Lauren BerlantThinkers

Citizenship is a kind of politicized intimacy whereby, in return for cultural, legal, and military security, people are asked to love their country and to recognize certain stories, events, experiences, practices, and ways of life as related to the core of who they are, their public status, and their resemblance to other people.

Citizenship is a relation among strangers who learn to feel it as a common identity based on shared historical, legal, or familial connection to a geopolitical space.

Citizenship is an abstract idea on behalf of which people engage in personal and political acts, from cheating on taxes to pledging allegiance to fomenting revolutions.

Citizenship is, for the Greeks, not something national, but simply a member of an elite class in the greek city who was said to be capable of self-governance and therefore of the legal and military governance of the city.

Citizenship is, importantly, an ordinary space of activity that many people occupy without thinking much about it, as the administration of citizenship is usually delegated to the political sphere and only periodically worried over during exceptional crises or the election season.

Citizenship is most simply put, to have a standing within the law (this is often called formal citizenship).

Citizenship 1s 2egal architecture manifests itself and is continually reshaped in the space of transactions between intimates and strangers.

Citizenship is engendered in local communities through churches, schools, and other institutions that involve face-to-face social participation.

Citizenship is a kind of trained political intimacy that turns political boundaries into visceral, emotional, and seemingly hardwired responses of 'insiders' to 'outsiders'.