ABSTRACT
How does the state encourage individuals to willingly sacrifice their lives for their country? This unresolved problem has long troubled social scientists. It takes us from taken-for-granted assumptions about citizens’ duty to protect their country, to mechanisms and structures that assume interstices between security and citizenship. In these interstices, providing security to citizens may be politically contested, because it requires people to sacrifice their lives to protect others. In other words, individuals are asked to give up their rights to protection by protecting the rights of others. Thus, questions regarding the entitlement to protection versus the duty to protect make the status of citizens – either as protectors or as those being protected – politically negotiated and contested, as well as having an impact on the status of citizenship.
