1. Citizenship and Activism
Duncan Green
Brandeis Proseminar
March 2012
Lecture 4

2. Theories of citizenship
 Four interwoven themes
 Rights, duties, participation and identity
 Different combos of these give rise to
three schools of thought
– Liberal models that give priority to
individual rights
– Communitarian models that place the
emphasis on duties and identity
– Republican models that stress
participation

3. Liberal theories of citizenship
 Born out of reaction to tyranny and the
overweening state.
 ‘the great end’ of men entering society
is ‘the enjoyment of their properties in
peace and safety’. (Locke)
 Ignores:
– Struggle for rights (granted rather than
won)
– Other (non class) forms of exclusion
– Communal identities (v individualistic)

4. Communitarians
 Common Good > Individual Rights
– The East London mattress
 Identity (and citizenship) springs from
membership of a community, raising
problems with rights of minority
communities or dissidents
 Ambivalent on role of state
 Struggles with post-modern social
fragmentation and multiple parallel (and
overlapping) communities

5. Republicanism
 Also suspicious of liberal individualism
 But social bonds created through
participation and membership
(Puttnam), not deeper sense of
community
 Little to say on conflictive aspects of
citizenship

6. Where the three schools collide on
citizenship and activism
 Relative weight of formal democracy
and protest
 Invited v conquered spaces
 Is formal democracy irrelevant?
 I’m with Churchill

7. The dynamics of citizenship
 Cycles of Contention
– repression, partial victories leading to
reform, and demobilisation
 Tarrow: protest requires
– patterns of political opportunities and
constraints
– inherited cultural symbols
– dense social networks
 Which is why global citizenship will
always be weak cf national level

8. Citizens and states
 In Europe citizenship created by
encroachment of state (taxes,
conscription) – ‘caging’ (Mann)
 Social contract (tax, law, elections)
 Citizens movements often a source of
innovation for the state and challenge
the ‘plasticity of power’
 At local level ‘Cycles of Accountability’
(Fox)
– ‘thickening of civil society and state
reformism’

9. The conflict-cooperation cycle
Social
Conflict
Events and Reforms run out
Moments of steam or new
problems arise
Reforms and
Cooperation

10. When do citizens’ movements achieve
lasting change?
 Gaventa and McGee (2010)
– Civil society alone is not enough
– formal political process
– And alliances between civil society and
reformers inside state
• Juggling trade offs between influence and
cooption (insider/outsider)
 Often division between state and civil
society is artificial (Porto Alegre) - state/
society complexes’

11. Tarrow’s view of the future, as state-
citizen interaction builds institutions
‘The power [of contentious politics] will
at first be ferocious, uncontrolled and
widely diffused, but ultimately ephemeral
and institutionalised. It will disperse ‘like
a floodtide which loosens up much of the
soil but leaves alluvial deposits in its
wake’’

12. How Change Happens: some
archetypes
 Active Citizenship
– People in the Streets
– Grassroots Leadership
 Elite-driven
– Enlightened Leaders
– Technocrats make evidence-based policy

13. Archetypes (continued)
 Cross class interaction
– Democracy works
– Drivers of Change: Cross-sectoral alliances
around common agenda + conflict leads to
‘transitions to accountability’
 Pathways
– Incremental progress
– Power of Example
– Sudden breakthroughs (Arab Spring)
– Evolutionary change (venture capitalism)

14. South Africa’s Treatment Action
Campaign
 Watch the video (10 minutes) and
discuss
– What kinds of change strategies did TAC
use?
– Why do you think they chose those
strategies (what other approaches could
they have taken)?