Table Of ContentEngaging Authority
Frontiers of the Political
Series Editor: Engin Isin is Professor of International Politics, Queen Mary
University of London (QMUL) and University of London Institute in Paris
(ULIP). He is a leading scholar of citizenship studies and is a Chief Editor of the
journal Citizenship Studies. He is author and editor of eleven books in the field,
including Being Political and Citizens without Frontiers.
This series aims to contribute to our understanding of transversal
political struggles beyond and across the borders of the nation-state, and its
institutions and mechanisms, which have become influential and effective means
of both contentious politics and political subjectivity. The series features titles
that eschew and even disavow interpreting these transversal political struggles
with categories and concepts.
Postcolonial Transitions in Europe: Contexts, Practices and Politics
Edited by Sandra Ponzanesi and Gianmaria Colpani
Citizenship and Place: Case Studies on the Borders of Citizenship
Edited by Cherstin M. Lyon and Allison F. Goebel
The Question of Political Community: Sameness, Logos, Space
Jonna Pettersson
Postcolonial Intellectuals in Europe: Academics, Artists, Activists and
Their Publics
Edited by Sandra Ponzanesi and Adriano José Habed
Citizen Journalism as Conceptual Practice: Postcolonial Archives and
Embodied Political Acts of New Media
Bolette B. Blaagaard
Governing Affective Citizenship: Denaturalization, Belonging and Repression
Marie Beauchamps
Public Perception of International Crises: Identity, Ontological Security and
Self-Affirmation
Dmitry Chernobrov
The Uses of Imperial Citizenship: The British and French Empires
Jack Harrington
Engaging Authority: Citizenship and Political Community
Edited by Trevor Stack and Rose Luminiello
Engaging Authority
Citizenship and Political
Community
Edited by Trevor Stack and Rose Luminiello
ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD
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Published by Rowman & Littlefield
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Copyright © 2021 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.
Selection and editorial matter © Trevor Stack and Rose Luminiello, 2021
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any elec-
tronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without
written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages
in a review.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Stack, Trevor, 1970- editor. | Luminiello, Rose, 1991- editor.
Title: Engaging authority : citizenship and political community / Trevor Stack, Rose
Luminiello.
Description: Lanham : Rowman & Littlefield, [2021] | Series: Frontiers of the
political: doing international politics | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
Summary: "This volume explores different forms of citizen's relationship to authority
in political community"-- Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021036223 (print) | LCCN 2021036224 (ebook) | ISBN
9781538159101 (cloth) | ISBN 9781538159118 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Authority. | Community power, | Citizenship.
Classification: LCC JC330 .E52 2021 (print) | LCC JC330 (ebook) | DDC
323.6–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021036223
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021036224
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American
National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library
Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.
Contents
Preface ix
Chapter 1: Introduction: Citizenship and Political Community in
Four Questions 1
Trevor Stack
Chapter 2: Political Community in a Plural Society: Reflections
from India 23
Gurpreet Mahajan
Chapter 3: Recasting Political Community: The New National
Identity of Hungary 39
Balázs Majtényi
Chapter 4: Political Community under Communism: Regime,
Dissidents and Church in Post–World War II Poland 57
Anna Grudzińzka
Chapter 5: Schooling in Citizenship and Political Community 79
Nadia Kiwan, Rachel Shanks and Trevor Stack
Chapter 6: Sovereignty, Autonomy and Citizenship in the Kurdish
Model of Political Community 101
Hanifi Baris
Chapter 7: Overcoming the Myth of the Sovereign, Self-Governing
People 125
David Thunder
Chapter 8: Civic Friendship, Economic Justice and Political
Authority 147
Nathaniel Jezzi
v
vi Contents
Chapter 9: Studying Political Community from the Citizen Up 163
Trevor Stack
Chapter 10: Competing Models of Islamic Political Community:
ISIS and the Amman Message and Shariah Index 189
Ionut Untea
Chapter 11: Community as Referent and Effect of Authority Claims 205
Trevor Stack
Index 235
Preface
Trevor Stack and Rose Luminiello
We put the finishing touches on this volume in May 2020, while ordered
by our political authorities to remain within our homes, leaving them only
when essential. Even then, our governments insisted that we had to remain
at least two metres distant from anyone not from our immediate household.
Many states around the world are making such demands on their citizens and
on others present in their territories. The shape of this order is unfamiliar to
many because few people have experienced or imagined such calls to change
how we work, live and play. Citizens have taken it on themselves to denounce
others’ failing to heed the restrictions, and some have volunteered to aid
struggling health services, even as others protest the curbs on their freedom,
within and beyond democracies. Governments, democratic or otherwise, have
had to engage with those that they govern to exercise their authority as sel-
dom before, and in turn, they have had to respond to demands made by groups
under their jurisdiction, from scientists and unions to employers, civil soci-
ety, churches and political parties. At these moments, the intricate interplay
between political authority and those it is exercised over comes most sharply
into focus, with all its stresses and strains. In a few short weeks, the crisis has
highlighted the import of this book’s topic: how the governed engage and are
engaged, in a myriad of ways and with innumerable effects, in the exercise
of authority over them.
We look forward from this initial moment of crisis towards what are likely
to be tortuous processes stretching into the future, in which political author-
ity will engage and be engaged in ways that are hard to foresee. It is already
evident that such processes will vary dramatically across the world, in part
because of the idiosyncrasy of those in government but also because of the
vii
viii Preface
contrasting dynamics of political community between, for example, Europe
and China or, indeed, between and within countries that are considered
as democratic. As local, regional, national and transnational governments
respond to the crisis as they perceive it, they are enabled and constrained by
the patterns of relationships with and between those whom they govern, which
is how we understand political community in this volume. Governments will
design policies to target particular groups for protection and to call on and
reward others for service, while calls will also be made to hold government
to account or to privilege some citizens over others. Citizenship, understood
here as membership of political community, will doubtless be a fault line of
such calls on and by political authorities. Citizens’ engagement with govern-
ments, and with each other and with non-citizens, will evolve in the months
and years to come but in ways that will vary globally, including across the
several contexts studied in this volume.
In the UK where we are writing, the government found that its authority
could be framed as an appeal to citizens’ sense of investment in the National
Health Service (NHS), insisting that everyone must, ‘Stay Home, Protect
the NHS, Save Lives.’ Every Thursday, millions have stood at their doors
and windows to applaud NHS workers for sixty seconds, while harbours
have been filled with the sounds of ships’ horns. Citizens have looked to the
government to give clear instructions, and they grew frustrated less at being
commanded to stay indoors and socially isolate and more at what has been
perceived, to varying degrees, as the lack of clarity in the instructions from
the UK government. Other stresses have arisen over the scope of the UK gov-
ernment’s authority, complicated by the boundaries of political community
internal to its jurisdiction. In the case of Scotland, one of the cases included in
this volume, the First Minister declared her government’s intention to remain
in ‘lockstep’ with rest of the UK, but she objected to the Prime Minister’s
reluctance to specify that his edicts pertained exclusively to England.
Further afield, in many countries of which Spain is one, those who flout
quarantine in defiance of government have been shamed on social media and
denounced to police. US citizens were typically divided: in this case, between
those inclined to ‘follow the science’ even if they believe their President is
failing to do so, and at the other extreme, those taking to the streets to protest
the infringement on their freedoms, even bearing arms in protest of their state
legislatures. No doubt the latter will be joined by others, within and beyond
the United States, objecting to government mandates over the use of smart-
phones for contact tracing, with its implications for individual privacy rights.
In neighbouring Mexico, another case considered in this book, coronavirus
curfews were enforced by armed groups claiming to be self-defence militias
but known by locals as criminal cells, while the President hastened to ease
a lockdown that threatened his ambition to transform Mexico, not least by
Preface ix
ending the corruption that undermines citizens’ trust in authorities, inhibit-
ing everything from tax collection to detecting crimes. Corruption is also an
issue in China, where the government appears nonetheless able to constrain
citizens’ movements and interactions, impeding the virus’s transmission, all
the while moving against protestors defending a more democratic variety of
political community in Hong Kong. In China, as elsewhere, citizens have
sought to blame non-citizen migrants who they believe to put their own
political community at risk, and no doubt in months and years there will be
widespread, renewed anxieties over immigration, coupled with resentment
over entitlement to inevitably scarce public funds.
Such tensions are but tokens of the intense struggles that await, as gov-
ernments, and those they govern, settle on ‘new normals’ not only in their
places of work and leisure but also in the intricacy of their political relations,
both formal and informal, which we study in this volume. In the time ahead,
the dense web of engagement between those who exercise authority and
those subject to it, which we term ‘political community,’ will become more
apparent. Citizens and governments will undergo strain and stress, even as
the exercise of authority becomes more visible in all its startling diversity,
challenging our scholarly habits of sorting authority’s exercise into simple
binaries like ‘democratic’ and ‘authoritarian.’
This volume explores how the governed are invoked and involved in the
exercise of authority over them, which is how we understand citizenship and
political community. It brings to bear insights from a range of disciplines,
reaching across scholarly debates that are seldom brought into contact. Some
chapters are theoretical, whereas others are empirical, taking in citizenship
and political community in Scotland, Poland, Hungary, Turkey, Iraq and
Syria, India, Mexico, and the United States. The chapters consider citizens’
engaging of authority in contexts from political constitutions and national
movements to local schools and small-town politics and to Islamic State and
the Kurdish political movement. Across all these theoretical and empirical
concerns, the authors respond to a common set of four questions: Who or
what exercises political authority? What scope of authority and over whom?
What relations exist between those subject to authority? What ideals of citi-
zenship and political community are and can be held?
In the present time, and after the COVID-19 crisis subsides, these ques-
tions will be more pertinent than ever to citizens and scholars’ efforts to
grasp authority’s exercise and the untold ways in which they engage and are
engaged in it. We hope our volume, traversing the landmark scholarly debates
of recent years, will help to inspire and inform readers to consider how their
own and others’ embedding in political community is shaped by and will
shape the times ahead.
