Reconsidering the political in citizenship

Citizenship has traditionally been a strongly political concept (e.g. Brubaker 1992, Torpey 2000 with a broader historical view) but has developed towards heterogeneity in the last decades (see e.g. Shachar et al 2017). Thus it is timely to reconsider the relationship of citizenship and the political as politics and policy in a polity (see e.g. Sorensen, Torfing 2017). This paper seeks to reconsider the political dimension into studying citizenship: how various political aspects are embedded in citizenship discourses and practices, and how the dimensions, aspects of and normatives of citizenship can be analysed in terms of policy making and politics. There will also be a discussion on the horizontal and vertical dimension of citizenship (e.g. Jakobson et al 2011) and the relative autonomy of the state elites in this context. Based on this I will also analyse the opportunities for implementing a relational approach (see e.g. Kalev et al 2020) to studying citizenship, citizenship politics and policy.