ABSTRACT
In his inaugural lecture at the Open University (OU), Engin Isin (2012a: 6) asserted that ‘citizenship is a bounded concept’. This is in two ways. First, citizenship is widely defined as membership of a political community that has formally recognized boundaries (Smith 2000; Painter 2002; Isin and Turner 2007; Closs Stephens and Squire 2012b; Turner 2012). In other words, citizenship is territorial and bound to the dimensions of a particular geographical unit. Second, as Isin expounds, people are also bound into the authority and territory of a political body through the idea of citizenship. Citizenship might be thought of as a ‘social glue’ that binds people to each other and the state. The relationship between citizenship and territory is therefore significant and mutually constituted.
