ABSTRACT
Thus, the question I ask is what conditions sustain regimes of national citizenship that deny some of their own citizens an existence worthy of a full citizen? They are the same conditions, I would add, that maintain the nation-state as a convention of territorial borders and membership rules within a system of states that renders many people stateless, relegates them to the status of ‘persons without rights’, and therefore excludes them from citizenship altogether. Thus, the internally excluded and the externally excluded – the marginal national citizen and the stateless non-citizen – issue from the same font of exclusionary citizenship. This common sort of inegalitarian citizenship has the following characteristic: it incorporates vast numbers of different kinds of people as citizens and uses differences among them that are not the basis of national membership (differences, for example, of race, religion, class, and gender) to distribute rights, powers, and privileges differentially.
