Martijn Koster

Citizenship agendas in and beyond the nation-state: (en)countering framings of the good citizen

This special issue analyzes the formulation, implementation, and contestation of citizenship agendas. We define citizenship agendas as normative framings of citizenship that prescribe what norms, values, and behavior are appropriate for those claiming membership of a political community. These agendas are concerned with defining the meaning of membership in explicitly normative ways that go beyond conventional, legal– formal citizenship status. Citizenship agendas prescribe relations between people and larger structures of rule and belonging, which are often but not exclusively nation-states. Such citizenship agendas invariably imply models of virtuous and deviant citizens, favoring particular subject-citizens over others, and suggesting ways to transform the latter into the former. Some of these agendas are part and parcel of the working of the nation-state; other citizenship agendas, however, are produced beyond the nation-state. The articles collected here study various sites where the meaning of ‘the good citizen’ is framed and negotiated in different ways. We approach these framings as agendas that may coexist in apparent harmony, or merge, or clash. The various articles in this special issue engage with normative framings of citizenship in different contexts, ranging from security policies and social housing in Dutch cities, to state-like but extralegal organizations in Jamaica and Guatemala, and from the regulation of the Muslim call to prayer in the US Midwest, to post-conflict reconstruction in Lebanon. In this introduction, we extend the discussion of normative framings of citizenship associated with the nation-state. Building on recent discussions in the field of citizenship studies, which emphasize that citizenship can also be conceptualized and investigated beyond the state, the first section of this introduction provides a more detailed outline of our approach to citizenship agendas in and beyond the state. In the second section, we suggest a typology of three different configurations between state and non-state actors within which citizenship agendas are produced, detailing the different mechanisms of collaboration or contestation between state and non-state/state-like actors. Drawing on the cases presented in the different contributions to this special issue, we attempt to structure the diversity in state/non-state citizenship agendas by differentiating between the

Mediating and getting ‘burnt’ in the gap: Politics and brokerage in a Recife slum, Brazil

This article takes a fresh look at political brokerage as a complex, provisional and contested phenomenon. Although brokerage has received little recent attention, I show how it remains critical to understanding the urban poor’s involvement in electoral politics. The article focuses on how local community leaders in a Recife slum, Brazil, operate as brokers during elections. Here, they have to deal with the different interests of their patrons (politicians) and their clients (their fellow slum dwellers), and also with the latter’s contradictory views on electoral politics. Slum dwellers combine a positive image, in which electoral politics provides access to resources, with a negative image, in which it contaminates all those involved, including the brokers. Further, by showing how these slum dwellers perceive electoral politics as coming from ‘another world’, this study counters the still prevalent functionalist understandings of brokerage which depict brokers as the forgers of a shared moral universe.

Fear and Intimacy: Citizenship in a Recife Slum, Brazil

Abstract In Brazil, citizenship rights and the institutionalisation of citizen participation have advanced significantly under the democratic regime. However, many of the urban poor are still alienated from the state and its legal system. This article argues that, to understand the citizenship of these ‘half-citizens’, it is necessary to take account of an unofficial realm of practices. I show how residents of a slum in Recife interpret and deal with the state project of registered citizenship, which finds its material expression in the compulsory carrying of identity cards. Carrying these cards is surrounded by fear of violent police control. However, obtaining identity cards through informal procedures is associated with a longing for personalised relationships with the police and other state representatives. The relationship of these residents with their identity cards is thus both fearful and affectionate, which allows us to understand their citizenship as a confluence of fear and intimacy.

Citizenship agendas, urban governance and social housing in the Netherlands: an assemblage approach

This article combines recent conceptualizations of citizenship beyond the nation state with new perspectives on governance assemblages comprising both state and non-state actors. Focusing on Dutch social housing, this study explores how such governance assemblages produce agendas that attempt to shape citizenship. Employing an assemblage approach, this study first demonstrates how state and non-state actors amalgamate by providing a historical overview of the urban governance of social housing in the Netherlands. Second, taking account of the territory that the assemblage claims, it shows how underprivileged neighbourhoods become the spatial locus of these assemblages. Third, examining what this amalgam produces, the article shows how the assemblage imposes a citizenship agenda on the population of these neighbourhoods, distinguishing between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ citizens. Acknowledging that citizenship agendas are produced by a multifaceted amalgam of state and non-state actors, this article emphasizes the need for rigorous academic analysis of such governance assemblages.

Play and work: An introduction to sport and organization

In recent decades, sport as a social practice has become relevant in many different fields: in health, economy, politics, education, work and leisure. The importance of sport transcends the confines of the sports field. Sport involves not only organization but also organizing. Sport is about organizing collective efforts and performance. Sport is about managing excellence, coaching and developing tactics as well as strategies. Sport also has its own mechanisms of organizing social differences. The competitive aspects of sport imply practices of inand exclusion. These practices are enacted spatially on the sports field, dividing space between competing teams and individual sportsmen and sportswomen. In a broader sense, this theme touches upon the issue of access and socially marginalized identities. Sport deals with contradictions and paradoxes that exist in society at large. Sport is ‘contested terrain’ (Bourdieu 1988), an arena in which social and political differences are being played out. Sport is often considered a popular and innocent endeavor that engages many people all over the world, both as amateur players and as enthusiastic audience. At the same time, however, professional and commercial sport inescapably is big business and an arena for political disputes. The economic and political dimensions often are intertwined, as in the recent doping scandal of Russian athletes where presumably actors on the highest level of Russian politics were involved (‘IAAF in Crisis’ 2016). From a different perspective, Sorek (2007), in his wonderful study of Arab soccer in Israel, underscores the political aspect of sport. He argues that soccer for Arabs provides ‘an opportunity for integration into Jewish-Israeli society’ as well as ‘a stage for promoting political protest’ (Sorek 2007, 7). The apparent contradiction here seems to be characteristic of sport in general (Spaaij 2011). Sport is not either good or bad. Gatz, Messner, and Ball-Rokeach (2002) prefer to talk about the ‘paradoxes of sport’. As an example they point to the fact that sport programs for youths may be set up as ‘violence prevention tools’ while at the same time ‘violence is an integral part of the sport world’ (Gatz et al. 2002, 1). In a seminal article about American sports the sociologist Gregory Stone (1955, 85) put it this way: ‘ . . . because of their intrinsic agonistic character and the fact of their involvement in the “agony” of the larger society, sport and play are fraught with anomalies’.

Brazilian brokers, boundaries and buildings: A material culture of politics

This article contributes to understanding the material culture of contemporary political practice, particularly in a context of high sociopolitical inequality, by focusing on the spatiality and materiality of political brokerage. Its central question is where brokers mediate between different worlds and with what material artifacts. The author presents the case of community leaders in a favela in Recife, Brazil, who operate at the boundary between different worlds separated by class, race and place. Their offices, with their material artifacts, form brokerage spaces. He introduces these offices as boundary places: privileged spatial and material contexts in which worlds that would be incompatible in other circumstances become temporarily compatible. Simultaneously, in these boundary places, the differences between these worlds are reproduced. Through an in-depth analysis, he shows how brokers’ practices ‘take place’ in the spatiality and materiality of their offices, which become a stage for both the convergence and divergence of different worlds.

The making of an ethnically diverse management: contested cultural meanings in a Dutch amateur football club.

This paper discusses ethnographic research on the planned transition from an all-white Dutch management towards an ethnically diverse management of an amateur football club. This study is based on a 3-year period of ethnographic fieldwork in a football club, located in an ethnically diverse neighbourhood in the Netherlands. We argue that the transition led to contested understandings of cultural practices and artefacts within the club. The meaning-making processes of the clubs organizational culture reinforced us–them divisions between the two groups. What is at stake is the symbolic ownership of the club that comes from a deep-rooted desire among members of the club to be ‘among themselves’. Findings suggest that apparent equity in terms of shared participation in the clubs management does not necessarily lead to bridging of ethnic differences on the level of the clubs culture.

Dutch-Moroccan Girls Navigating Public Space: Wandering as an Everyday Spatial Practice

Based on qualitative research among female Dutch-Moroccan teenagers in two underprivileged neighborhoods in the city of Utrecht, the Netherlands, this article focuses on the spatial practices of young Muslim women in public space. Compared to their male counterparts, who “hang around” in groups, female teens spend less time in public space. We focus on girls’ “wandering practices” through the neighborhood, a spatial practice structured by their search for freedom (to spend time outside the home, to talk to friends in private) and by social control (to avoid the presence of young men, to avoid being gossiped about). Our research shows that wandering both decreases their visibility and pushes against gendered cultural norms about women in public space. By analyzing their wandering as a form of social navigation, we show how these teenagers maneuver through both the physical neighborhood and the gendered cultural norms regarding appropriate behavior in public space.

Brokers as Assemblers: Studying Development Through the Lens of Brokerage

Brokers have long featured in the anthropological literature as figures that connect disparate social worlds. Using their particular knowledge, skills and authority, they bridge gaps between populations, usually disadvantaged, and power-holders. This special issue builds on recent calls to revive the focus on brokers in anthropological analysis, most notably in relation to recent neo-liberal societal transformations and governance transitions (James 2011; Lindquist 2015). It explores the variety of brokers and dimensions of brokerage in settings characterised by rapid societal change. Focusing on brokers’ work of connecting and maintaining personal ties among and across different actors, sites and rationales provides insights into development processes and generates a foundation for building theory around new social categories and changing political relationships. The contributions to this issue present studies of brokerage from South Africa, the Netherlands and Indonesia. While the specific settings range from urban to rural locales and from nature conservation initiatives to youth development programmes, all of the articles emphasise the importance of brokers as central figures who engage in blending, translating and reworking. Brokers are Janus-faced figures whose distinct faces are recognised and addressed by different actors and whose performances align with different logics and rationales. Studying the agentive practices of brokers sheds light on complex societal settings, where multiple forms of authority co-exist, statecitizen relationships are increasingly problematised and policy messages are contradictory. The brokers described in this volume shape the interactions between actors who have unequal power relations and diverging interests. They may operate as gatekeepers, representatives, liaisons, itinerant guides or coordinators, and often as combinations of these (Stovel & Shaw 2012). They may take advantage of the void left by government

Assembling the Irreconcilable: Youth Workers, Development Policies and ‘High Risk’ Boys in the Netherlands

ABSTRACT This article demonstrates how youth workers in a Dutch city bring together seemingly irreconcilable worlds: the development policies of their organisations and the state on the one hand and the practices, needs and aspirations of young people on the other. Current policies, like much academic literature on street-level professionals, define youth workers as frontline workers, implementing policies as representatives of their organisations. We approach these workers not as representatives but as brokers. Based on detailed ethnographic research with two youth workers and their interactions with so-called high-risk boys, we demonstrate that these workers constantly negotiate boundaries, as they are positioned between the policies and the youth. On a theoretical level, employing the concept of ‘correspondence’, we argue that these brokers bring together different actors, institutions and resources, yet without fully integrating them and without forfeiting their own autonomous position.