ABSTRACT
‘Global citizenship’ has emerged as the locus of struggles on the ground and of reflection and contestation in theory. Many of the central and most enduring struggles in the history of politics have taken place in and over the language of citizenship and the activities and institutions into which it is woven. The language of ‘global’ and ‘globalisation’ and the activities, institutions and processes to which it refers and in which it is increasingly used, while more recent than citizenship, comprises a similarly central and contested domain. The tradition of modern citizenship takes as its empirical and normative exemplar the form of citizenship characteristic of the modern nation state. The modern civil liberty of private property and contracts accordingly presupposes the historical dispossession of people from access to land and resources through their local laws and non-capitalist economic organisations.
