ong mutations

Copyright © 2006 Theory, Culture & Society (http://tcs.sagepub.com) (SAGE Publications, London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi) Vol. 23(2–3): 499–531. DOI: 10.1177/0263276406064831

Mutations in CitizenshipAihwa Ong

Abstract Mutations in citizenship are crystallized in an ever-shifting landscape shapedby the flows of markets, technologies, and populations. We are moving beyond thecitizenship-versus-statelessness model. First, the elements of citizenship (rights, entitle-ments, etc.) are becoming disarticulated from each other, and becoming re-articulatedwith universalizing criteria of neoliberalism and human rights. Such ‘global assemblages’define zones of political entitlements and claims. Second, the space of the ‘assemblage’,rather than the national terrain, becomes the site for political mobilizations by diversegroups in motion. Three contrasting configurations are presented. In the EU zone, un-regulated markets and migrant flows challenge liberal citizenship. In Asian zones,foreigners who display self-enterprising savoire faire gain rights and benefits of citizen-ship. In camps of the disenfranchised or displaced, sheer survival becomes the groundfor political claims. Thus, particular constellations shape specific problems and resol-utions to questions of contemporary living, further disarticulating and deterritorializingaspects of citizenship.

Keywords contemporary living, global assemblages, mutation in citizenship, politicalspaces

We can trace mutations in citizenship to global flows and their configuration of newspaces of entangled possibilities. An ever-shifting landscape shaped by the flows ofmarkets, technologies, and populations challenges the notion of citizenship tied to

the terrain and imagination of a nation-state (Anderson 1991[1983]). Mobile markets, tech-nologies, and populations interact to shape social spaces in which mutations in citizenship arecrystallized. The different elements of citizenship (rights, entitlements, etc.), once assumedto go together, are becoming disarticulated from one another, and re-articulated with univer-salizing forces and standards. So while in theory political rights depend on membership in anation-state, in practice, new entitlements are being realized through situated mobilizationsand claims in milieus of globalized contingency.

New connections among citizenship elements and mobile forms suggest that we have movedbeyond the idea of citizenship as a protected status in a nation-state, and as a condition opposedto the condition of statelessness (Arendt 1998[1958]). Binary oppositions between citizenshipand statelessness, and between national territoriality and its absence, are not useful for thinkingabout emergent spaces and novel combinations of globalizing and situated variables. Forinstance, market-driven state practices fragment the national terrain into zones of hyper-growth. These spaces are plugged into transnational networks of markets, technology, andexpertise.

Meanwhile, strict discriminations between the citizens and foreigners are dropped in favorof the pursuit of human capital. Such modes of governing engender a checkerboard pattern-ing of the national terrain, thus producing an effect of graduated or variegated sovereignty(Ong, 2000). Some sites and zones are invested with more political resources than others.Meanwhile, rights and entitlements once associated with all citizens are becoming linked to

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neoliberal criteria, so that entreprenuerial expatriates come to share in the rights and benefitsonce exclusively claimed by citizens. The difference between having and not having citizen-ship is becoming blurred as the territorialization of entitlements is increasingly challenged bydeterritorialized claims beyond the state.

Universalizing market interests, technologies, and NGOs become articulated with citizen-ship orders, creating new sites for the making of new claims for resources from state as wellas non-state institutions.

We used to think of different dimensions of citizenship – rights, entitlements, a state, terri-toriality, etc. – as more or less tied together. Increasingly, some of these components arebecoming disarticulated from each other, and articulated with diverse universalizing normsdefined by markets, neoliberal values, or human rights. At the same time, diverse mobile popu-lations (expatriates, refugees, migrant workers) can claim rights and benefits associated withcitizenship, even as many citizens come to have limited or contingent protections within theirown countries. Thus, the (re)combinations of globalizing forces and situated elements producedistinctive environments in which citizens, foreigners, and asylum-seekers make political claimsthrough pre-existing political membership as well as on the grounds of universalizing criteria.

Given this scenario of shifting ‘global assemblages’ (Ong and Collier, 2005), the sites ofcitizenship mutations are not defined by conventional geography. The space of the assemblage,rather than the territory of the nation-state, is the site for new political mobilizations andclaims. In sites of emergence, a spectrum of mobile and excluded populations articulates rightsand claims in universalizing terms of neoliberal criteria or human rights. Specific problemati-zations and resolutions to diverse regimes of living cannot be predetermined in advance. Forinstance, in the EU zone, unregulated markets and migrant flows threaten protections associ-ated with liberal traditions. In emerging Asian sites, the embrace of self-enterprising valueshas made citizenship rights and benefits contingent upon individual market performance. Incamps of the disenfranchised or displaced, bare life becomes the ground for political claims,if not for citizenship, then for the right to survive. In short, instead of all citizens enjoying aunified bundle of citizenship rights, we have a shifting political landscape in which hetero-geneous populations claim diverse rights and benefits associated with citizenship, as well asuniversalizing criteria of neoliberal norms or human rights.

Market Bloc and Political Liberalism

In the West, the European Union has been one of the most ambitious attempts to form amarket zone by assembling various polities and cultures. With the rapid expansion of the bloc,the articulation of market interests with political rights has crystallized long-standing ambiv-alence over the erosion of cultural traditions and liberal norms associated with postwarEuropean citizenship. In the region, global market forces and neoliberal criteria have come toarticulate entrenched political norms and entitlements. For instance, opening markets tomigrant labor – guest workers and illegal aliens – has ignited fierce debates about the integra-tion of diverse foreign communities. On the one hand, there is talk about the need to balancediverse immigrant populations of non-European origins with an imaginary of European civiliz-ation. On the other, pro-human rights movements talk about ‘disaggregating’ citizenship intodifferent bundles of rights and benefits, so that European states can differently incorporatemigrants and non-citizens. Such bundles of limited benefits and civil rights thus constitute aform of partial citizenship, or ‘postnational’ political membership for migrant workers (Soysal,1994). This political resolution, it is argued, can accommodate cultural diversity withoutundermining European liberal democracy and the universals of individual civil rights. Butambivalence remains, as a strong groundswell against the possible inclusion of Muslim Turkeyin the bloc has fueled resistance to EU expansion.

Another dimension of the articulation between citizenship and deregulated markets iswidely viewed as a threat to what Jürgen Habermas has called the ‘democratic achievementsof European societies’ – inclusive systems of social security, social norms regarding class andgender, investment in public social services, rejection of the death penalty, and so on. To


Problematizing Global Knowledge – Citizenship/The Political/Global Sovereignty 501

counter the market-generated ‘democratic deficit’ in public life, Habermas calls for thecreation of a Europe-wide public sphere and constitution that can give symbolic weight to theshared political culture underpinned by the cluster of European welfare features (Habermas,2001). The spring 2005 French and Dutch votes against the ratification of the existingEuropean constitution delivered powerful statements about the primacy of national interestsover the unity to be wrought through neoliberal policies. The rejection of the constitution bymajor members reflects popular sentiments against the widespread adoption of market-basedcriteria, as well as a positive affirmation of national regimes that preserve elements of socialcitizenship and protection for their people. There is now profound doubt about the feasibil-ity of a Europe-wide solidarity built primarily on principles of market efficiency and compet-itiveness.

Zones of Entitlement

In contrast to the Euro zone, emergent sites of growth in Asia currently display less ambiv-alence over the adoption of neoliberal values in policies shaping citizenship. These sites recog-nize that articulation with transnational networks and global professionals is crucial for theiremergence as centers of global capitalism. Transnational itineraries and practices enhance thecapacity of professionals and investors to negotiate national spaces, while the desire for talentedactors has induced changes in immigration laws. Complex affiliations by elite mobile actorsallow for temporary, multiple, and partial ascription, thus creating conditions for expatriatepopulations to claim citizenship-like entitlements.

The concept of ‘flexible citizenship’ describes maneuvers of mobile subjects who respondfluidly and opportunistically to dynamic borderless market conditions. Global markets inducesuch activities, so that ‘flexibility, migration, and relocations, instead of being coerced orresisted, have become practices to strive for rather than stability’ (Ong, 1999: 19). Further-more, nation-states seeking wealth-bearing and talented foreigners adjust immigration laws tofavor elite migrant subjects. Thus a new synergy between global capitalism and commercial-ized citizenship creates milieus where market-based norms articulate the norms of citizenship.

This premium on flexible, self-enterprising subjects originated in advanced democraciesthat had steadily adopted market-driven rationality in politics. Such neoliberal ideas stem fromFrederic von Hayek’s theory of the homo economicus as an instrumentalist figure forged in theeffervescent conditions of market competition. The ideas of individual economic agency as themost efficient form for distributing public resources were embraced under the ‘neo-conserva-tive’ policies of Thatcherism and Reaganomics.

This shift toward a neoliberal technology of governing holds that the security of citizens,their well-being and quality of life, are increasingly dependent on their own capacities as freeindividuals to confront globalized insecurities by making calculations and investments in theirlives.

For instance, in Tony Blair’s New Britannica, citizens are generally governed ‘throughfreedom’, or an inducement for formally free subjects to make calculative choices on theirown behalf. Government is no longer interested in taking care of every citizen, but wantshim/her to act as a free subject who self-actualizes and relies on autonomous action toconfront globalized insecurities. There is thus a fundamental shift in the ethics of subjectformation, or the ethics of citizenship, as governing becomes concerned less with the socialmanagement of the population (biopolitics) than with individual self-governing (ethico-politics) (Rose, 1999). Such ethics are framed as an animation of various capacities of individ-ual freedom, expressed both in the citizen’s freedom from state protection and guidance, aswell as freedom to make choices as a self-maximizing individual. In the USA, administrativepractices that govern through the aspirations of subjects especially target the urban poor, immi-grants, and refugees who are viewed as less capable of self-improvement. But as neoliberalvalues of flexibility, mobility, and entrepreneurialism become ideal qualities of citizenship, theyalso undermine the democratic achievements of American liberalism based on ideals of equalrights (Ong, 2003). Tensions between neoliberal values of citizens as economic agents, and



liberal ideals of citizens as defenders of political freedom continue to roil American politicallife.

Neoliberal ideas and practices migrate and are taken up in new zones of hyper-growth.In democratic, socialist, and authoritarian Asian settings, citizens are urged to be self-enterprising, not only to cope with uncertainties and risks, but also to raise the overall ‘humanquality’ of their societies. Thus, in East and South Asian environments, neoliberal ethics ofself-responsible citizenship are linked to social obligations to build the nation. In India andMalaysia, discourses about ‘knowledge workers’ and ‘knowledge society’ urge citizens to self-improve in order to develop high-tech industries. In Singapore, the accumulation of intellec-tual capital as an obligation of citizenship is most extreme. Ordinary citizens are expected todevelop new mindsets and build digital capabilities, while professionals are urged to achievenorms of ‘techno-preneurial citizenship’ or lose out to more skilled and entrepreneurial foreign-ers and be reduced to a second-class citizenry.

In short, neoliberal values of self-management and self-enterprise have different impli-cations for citizenship, depending on interactions with particular political environments. Whilethe tendency in Britain and the USA is to focus on the self-governing and technologically savvycitizen as a participant in civil society, in Asian growth zones, the discourse of the self-improv-ing and entrepreneurial citizen is linked to ‘civic society’, or the building of national solidarity.The common feature is that across these diverse milieus, the stakes of citizenship are raisedfor the majority. Especially in hyper-capitalist zones, those who cannot scale the skills ladderor measure up to the norms of self-governing are increasingly marginalized as deviant orsubjects who threaten the security of the globalized milieu. Thus, the articulation of neoliberalcriteria and situated citizenship regimes undercuts the protection of citizenship entitlementsand blurs political distinctions between citizens and talented foreigners.

Arenas of Political Claims

But the mix of market-opportunism and citizenship has also engendered conditions for greaterpolitical activism. In non-democratic countries embracing market-driven policies, new arenasare opening up for ordinary people to claim justice, accountability, and democratic freedoms.The confluence of market forces and digital technologies have pried open cracks in the inter-stices of highly controlled societies, thus creating conditions for exciting outbursts of populardemands for democracy by ordinary people.

In the StreetsIn Southeast Asia, the combined forces of the Asian financial crisis and political instability inthe 1990s created an opportunity for the flowering of ‘pro-reformasi’ movements andnongovernmental organizations in shaping a space of civil society.

In Indonesia, a diversity of humanitarian, non-violent, and women’s groups came togetherto protest state brutality and demand an end to corruption, nepotism, and autocratic rule. Inparticular, the army-instigated rapes of hundreds of ethnic Chinese women in Indonesia, andthe prison beatings of the deputy prime minister in Malaysia, focused public attention on stateviolence against the human body. In street protests, the cries for reforms are couched less inthe language of human rights than articulated in the ethics of culture and religion. Humanrights discourses have not been directly useful in negotiations with the state because the humanrights regime is viewed as originating in the West, and biased towards Asian countries. Women’sgroups and religious NGOs frame problems of state violence as violations of humanity, asunderstood in local religious terms of compassion, reciprocity, and forgiveness. In Malaysia,the NGO Sisters-in-Islam has gained international fame for their capacity to articulatewomen’s rights in terms of Muslim precepts. Various NGOs and social movements in South-east Asia not only enact in the streets and media the rights of free citizens to protest stateaction, but they also challenge entrenched habits of state authoritarianism through thediscourse of situated ethics.

In Latin America and India, social movements in the streets have developed at the



confluence of urban development and migrant communities. Street demonstrations by thedisenfranchised – poor migrants, shantytown dwellers, refugees – articulate an array of civil,political, and social rights. The streets form an arena for the political mobilization of the poorto claim public resources such as urban housing, water, and electricity as a kind of substantivecitizenship (Holston, 1993). There is the perception that citizenship encoded in law is noguarantee of protection for the marginalized. In many cases, market intrusions and displace-ment have created arenas for the activation of citizenship in demanding state delivery ofresources and justice. Democratic values are becoming performed in public spaces to challengeauthoritarian rule, corruption, and the lack of access to rights and benefits for excluded popu-lations.

In Cyber SpaceMarkets and electronic technology have also opened up other venues of political performanceand claims. For a socialist market-economy society like China, the internet is emerging as aspace of citizenship formation, but also as a space of government surveillance. Online commen-taries, criticisms, and mockery of state policies have flourished in the relatively democraticand elusive cyberspace. A cyberpublic made up of millions of online Chinese uses the internetfor accessing foreign news, spreading stories of injustice, and promoting alterative culturalforms. A college student called ‘the Stainless Steel Mouse’ has written articles spoofing thepomposity of the Chinese Communist Party. Other cyber rebels include ‘Reporters withoutBorders’ who seek to expose hidden abuses of peasants by local authorities and the new rich,protest against injustices and corruption, and demand accountability from the government. Inresponse, state anti-cyber interventions have closed down certain dissident websites, blockedaccess to some foreign news websites, and tracked down and punished dissidents wherepossible. But the surveillance of the cyberpublic space is very chancy, and ‘netizens’ has becomea term to index this new style of democracy in action.

The cyber space is a new site for mapping out a war of positions, and for playing a cat-and-mouse game over the freedom of information essential to democratic citizenship. TheChinese nexus between market reforms, web technology, and dissidents has enabled criticismsmore focused on the lack of freedom of political expression under authoritarian rule than onattacking neoliberal values. In contrast to the assemblage of factors in Europe that induceordinary citizens to resist unregulated market forces, in China, the confluence of markets,technology and activism is a space that enables people to perform the kind of democraticcitizenship that is denied in society at large.

The cyber space, however, can also be the site for the articulation of overweening ethnicpower that exceeds the nation-state. In diaspora, transnational groups such as overseas Chineseor ethnic Indians have increasingly turned to the internet to construct a web-based ‘globalcitizenship’. One such internet-based group is ‘Global Huaren’ (Global Chinese), which actsas a cyber-watchdog, condemning government actions anywhere in the world that areconstrued to be against co-ethnics. There are, however, dangers when such ethnic networksseek to leverage their cyberpower vis-à-vis a specific state. The outcome is a kind of border-less citizenship based on claims of global ethnicity that is not answerable to any overarchingauthority.

Sheer Survival

Another arena of political mobilization is the space of endangerment and neglect. Here thequestion is whether political resolutions to the plight of imperiled or abject bodies are framedin terms of the binary opposition between citizenship and statelessness. Giorgio Agambendraws a stark distinction between citizens who enjoy juridical-legal rights and excluded groupswho dwell in ‘a zone of indistinction’. Only the erasure of the division between People (politi-cal body) and people (excluded bodies), he maintains, can restore humanity to the globallyexcluded who have been denied citizenship (Agamben 1998: 177, 180). Such views arereflected in claims that the human rights regime is capable of transforming millions of people

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enduring a bare existence in Africa, Latin America, and Asia into citizens, thus actualizing theirhumanity. But the rhetoric of ethical globalization operates at too vast a scale to deal withspecific milieus of exclusion and endangerment. Furthermore, the focus on citizenship andhuman rights gives short shrift to other modes of ethical reflection and argumentation. It isby no means clear that the right to survival will everywhere be translated into citizenship ormerely legitimized on the grounds of common humanity, or relevance to labor markets. Letme briefly cite three situations of interventions on behalf of the injured or threatened body,and their different resolutions in relation to citizenship.

In recent decades, health-based claims have become an important part of citizenship rightsin the West. In the aftermath of the Chernobyl accident in the Ukraine, sufferers claimedbiomedical resources and social equity, thus giving rise to a notion of ‘biological citizenship’(Petryna, 2002). In France, migrants have recently made health the ground for claiming asylum.Didier Fassin argues that the suffering body of the HIV-infected migrant reverses publicperception of his biopolitical otherness rooted in race and alien status. Increasingly, some formof legal recognition is awarded in the name of humanity, i.e. the right to a healthy body, regard-less of the citizenship of the patient (Fassin, 2001).

The explosive growth of NGOs is an index of the humanitarian industry that seeks to repre-sent the varied interests of the politically dispossessed. Increasingly, such voluntary groups areshaped by specific interests, affiliations, and ethics, forming themselves into socio-politicalgroups in order to make particular claims on states and corporations. Thus, the language ofuniversal human rights is often superseded by more specific categories finely tuned to thecriteria of state or philanthropic organizations. In the non-state administration of excludedhumanity, groups and individuals are sorted into various categories, in relation to particularneeds, prioritized interests, and potential affiliations with powers-that-be. These are ‘counter-politics of sheer life’ – a situated form of political mobilization that involves ethical claims toresources articulated in terms of needs as living beings (Collier and Lakoff, 2005: 29).

The politics of sheer life is emerging in Southeast Asia, where a vast female migrant popu-lation – working as maids, factory workers, or prostitutes – is regularly exposed to slave-likeconditions. Feminist NGOs invoke not the human rights of female migrants but somethingmore minimal and attainable, i.e. biological survival, or ‘biowelfare’. The claims of a healthyand unharmed migrant body are articulated not in terms of a common humanity, but of thedependency of the host society on foreign workers to sustain a high standard of living. NGOsinvoke the ethics of reciprocity or at least recognition of economic symbiosis between migrantworkers and the affluent employers who feel entitled to their cheap foreign labor. Wherecitizenship does not provide protection for the migrant worker, the joining of a healthy bodyand dependency on foreign workers produces a kind of bio-legitimacy that is perhaps a firststep toward the recognition of their moral status, but short of human rights.

A simple opposition between territorialized citizenship and deterritorialized human rightsis not able to capture the varied assemblages that are the sites of contemporary political claimsby a range of residential, expatriate, and migrant actors. The confluence of territorialized anddeterritorialized forces forms milieus in which problems of the human are crystallized andproblems posed and resolved. Diverse actors invoke not territorialized notions of citizenship,but new claims – postnational, flexible, technological, cyber-based, and biological – as groundsfor resources, entitlements, and protection. These various sites and claims attest to the contin-gent nature of what is at stake in being human today. Such political mobilizations engage butalso go beyond human rights in resolution to situated problems of contemporary life. Inaddition to the nation-state, entities such as corporations and NGOs have become practitionersof humanity, defining and representing varied categories of human beings according to degreesof economic, biopolitical, and moral worthiness. Diverse regimes of living are in play. In short,global assemblages crystallize specific problems and resolutions to questions of contemporaryliving, thus further disarticulating and deterritorializing aspects of citizenship.



References

Agamben, G. (1998) Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford,CA: Stanford University Press.

Anderson, B. (1991[1983]) Imagined Communities, 2nd edition. London: Verso.Arendt, H. (1998[1958]) The Human Condition, with an Introduction by Margaret Canovaan, 2nd

edition. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.Collier, S.J. and A. Lakoff (2005) ‘Regimes of Living’, in A. Ong and S.J. Collier (eds) Global

Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems. Malden, MA: Blackwell.Fassin, D. (2001) ‘The Biopolitics of Otherness’, Anthropology Today 17(1): 3–23.Habermas, J. (2001) ‘Why Europe Needs a Constitution’, New Left Review 11 (Sept–Oct): 5–26.Holston, J. (1993) ‘Introduction’, in J. Holston (ed.) Cities and Citizenship. Durham, NC: Duke

University Press.Ong, A. (1999) Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality. Durham, NC: Duke

University Press.Ong, A. (2000) ‘Graduated Sovereignty in Southeast Asia’, Theory, Culture & Society 17(4): 55–75.Ong, A. (2003) Buddha is Hiding: Refugees, Citizenship, the New America. Berkeley: University of

California Press.Ong, A. and S.J. Collier (eds) (2005) Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as

Anthropological Problems. Malden, MA: Blackwell.Petryna, A. (2002) Life Exposed: Biological Citizens after Chernobyl. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University

Press.Rose, N. (1999) Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press.Soysal, Y. (1994) The Limits of Citizenship: Migrants and Postnational Membership in Europe. Chicago,

IL: University of Chicago Press.

Aihwa Ong is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. Recentbooks include Flexible Citizenship (1999, Duke University Press), Buddha is Hiding (2003,University of California Press), Global Assemblages (2005, Blackwell), and Neoliberalism asException (forthcoming, Duke University Press).

The PoliticalJeremy Valentine

Abstract This article looks at the problems of the co-determination of the politicalwithin western metaphysics and political reflection, and considers solutions that arefigured in terms of failure and incompletion. The focus is on the relation of the politi-cal to political modernity, its defenders and attackers, and those who seek to overcomethe opposition.

Keywords failure, incompletion, political modernity, post-foundationalism

It is worth remarking that in the English language the notion of the political is an awkwardgrammatical formulation. The transformation of an adjective into a noun suggests that thenotion is detached from its proper enunciation, as if to prompt the question ‘the politi-

cal what?’ in order to complete it. The awkwardness has arisen from the translation of adistinction commonly found in Germanic and Romance languages for which preciseequivalents are not available in English. Thus the distinctions between die Politik and das


ong mutations

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