Suchergebnisse

Citizens increasingly engage with political issues in new ways
by addressing politicians via social media, campaigning at international
forums, or boycotting corporate entities. These forms of engagement
move beyond more regulated electoral politics and are rightly celebrated
for the ways they increase representation and provide new channels of
accountability. Yet, despite these virtues, political engagement beyond
voting inevitably tends to entrench and amplify inequality in citizen
influence on political decision-making. The tendency toward inequality
undermines relational equality between citizens and muddies the channels
of political accountability and responsibility. This article unpacks
the ostensible tension and argues that it reveals to us another strength in
views which hold the state to be citizens' collective project and provides
argumentative resources to motivate democracies to give due attention
to ensuring that democratic participatory channels remain fit for purpose
in an ever-changing society.

"This book presents a globally-oriented, state-based conception of citizenship. It responds to both the increasing polarization between nationalists and those who view themselves as citizens of the world, and the expanding responsibility gap between states that perpetuate global injustices and the citizens in whose name they act. Hobden argues that citizens of liberal western democracies can be held collectively morally responsible for the unjust acts of their state in the international realm. While citizenship is state-based, citizens have duties of global justice that are grounded in virtue of their citizenship of a particular state, and therefore the collective can be blamed, punished (within limits), expected to apologize, and held liable for remedial duties. The book explores how this conception of citizenship approaches the conditions of contemporary societies: citizens of vastly differing wealth and education; states that often act beyond the realm of their mandate; semi-democratic regimes; and the rise of non-citizen residents. It advocates for an active citizenry, with obligations to make use of a wide-range of democratic channels in the pursuit of justice, including social media and consumer activism"--

Abstract
Over the COVID-19 period, much attention has been paid to the governance relationship between citizens and the state. In this article, however, we focus on a feature that is less evident in the day-to-day living of the social contract: the relationship between citizens. Because this horizontal cohesion is critical to the social contract, we suggest that it should not be neglected, even amid a deepening crisis of state–citizen relations. Using the case of South Africa's vaccine roll-out as an illustration, we argue that certain kinds of state failures – failures in making complex fairness decisions, in treating citizens as equals when enacting these decisions, and in providing public justification for these decisions – risk dual damage to both citizen–state and citizen–citizen relations and so undermine an already fragile social contract.

18 November 2019CH: Thank you for agreeing to do this. The prompt for the interview was to talk about your recently published book, Territorial Sovereignty, but I thought before we got into that you could say something about your earlier work and how that led you to be interested in this particular project that you deal with in the book.