.africanservices.org/

www.cfmw.org

http://www.communityworks.com/html/mgd/iwrc.html

www.kiwa.org

www.migrants.net

www.nyawc.org

www.ataturquie.asso.fr

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they are able to control the whole process up to itsfinal destination, whereas the other categories ofpersonnel, usually lower-level actors, enforcers, debtcollectors, etc., operate in the major destination cities,New York, Los Angeles, Paris, London, etc.

In recent years other forms of ‘trafficking’,particularly in women and minors , have developedthrough the use of the Internet. Bride traffickers, forexample, advertise through catalogues on theInternet operating mainly in the US (in particularNew York, Los Angeles, Miami) as well as in thecountries where women are recruited: the Philippines,the former Soviet Union, and south-east Asia.According to the International Organisation forMigration (1999), nearly all the mail-order brideservices, especially those in the former Soviet Union,are under the control of organised crime networks(see Table 9.6).

Anti-trafficking

In turn, there has been an increase of counter-networks for anti-trafficking programmes in theareas of trafficking prevention, protection, andassistance for victims, and prosecution of traffickers(see Table 9.7). Much of this effort is centred in non-governmental organisations. Insofar as the numbersof peoples and organisations, the geographic scopeand the institutional spread of these anti-traffickingefforts are all growing, they are becoming a

significant component of global networks, bothconstitutive of and enabled by global civil society.

The Forging of New Political Subjects

The mix of focused activism and local/globalnetworks represented by the organisationsdescribed in the preceding section creates

conditions for the emergence of at least partlytransnational identities. The possibility of identifyingwith larger communities of practice or membershipcan bring about the partial unmooring of identitiesreferred to in the first section. While this does notnecessarily neutralise attachments to a country ornational cause, it does shift this attachment toinclude trans-local communities of practice and/ormembership. This is a crucial building block for aglobal civil society that can incorporate the micro-practices and micro-objectives of people’s daily livesas well as their political passions. The possibility oftransnational identities emerging as a consequenceof this thickness of micro-politics is important forstrengthening global civil society; the risk ofnationalisms and fundamentalisms is, clearly, presentin these dynamics as well.

A growing number of scholars concerned withidentity and solidarity posit the rise of transnationalidentities (Torres 1998; R. Cohen 1996; Franck 1992)and trans-local loyalties (Appadurai 1996: 165). ThisG

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Apex Visa Services http://www.hervisa.com

Goodwife.com http://www.goodwife.com

Mail-orders bride.com http://www.tourrussia.com

Heart of Asia http://www.heart-of-asia.org

A pretty woman http://aprettywoman.com

Kiss.com http://www.kiss.com

Romancium.com http://www.romancium.com

Beautiful Russian Women Net http://www.beautiful-russian-women.net

Mail Order Bride Guide http://www.mailorderbrideguide.com

Mail Order Brides 4U http://www.mailorderbrides4u.com

Table 9.6: Mail-order bride services

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literature provides us with a broader conceptuallandscape within which we can place the morespecific types of organisations and practices thatconcern us here. Following Bosniak (2000: 482) wecan find at least four forms taken by trans-nationalised identity claims.

One is the growth of European-wide citizenshipsaid to be developing as part of the European Union(EU) integration process, and beyond the formalstatus of EU citizenship (Soysal 1994; Howe 1991; Isin2000; Delanty 2000). Turner (2000) has posited a

growing cultural awareness of a ‘European identity’.This is clearly a different condition from thatrepresented by the activist and diasporic networksdescribed in the second section, which include someEuropean-wide organisations but with a very specific,particularistic focus, notably immigration issues. Incontrast, European identity entails a diffuse senseof belonging on a semi-continental level.

A second focus is on the affective connections thatpeople establish and maintain with one another inthe context of a growing transnational civil society (J. G

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The GlobalAlliance AgainstTraffic in Women

Anti SlaveryInternational

The InitiativeAgainstTrafficking inPersons

Asian Women’sHuman RightsCouncil

Coalition toAbolish Slaveryand Trafficking(CAST)

FundacionESPERANZA

La Strada

Table 9.7: Anti-trafficking organisations

Aimed at ensuring that the human rights of migrantwomen are respected and protected by authorities andagencies.

Aimed at eliminating slavery in all its forms throughawareness raising, lobbying of governments andinternational bodies and public campaigning.

Established as a project of the Women’s Rights AdvocacyProgram (WRAP) to combat the global trade in persons.

An Asia-wide network of women’s human rightsprogrammes, centres, organisations, and individualswith coordinating offices in Bangalore, India andManila, Philippines.

Established to address the special needs of traffickedpersons, and related issues, within the context of anetwork of non-profit human service providers.

An NGO in Colombia working on the issue of traffickingin the Latin American region. Their work mainly focuseson prevention, reintegration, and documentation.

La Strada group is an international programme whichoperates in the Netherlands, Poland, Bulgaria, Ukraine,and the Czech Republic. La Strada focuses on preventionof traffic in women, support of victims of traffic inwomen, influencing legislation, and disseminatinginformation on the issue.

http://www.inet.co.th/org/gaatw

http://www.antislavery.org

http://www.hrlawgroup.org/site/programs/Traffic.htm

http://www.awhrc.org

http://www.trafficked-women.org

http://www.fundacionesperanza.org.co

http://www.ecn.cz/lastrada

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Cohen 1995; Lipschutz 1996; Lister 1997). Citizenshiphere resides in identities and commitments that ariseout of cross-border affiliations, especially thoseassociated with oppositional politicsthough it might include the corporateprofessional circuits that are increas-ingly forms of partly de-territorialisedglobal cultures (Sassen 2001). Theseidentities and commitments can be ofan elite and cosmopolitan nature orthey can be very focused and withspecific objectives, such as those ofmany of the licit organisations de-scribed in the preceding section.MADRE and its worldwide affiliates isa good example. Many aspects of theglobal environmental movement aswell as the human rights movementare actually rather focused andillustrate these emergent cross-borderidentities in that these activists tendto identify more strongly with theglobal movement than with theirnational state. There are elements ofthis also in many of the women’sorganisations we presented earlier.Table 9.8 lists some very diverse organisations thatcapture some of the features of an emergenttransnational sense of one’s community of membershipand to some extent an often key part of one’s senseof identity.

A third version is the emergence of transnationalsocial and political communities constituted throughtrans-border migration. These begin to function asbases for new forms of citizenship identity to theextent that members maintain identification andsolidarities with one another across state territorialdivides (Portes 1996; Basch, Schiller, and Szanton-Blanc 1994; Smith 1997; Soysal 1994). These are,then, identities that arise out of networks, activities,ideologies that span the home and the host societies.A key dynamic becoming evident among some ofthe organisations we studied is a shift away fromthe type of bi-national experience that most of themigration literature on the subject describes, towardsa more diffuse condition of globally constituteddiasporic networks. The orientation ceases to beconfined to one’s community of residence and one’scommunity of origin, and shifts towards multipleimmigrant communities of the same nationality orethnicity wherever they might be located. The

Internet has played a crucial role in making thispossible. It is, perhaps, this type of network that bestcaptures the notion of diasporic networks as enabling

participation in and contribution toglobal civil society (see Table 9.9 forexamples). Though of a very differentsort from those described here,diasporic networks can enable theformation of international organisedterrorism and certain types ofethnic-based cross-border traffickingnetworks (Sassen 2000).

A fourth version is a sort of globalsense of solidarity and identification,partly out of humanitarian con-victions (Pogge 1992). Notions ofthe ultimate unity of human experi-ence are part of a long tradition.Today there are also more practicalconsiderations at work, as in globalecological interdependence, eco-nomic globalisation, global mediaand commercial culture, all of whichcreate structural interdependenciesand senses of global responsibility(Falk 1993; Hunter 1992; Held 1995;

Sassen 1996). Table 9.8 lists some possible examplesof this kind of organisation.

Towards DenationalisedCitizenship Practices andIdentities

How do we interpret these types ofdevelopments in ways that help us understandtheir implications for global civil society? One

way is to explore what it tells us about modernnation-based citizenship in so far as the existence ofa global civil society requires the possibility of an atleast partial reorientation towards objectives thatare not exclusively geared towards one’s nation-state.Yet global civil society would be severely weakenedif it were to become completely disconnected fromthe substantive notion of citizenship as a complexcondition predicated on formal rights and obligationsconfigured in ways that negotiate individual andshared interests and needs.

Most of the scholarship on citizenship has claimeda necessary and exclusive connection to the nationalstate, thereby neutralising the meaning and significanceof the types of citizenship practices and emergentG

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A key dynamic

becoming evident

among some of the

organisations we

studied is a shift away

from the type of

bi-national experience

that most of the

migration literature on

the subject describes,

towards a more diffuse

condition of globally

constituted diasporic

networks

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identities present in the variety of organisationsdescribed in the preceding sections. The transformationsafoot today raise questions about this proposition of anecessary connection of citizenship to the nationalstate in so far as they significantly alter those conditionswhich in the past fed that connection (for a gooddescription of these conditions see Turner 2000). If thisis indeed the case, then we need to ask whether nationalconceptions of citizenship exhaust the possible rangeof experiences and aspirations that today denotecitizenship. It is becoming evident that, far from beingunitary, the institution of citizenship has multiple

dimensions, only some of which might be inextricablylinked to the national state (Isin and Turner 2002).

The context of this possible transformation isdefined by the two major, partly interconnectedconditions discussed in the preceding sections. Oneis the change in the position and institutional featuresof national states since the 1980s resulting fromvarious forms of globalisation, ranging fromeconomic privatisation and deregulation to theincreased prominence of the international humanrights regime. Among the consequences of thesedevelopments is the ascendance of sub-national and G

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Name

The InternationalAssociation forCross-CulturalPsychology(IACCP)

InternationalTobacco ControlNetwork

The InternationalAssociation ofRefugee LawJudges

InternationalCriminal DefenceLawyersAssociation

World BusinessCouncil forSustainableDevelopment(WBCSD)

Water PartnersInternational

50 Years isEnough

MADRE

Table 9.8: Organisations promoting transnational identity based on activities

Description

It has a membership of over 500 persons in morethan 65 countries with the aim of facilitatingcommunication among persons interested in cross-cultural psychology.

Its aim is to serve all those active in tobacco control,cancer control and public health.

It fosters recognition that protection frompersecution is an individual right established underinternational law, and that the determination ofrefugee status and its cessation should be subject tothe rule of law.

Founded with the core goal of ensuring a full, fairand well organised defence in the proceedings of thead hoc tribunals and the future InternationalCriminal Court.

A coalition of 125 international companies united bya shared commitment to the environment and to theprinciples of economic growth and sustainabledevelopment.

Addresses water supply and sanitation needs indeveloping countries. Promotes innovative and cost-effective community water projects.

See Table 9.1 for details

An international women’s human rights organisation(see Table 9.3 for details).

Website adress

http://www.fit.edu/ft-orgs/iaccp/

http://www.globalink.org

http://www.iarlj.nl/

http://www.hri.ca/partners/aiad-icdaa/

www.wbcsd.ch

www.water.org

www.50years.org

www.madre.org

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transnational spaces for politics. The second is theemergence of multiple actors, groups, andcommunities partly strengthened by thesetransformations in the state and increasinglyunwilling automatically to identify with a nation asrepresented by the state. Again, it is important toemphasise that the growth of the Internet and linkedtechnologies has facilitated and often enabled theformation of cross-border networks amongindividuals and groups with shared interests thatmay be highly specialised, as in professional networks,or involve particularised political projects, as inhuman rights and environmental struggles or thediasporic networks and immigrant organisationsdescribed above. This has engendered or strengthenedalternative notions of community of membership.These new experiences and orientations of citizenshipmay not necessarily be new; in some cases they maywell be the result of long gestations or features thatwere there since the beginning of the formation ofcitizenship as a national institution, but are only nowevident because strengthened and rendered legible bycurrent developments.

One of the implications of these developments isthe possibility of post-national forms of citizenship(Soysal 1994; Feldblum 1998; see multiple chaptersin Isin 2000). The emphasis in that formulation is onthe emergence of locations for citizenship outside the

confines of the national state. The European passportis, perhaps, the most formalised of these. But theemergence of a re-invigorated cosmopolitanism(Turner 2000; Nussbaum 1994) and of a proliferationof trans-nationalisms (Smith 1997; Basch, Schiller,and Szanton-Blanc 1994) have been key sources fornotions of post-national citizenship. As Bosniak(2000) has put it, there is a reasonable case to bemade that the experiences and practices associatedwith citizenship do, to variable degrees, have locationsthat exceed the boundaries of the territorial nation-state. Whether it is the organisation of formal status,the protection of rights, citizenship practices, or theexperience of collective identities and solidarities,the nation state is not the exclusive site for theirenactment. It remains by far the most important site,but the transformations in its exclusivity signal apossibly important new dynamic.

There is a second dynamic becoming evident that,while sharing aspects with post-national citizenship,is usefully distinguished from it in that it concernsspecific transformations inside the national statewhich directly and indirectly alter specific aspectsof the institution of citizenship (Sassen 2003). Thesetransformations are not predicated necessarily on arelocating of citizenship components outside thenational state, as is key to conceptions of post-national citizenship. Two instances are changes inG

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Name

The Council ofHellenes Abroad

The HungarianHuman RightsFoundation(HHRF)

BADIL

Table 9.9: Diaspora organisations

Description

An historic international movement that unitesHellenes worldwide under one, non-profit, non-governmental organisation with its permanentheadquarters in Thessaloniki, Greece

Formed to alert the public opinion and politicalleadership of the United States and other Westerncountries to the gross human rights violationsagainst national minorities in Romania. TheFoundation is now working on behalf of the ethnicHungarians who live as minorities in Croatia, Serbia,Slovenia, Slovakia and Ukraine, as well as in Romaniaitself.

A Palestinian NGO that works to find solutions to theresidency problems of the Palestinian diaspora.

Website adress

http://www.saeamerica.org/

http://www.hhrf.org

www.badil.org

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the law of nationality entailing a shift from exclusiveallegiance to one nation-state to dual nationality,and enabling legislation allowing national courts touse international instruments. These are transforma-tions inside the national state. More encompassingchanges, captured in notions of privatisation andshrinking welfare states, signal a shift in therelationship of citizens to the state. Similarly, thewidespread constitutionalising of the right to takeone’s government to court for failure to fulfil itsobligations has also changed the relationship ofcitizens to their national states in the sense that theycreate a legally sanctioned possibilityof separation of interests.

These and other developments allpoint to impacts on citizenship thattake place inside formal institutionsof the national state. It is useful todistinguish this second dynamic oftransformation inside the nationalstate from post-national dynamicsbecause most of the scholarship oncitizenship has failed to make thisdistinction. The focus has almostexclusively been on post-nationalcitizenship, either by opposing oraccepting it or by interpreting thesetrends as post-national. In my ownwork (Sassen 1996; 2003) I haveconceptualised this second dynamicas a de-nationalising of particularaspects of citizenship to be distinguished from post-national developments.

The materials presented in this chapter on globalcities and activist/diasporic networks fall into thissecond type of conception of changes in theinstitution of citizenship. These are mostly not post-national in their orientation: they are either sub-national, or they are about third issues where sharednationality, as in immigrant organisations, is thebonding element but the objective may have little todo with national issues per se. Further, they do notscale at the national level, in so far as they constitutemicro-politics or micro-initiatives enacted in sub-national spaces that are part of cross-border networksconnecting multiple such sub-national spaces.

Though often talked about as a single conceptand experienced as a unitary institution, citizenshipactually describes a number of discrete but relatedaspects in the relation between the individual and thepolity. Current developments are bringing to light

and accentuating the distinctiveness of these variousaspects, from formal rights to psychologicaldimensions. These developments also bring to thefore the tension between citizenship as a formal legalstatus and as a normative project or an aspiration.Again, current conditions have led to a growingemphasis on claims and aspirations that go beyondthe formal legal definition of rights and obligations.The last few years have witnessed a reneweddetermination by multiple organisations andindividuals to play a role in this changed world. Manyof the groups mentioned here do not necessarily

have a particularly strong sense ofgratitude to either their country oforigin or that of immigration. Othershave a generalised critical stancetowards the major trends evident inthe world, including their countriesof origin, which also reorients theirsense of attachment. As Mary Kaldor(2001) has repeatedly found in herresearch on wars, people, and soldiersin particular, are no longer preparedor expected to die for their country.But as Srebrenica has shown, theyare not quite ready to die for globalideals either. It suggests that thebuilding blocks for global civilsociety are to a considerable extentmicro-sites in people’s daily lives.

For the development of notionsof citizenship that can strengthen global civil societydirectly, it is important to question the assumptionthat people’s sense of citizenship in liberaldemocratic states is fundamentally and exclusivelycharacterised by nation-based frames. Non-formalidentities and practices need to be taken intoaccount along with formal developments such asEuropean Union citizenship and the growth of theinternational human rights regime. In so far as legaland formal developments have not gone very far, wecannot disregard experiences of identity and ofcitizens’ practices which partly re-map thegeography of citizenship. This deconstruction ofcitizenship feeds notions of citizenship not based onthe nation-state, whether understood in narrowpolitical terms or broader sociological andpsychological terms. The growing prominence ofthe international human rights regime has played animportant theoretical and political role instrengthening these conceptions even as it has G

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In so far as legal and

formal developments

have not gone very

far, we cannot

disregard experiences

of identity and of

citizens’ practices

which partly re-map

the geography of

citizenship

GCS2002 pages [09] 2/04 19/6/02 3:40 pm Page 235

underlined the differences between citizenshiprights and human rights.

Recently there have been several efforts toorganise the various understandings of citizenshipone can find in the scholarly literature: citizenshipas legal status, as possession of rights, as politicalactivity, as a form of collective identity andsentiment (Kymlicka and Norman 1994; Carens1989; Kratochwil 1994; Conover 1995; Bosniak2000). Further, some scholars (Turner 1993; C. Taylor1994; see also generally VanSteenbergen 1994) have positedthat cultural citizenship is a neces-sary part of any adequate concep-tion of citizenship, while othershave insisted on the importance ofeconomic citizenship (FernandezKelly 1993) and yet others on thepsychological dimension and theties of identification and solidaritywe maintain with other groups inthe world (Conover 1995; Carens1989; Pogge 1992). (See in thisregard also Record 23 and 27 in thisvolume.

This pluralised meaning ofcitizenship, partly produced by theformal expansions of the legalstatus of citizenship, is today contributing to theexpansion of the boundaries of that legal statuseven further. One of the ironies is that, in so far asthe enjoyment of rights is crucial to what weunderstand citizenship to be, it is precisely theformalised expansion of citizen rights which hasweakened the ‘national grip’ on citizenship. Notablehere is also the emergence of the human rightsregime partly enabled by national states. Again, itseems to me that this transformation in nation-based citizenship is not only due to the emergenceof non-national sites for legitimate claim-making,i.e. the human rights regime, as is posited in thepost-national conception. I would add two otherelements already, alluded to earlier, which concernchanges internal to the national state.

First, and more importantly in my reading, is thestrengthening, including the constitutionalising, ofcivil rights which allow citizens to make claimsagainst their states and allow them to invoke ameasure of autonomy in the formal political arenathat can be read as a lengthening distance betweenthe formal apparatus of the state and the institution

of citizenship. Instances that capture this are lawsuitsfiled by citizens against particular state agencies,notably the police and the Immigration andNaturalization Service in the case of the US. Theimplications, both political and theoretical, of thisdimension are complex and in the making: we cannottell what will be the practices and rhetorics thatmight be invented.

Second, there is the granting, by national states,of a whole range of ‘rights’ to foreign actors, largely

and especially economic actors—foreign firms, foreign investors,international markets, foreignbusiness people (see Sassen 1996:Ch. 2). Admittedly, this is not acommon way of framing the issue. Itcomes out of my particular perspect-ive about the impact of globalisationand denationalisation on thenational state, including the impacton the relation between the stateand its own citizens, and betweenthe state and foreign actors. I seethis as a significant, though notwidely recognised development inthe history of claim-making. For methe question as to how citizensshould handle these new concen-

trations of power and ‘legitimacy’ that attach toglobal firms and markets is a key to the future ofdemocracy. My efforts to detect the extent to whichthe global is embedded and filtered through thenational (e.g. the concept of the global city) is oneway of understanding whether this might enablecitizens, still largely confined to national institutions,to demand accountability of global economic actorsthrough national institutional channels rather thanhaving to wait for a ‘global’ state. Herein would alsolie a key element for participation in, and the furtherconstituting of global civil society through sub-national initiatives that are part of cross-borderdynamics or issue-oriented global networks.

These new conditions may well signal thepossibility of new forms of citizenship practices andidentities that can allow large numbers of localisedpeople and organisations to become part of globalcivil society. New understandings of what citizenshipis about and can aspire to are being constitutedthrough these practices. Cities and cross-bordernetworks are two key sites for this type ofengagement. After the long historical phase that sawG

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Through new forms of

citizenship practise

new understandings

of what citizenship is

about and can aspire

to are being

constituted. Cities and

cross-border networks

are two key sites for

this type of

engagement

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the ascendancy of the national state and the scalingof key economic dynamics at the national level, wenow see the ascendancy of sub- and transnationalspaces. The city is once again today a scale forstrategic economic and political dynamics. Many ofthe disadvantaged concentrated in cities can becomepart of this global civil society even as they remainconfined to their localities and to some extentabsorbed by problems and struggles that are notcosmopolitan.

The author thanks the Centre for the Study of GlobalGovernance for its support and Isabel Crowhurst forher excellent research assistance.

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