ABSTRACT
Cities, and capital cities in particular, are often extremely important political arenas and sites for the expression and experience of citizenship. Recent anthropological work on citizenship has emphasized the role of cities in shaping political communities and facilitating particularly urban forms of citizenship. In addition, various ethnographic studies have examined the unequal distribution of rights among members of a political community. This differentiated citizenship means that formally equal citizens are treated very differently in practice. Contestations of this inequality have been studied under the rubric of ‘insurgent citizenship’. Both differentiated citizenship and insurgent citizenship have been especially visible in urban contexts.
