Negotiating Citizenship is a thoughtful, well-researched and insightful book concerned with the topical issue of citizenship and contesting citizenship rights within the context of global capitalism. It is a timely and comprehensive piece that interrogates and dissects traditional theories of citizenship, and offers an alternative theoretical perspective on the basis of examining the status and condition of foreign domestic workers and nurses who migrate to Canada from two similar but different regions of the world: the Caribbean and the Phillipines. In creating the context for discussion, the work takes the reader on the journey of these migrant women workers from their home countries in the “Third World” where national labour markets are becoming increasingly unable to absorb surplus labour and where they have been adversely affected by the anti-social structural adjustment policies of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), to the more economically developed Canada where the state encourages them to work without providing them with citizenship rights. By so doing, as the text points out, the Canadian state, which still has primacy under globalization, reinforces the vulnerability of an already vulnerable social group for which migration is a survival strategy.
By using a methodological approach that locates the women at the centre of analysis and social action, and which allows for an understanding of social phenomena as a concrete and interrelated process of change, Bakan and Stasiulis have distinguished themselves from most thinkers and theorists in the field of citizenship studies. Their approach differs also from international migration studies that tend to lack concrete experiences on which to base analyses. It is this understanding of social reality that has allowed them to identify the limitations of existing theories of citizenship and to go beyond the narrow confines of such theories. According to the authors, the limitations in the conceptualization of traditional theories of citizenship are methodologically more static than dynamic and therefore take a mechanistic approach to understanding social reality. The consequence of this is a limited understanding of social inequality and modes of contestation for rights in a society, such as Canada, based as it is on capitalist relations of production and governed by the patriarchal ideology of neo-liberalism and the institutionalization of racism. Specifically, existing theories of citizenship conceptualize citizenship as “social membership in a particular nation state or national citizenship” (1–2) thus creating an “ideal image” of the citizen. This view is not validated by the Canadian experience. The authors, based on their case studies, point out that the Canadian state is based on discrimination of all forms and on systems of social inequality. Marginalized people, such as migrant women, blacks and the poor are excluded from the “ideal image” of the citizen. Therefore, they must negotiate citizenship and personhood. Citizenship, then, becomes a contested process, where gatekeepers “based in specific nation-states, and the uneven world system, create barriers to citizenship rights.” Based on their critique, the authors propose an alternative model that conceives of citizenship as an unstable relationship subject to active negotiation. This relationship is historically constructed and reconstructed nationally and across geopolitical borders. The dynamic process of negotiation, the authors contend, should go beyond the nation state and include other entities such as private organizations and other institutions of the state. It is only through this process that vulnerable women will be able to secure protection for themselves and their rights from anti-immigrant sentiments and practices so characteristic of the sociology and politics of globalization.
The work ends on a note of hope. These migrant Caribbean and Filipino women have been challenging the Canadian state, and by extension, the process of globalization, through their networks and solidarity movements as they resist social exclusion and boldly contest the limitations placed on their rights as women, workers and human beings by national and global capitalism. By this very act, black women and women of colour, seen as “aliens” by their host country, have shown that they are subjects of history and agents of change. By highlighting this, the authors have also made a significant contribution to the literature on international feminist politics that is concerned with women as global political players.
Negotiating Citizenship is not just about citizenship and migration studies. It is also about the comparative politics of development, international political economy, international politics, racist politics, feminist politics, the socio-politics of institutionalized discrimination of the dominant white culture, the inclusionary and exclusionary politics of globalization, the myth of the lessened role of the nation state under globalization, and the right of freedom of movement of capital, but not people, across borders. Together, these enhance the quality of the work and give it its unique flavour. This seminal work provides lessons for Caribbean women and governments that enter into employment arrangements with the Canadian state; it reflects sound scholarship and makes excellent reading.
