ABSTRACT
This chapter critically examines the potential of citizenship within the study of international relations (IR). Including citizenship in the conceptual armoury of IR scholarship, has the potential to break down the inside/outside walls of conventional IR frameworks and consider how non-state actors act as an intervening force in international politics. The chapter demonstrates that the concept of citizenship can be productively mobilised to reveal new insights about non-statist forms of world politics. Transformations in citizenship have profound implications for many of the key concepts in IR, including sovereignty, territoriality, and authority. The territorial sovereignty principle, with its account of citizenship as a bounded and legal identity, is increasingly in competition with the de-territorialised global connectivity principle, where political belonging is not necessarily synonymous with the sovereign territorial state. Central to thinking about citizenship in non-statist ways is to approach citizenship as a performative concept that is defined as much by its contextual enactments as by its formal and legal dimensions.
