ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the formation of young people as citizens and as political actors in relation to problems raised by shifts in the spatiality of contemporary citizenship regimes. The chapter argues that cosmopolitan or global citizenship has emerged as an important form of late modern liberal governmentality which is based on reified notions of spatiality and global difference, and which positions young people as key figures in boundary-making exercises both between and within nation states. This takes place through the intertwining of cosmopolitan citizenship with participation in a global economy governed on neoliberal terms, as well as through the identification of illiberal others that constitute the limits of tolerance to difference in a globalised world. In response, this chapter draws on the actually existing spatialities of young people’s citizenship identifications and political practices to describe a complex topology of youth citizenship subjectivities (Kallio and Mitchell, 2016), in which young people’s identities and practices are situated within fluid, complex and mobile places and networks. The chapter shows that the actually existing spatialities of young people’s citizenship practices manifests complex topologies of local investments, network socialities and transnational identifications with real and imagined others that are remote from the ambitions of liberal cosmopolitanism. In this respect, the formation of young people as citizen subjects takes place through the production of mutable, fluid and interconnected political spaces. Rather than an identification with an abstract global humanity, it is this mutable spatiality that forms the basis for young people’s ethical citizenships in the contemporary world.
