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Modern social and political thought has approached the questions of politics, law, and citizenship from the vantage point of a fundamental divide between the occidental and oriental, or archaic and modern, institutions. This article creates a concept, the gift of law, by staging two gift-giving practices as two historical moments: Greek euergetism and Ottoman waqf. While it is indebted to Mauss, our articulation of the gift of law also owes to the critical interventions of Jacques Derrida and Pierre Bourdieu, who emphasized non-voluntaristic and non-calculative aspects of the gift. We argue that both euergetism and the waqf enabled and substantiated legal subjectivities that allocated rights and obligations. Those gift-giving practices establish relationships between various groups and legal authorities that were crucial in the formation of cities as spaces of government, for both citizens and non-citizens alike. With the concept 'gift of law', categories 'oriental' and 'occidental' become problematic.

Politics, ethics, aesthetics -- Theorizing acts of citizenship / Engin F. Isin -- Can an act of citizenship be creative? / Melanie White -- What Levinas can and cannot teach us about mediating acts of citizenship / Bettina Bergo -- Acts I : Heroic intrusions and the body of law -- Act 1 : Abraham's sacrifice / Charles Wells -- Act 2 : Antigone's offering / Charles Wells -- Act 3 : Socrates's death / Bora Ali Isyar -- Act 4 : Euthanasia / Bora Ali Isyar -- Act 5 : Pat Tillman: soldier-citizen-hero? / Darryl Burgwin -- Citizens, strangers, aliens, outcasts -- Citizenship without acts? With Tocqueville in America / Brian C.J. Singer -- Acts of piety : the political and the religious or a tale of two cities / Bryan S. Turner -- Arendt's citizenship and citizen participation in disappearing Dublin / Kieran Bonner -- No one is illegal between city and nation / Peter Nyers -- Acts of demonstration : mapping the territory of (non- ) citizenship / William Walters -- Acts II : Exclusions without names -- Act 6 : Promising to become European / Erkan Ercel -- Act 7 : Checkpoint gazes / Irus Braverman -- Act 8 : The Romani / Ebru Üstündag -- Act 9 : Return to Guatemala / Karine Côté-Boucher -- Act 10 : Unintentional acts of citizenship (the joke) / Ian Morrison -- Sites and scales of answerability -- Citizenship, art and the voices of the city: Wodiczko's the homeless projection / Fred Evans -- Acts of Chinese citizenship : the tank man and democracy-to-come / Yon Hsu -- Answerability with cosmopolitan intent : an ethics based politics for acts of urban citizenship / Greg M. Nielsen -- Acts III : Rituals and performance -- Act 11 : Acts of commemoration / Ian Morrison -- Act 12 : Non-citizens' politics / John Saunders -- Act 13 : flash mobs / John Saunders -- Act 14 : Spike Lee's 25th hour / Erkan Ercel.

This book introduces the concept of 'act of citizenship' and in doing so, re-orients the study of what it means to be a citizen. Isin and Nielsen show that an 'act of citizenship' is the event through which subjects constitute themselves as citizens. They claim that such an act involves both responsibility and answerability, but is ultimately irreducible to either. This study of citizenship is truly interdisciplinary, drawing not only on new developments in politics, sociology, geography and anthropology, but also on psychoanalysis, philosophy and history. Ranging from Antigone and Socrates in the ancient world to checkpoints, euthanasia and flash mobs in the modern one, the 'acts' and chapters here build up a dynamic and wide-ranging picture. Acts of Citizenship provides important new insights for all those concerned with the relationship between individuals, groups and polities. Examines theories of how citizenship is mediated between lived experiences and formal entitlements in order to map out, confine, extend, name, and enact the boundaries of belonging to a polity. This book assembles deep traditions in social and political thought to provide a examination of acts of citizenship in this useful way.

"Data has become a social and political issue because of its capacity to reconfigure relationships between states, subjects, and citizens. This book explores how data has acquired such an important capacity and examines how critical interventions in its uses in both theory and practice are possible"--

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgements -- Notes on the Contributors -- Introduction: What Will Become of Europe? -- 1. Mind the 'Cap' -- 2. Derrida's Europe: 'Greek, Christian and Beyond' -- 3. A Roman Europe of Hope: Reading Derrida with Brague -- 4. Other Shores: Insularity, Materiality and the Making (and Unmaking) of 'Europe' -- 5. Europe's Constitution for the Unborn -- 6. The Borders of Contemporary Europe: Territory, Justice and Rights -- 7. We, the Non-Europeans: Derrida with Said -- 8. Of Europe: Zionism and the Jewish Other -- 9. The European Ideal in the Face of the Muslim Other -- 10. Christianity, Secularism and the Crisis of Europe -- Index