Re-negotiating Citizenship during Political Upheavals

Date/Time: 22 August 2022, 14:30-15:30
Venue: Kulturhuset and Zoom

This roundtable discusses recent political protests and revolutionary movements and explores the role of citizenship in politically charged and volatile contexts. Political protests can be seen as manifestations of people’s demands for change in the face of growing inequalities and, whether leading to actual change in civic rights or not, protests nonetheless leave a mark by changing the social fabric of societies in myriads of ways. Even in situations of fleeting change, there are lingering traces of new ways of doing citizenship. The social contract is renegotiated as citizens experience violence, transgressions, or even expulsions from the state, as well as solidarity, empowerment, and visions of a different future. In such experiences, peoples’ conceptions of citizenship may shift radically, as well as state practices of it. Analyses of political protests and their aftermath therefore provide a unique opportunity to gain novel insights into new vocabulary of justice, innovative practices of political engagement and changing forms of citizenship. This roundtable looks at political protest movements in Middle East and Eastern Europe and explores the various ways how citizenship is re-negotiated in such critical historical moments.

Participants: Tariq Dana (Doha Institute for Graduate Studies and Northwestern University, Qatar), Nelly Bekus (University of Exeter), Elina Troscenko (GRIP, UiB) 
Moderator: Mari Norbakk (CMI)

This event is co-hosted with GRIP (Global Research Programme on Inequality) and is part of a GRIP-CMI project on Political Inequalities (CMI-UiB fund grant)