Inter-disciplinary workshop
POLITICAL COMMUNITY
HO S TE D B Y T HE
CENTRE FOR CITIZENSHIP, CIVIL SOCIETY AND
RULE OF LAW (CISRUL)
A T TH E
UNIVERSITY OF ABERDEEN, SCOTLAND
Committee Room 2, University Office
Tuesday 25th – Wednesday 26th June
Academic coordinator:
Trevor Stack (t.stack@abdn.ac.uk)
Workshop secretary:
Tracey Connon (t.connon@abdn.ac.uk)
See the end of the programme for details of how to register.
TOPIC
Notions of political community are implicit in many or most contemporary debates –
academic and public – of citizenship, civil society and rule of law, as well as of
democracy, multiculturalism and human rights. But they are seldom made explicit and
subject to analysis and reflection. That has also been our experience at CISRUL. Having
debated and discussed aspects of citizenship, civil society and rule of law in a series of
events since our founding in 2009, we have identified political community as a topic that
crosscuts the three but which we have yet to comprehend fully, and are seeking papers
that address the following questions:
1. When “political community” has been the explicit topic of debates, in particular times
and places, what is meant by “political” and what is meant by “community”? What is not
considered political and what is not community? To give just two examples, how is
political community distinguished from religious community? And community from
society?
2. What notions of political community have been caught up in citizenship, civil society
and rule of law? Does citizenship, for example, always entail political community?
3. Can we identify political community beyond citizenship, civil society and rule of law?
For example, are universities political communities? How about families, businesses and
churches? Is multitude, as Hardt and Negri suggest, an emergent form of political
community? What other emergent political communities might there be?
The following are some of the questions that will addressed at the workshop:

Early modern thinkers such as Rousseau tended to associate political community
with the city; governments from the late-18th century onwards attempted to
nationalise political community. How successful have they been?

How has the principle of self-determination affected political community? Is there
still a place for an authority that governs different people with different languages
and cultures, as the Romans had?

What kinds of political community have been possible under empires? What has
been their legacy?

Where do understandings of sovereignty come into political community? And how
does political community stand in relation to democracy?

How have political communities dealt with minorities? Have minorities been able to
constitute their own political communities? How successful have been attempts to
develop plural political communities?

What is the role of business in relation to political community? Does corporate
citizenship imply political community, and if so, how does it compare to corporate
social responsibility?

Where do churches stand in relation to political community? Are they, themselves,
political communities? Can they be subsumed within broader political communities
such as nation-states?

Does political community need law? What kind of constitutional arrangements are
typical of political community?

Partha Chatterjee dismisses the promise of citizenship and civil society to build an
inclusive political community in India. The best he can envision is “political society”
by which he means the terrain on which popular classes deal with the
developmental state, for example by presenting themselves as “targets” of
government assistance. What does his argument spell for India and for other
countries?

Does the UN operate as a political community, and if so, of what kind?
SPEAKERS
Raul Acosta, Centre for the Study of Applied Ethics, Deusto University, Bilbao, has been
working on orderly dissent in the contexts of the Brazilian Amazon, west Mexico and the
Mediterranean.
Matyas Bodig, Senior Lecturer in Law at Aberdeen, is a legal theorist who has worked on
a range of issues concerning rule of law and the nature of the modern state.
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Michael Brown, Senior Lecturer in History at Aberdeen, has written extensively on the
Scottish and Irish Enlightenments.
Nigel Dower, Emeritus in Philosophy, U Aberdeen, author of An Introduction to Global
Citizenship(Edinburgh UP, 2003)
Ajay Gudavarthy, Assistant Professor, Centre for Political Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru
University, author of Politics of Post-Civil Society: Contemporary History of Political
Movements in India(Sage, 2013) and editor of Reframing Democracy and Agency in India:
Interrogating Political Society (Anthem, 2012)
Tamas Gyorfi, Lecturer in Law, U Aberdeen, publications include "Between Common
Law Constitutionalism and Procedural Democracy" in Oxford Journal of Legal
Studies (2012)
Daniel Koltonski, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Amherst College, publications
include “Normative Consent and Authority” in Journal of Moral Philosophy (2013)
Sian Lazar, Lecturer in Social Anthropology, U Cambridge, author of El Alto, Rebel City:
Self and Citizenship in Andean Bolivia (Duke, 2008)
Hanna Lerner is Assistant Professor of Politics, Tel Aviv University, author of Making
Constitutions in Deeply Divided Societies (CUP, 2011)
Gal Levy, Department of Sociology, Political Science and Communication, The Open
University of Israel, publications include "Within and Beyond Citizenship: Alternative
Educational Initiatives in the Arab Society in Israel" in Citizenship Studies (2012)
Sourayan Mookerjea, Associate Professor of Theory/Culture at the University of Alberta,
publications include “Subaltern Biopolitics in the Networks of the Commonwealth” in
Journal of Alternative Perspectives in the Social Sciences (2010)
Silvia Pasquetti is a Research Fellow at Clare Hall and in the Department of Sociology at
Cambridge University. Her publications include “Legal Emotions: An Ethnography of
Distrust and Fear in the Arab Districts of an Israeli City” in Law & Society Review (2012).
Yoav Peled is Associate Professor of Political Science at Tel Aviv University and coauthor of Being Israeli: The Dynamics of Multiple Citizenship (CUP, 2002).
John Perry, McDonald Post-Doctoral Fellow for Christian Ethics and Public Life, U
Oxford, author of The Pretenses of Loyalty: Locke, Liberal Theory, and American Political
Theology (OUP, 2011)
Márton Rövid holds a PhD in International Relations and European Studies from the
Central European University, and has co-edited a book on Multi-Disciplinary Approaches
to Romany Studies (2012).
Trevor Stack, director of CISRUL and Lecturer in Hispanic Studies, Aberdeen, and author
of Knowing History in Mexico: An Ethnography of Citizenship (2012) and co-editor of
“Citizenship Beyond the State?” special issue of Citizenship Studies (2007).
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SCHEDULE
MONDAY 25TH JUNE
9
Tea, coffee and biscuits
9.30
Introduction: Trevor Stack and Matyas Bodig
10.10
Discussion
Political Community and Constitution Making
10.40
Hanna Lerner “tbc”
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Tamas Gyorfi “tbc”
11.20
Discussion
11.50
Tea, coffee and biscuits
A Historical View
12.10
Michael Brown “tbc”
12.30
Discussion
12.50
Sandwich lunch
Philosophical Approaches
1.40
John Perry “tbc”
2
Daniel Koltonski “Political obligation and political community”
An account of the democratic citizen’s duty to uphold the law must make
use of the notion of political community: it is only when she is a citizen of a
genuine democratic community—a polity whose citizens are motivated in
their political choices by some liberal conception of justice—that she must
recognize as part of citizenship a duty to uphold the law. Absent such a
community, then, she will not have such a duty. Why is that? Consider the
case of an engaged and conscientious citizen—a citizen whose main aim is
to live justly—who is confronted by a law she reasonably thinks to be
unjust. How can she have a duty to uphold that law, a duty that overrides
her usual prerogative, as a free person, to act on her own moral judgments?
She has a moral duty to uphold that law when she may reasonably regard it
as the result of her fellow citizens responsibly exercising their moral
agency with regard to questions of justice, for upholding that law is the
way, in the inevitable circumstances of reasonable disagreement about
justice, for her to respect their equal rights to such responsible exercise in
deciding upon the laws governing their lives together. Her duty to uphold
the law, jointly with her fellows’ duties to uphold the law, is the correlative
of their rights to an equal say. The duty to uphold the law is a duty
distinctive of citizenship in a democratic community whose citizens
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exercise their moral judgment responsibly—and are known to do so—in
making their political choices. And so, it is in a political community in which
a kind of thick reciprocity of political concern for justice actually, and not
simply aspirationally, characterizes both the relationship of citizenship and
so also the democratic processes, that upholding the law will be what
respect for one’s fellows as free and equal citizens requires. This is a very
demanding account of political obligation—few, if any, states come close to
achieving this sort of democratic community—but it is the sort of account
one is lead to when one takes seriously the citizen who reasonably
demands a justification for the claim that her citizenship requires that she
against her own judgments about justice. And a liberal account of justice
must take this citizen’s demand seriously.
2.20
Discussion
Beyond the State?
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Sian Lazar “tbc”
3.20
Trevor Stack “Political community versus human society? versus?
Reading Rousseau in contemporary west Mexico”
3.40
Discussion
4.20
Tea, coffee and biscuits
4.40
Ajay Gudavarthy “tbc”
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Discussion
5.30
End of session and campus tour
6.30
Buffet dinner
TUESDAY 26TH JUNE
The Case of Israel-Palestine
9
Tea, coffee and biscuits
9.30
Silvia Pasquetti “The affective foundation of subordinated political
communities: Lessons from a West Bank refugee camp and an
Israeli ‘mixed’ city”
Emotions are key components in the making and unmaking of political communities.
The activation of solidarity facilitates the pursuit of collective political projects. By
contrast, mutual distrust discourages people from pursuing shared political identities.
Drawing on fieldwork within and across a West Bank refugee camp and the Arab
districts of an Israeli city, this paper explores the affective foundation of political
communities among subordinated populations—subjects and citizens alike—
experiencing exclusion due to their ethnonational, ethnoracial, or ethnoreligious
membership. The point of departure of this analysis is an empirical puzzle: stateless
camp dwellers invest in their group solidarity and perceive themselves as members of
a political community while urban minorities with Israeli citizenship experience
mutual distrust and withdraw from the public sphere. My research traces this
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difference in the shape and intensity of group life among these two sets of
Palestinians to the workings of different ruling agencies, especially their distinct uses
of law, coercion, and language. Specifically, I study the emotional and political
effects of the interplay between military repression and humanitarian aid in the camp
and those of the convergence of policing and security interventions in the minority
district. This paper aims to use these empirical materials and arguments to address
two questions posed by the Political Community Workshop organizers: the question
of political community beyond citizenship and the question of the interplay between
political community and access to scarce resources. The case of the Palestinian urban
minorities draws attention to how stigmatized segments of a citizenry, which are
excluded from the dominant body politic due to their ethnonational (or ethnoracial)
identity, might also be prevented from forming a thriving minority political
community. Similarly, the case of stateless camp dwellers offers some important
insights on the role that military repression and humanitarian aid might play in the
creation of subordinated political communities. The question of access to scarce
material and symbolic resources is also central to the diverging affective and political
trajectories of Palestinian refugees and minority citizens, highlighting how for poor
people the creation of political communities is inextricably linked to the available
survival strategies. To sum up, this paper argues that exploring how different
coercive and humanitarian discourses and practices affect emotional relationships
among subordinate people—for example, shaping whom they trust or distrust and
whom they feel threatened by or have confidence in—is a necessary step toward a
better understanding of the link between survival strategies and political projects,
including the formation of political communities.
9.50
Yoav Peled “Decline of political community and the excluded other:
the erosion of Palestinian citizenship in Israel”
While a Jewish state by self-definition, and therefore not a liberal democracy,
between 1966 and 2000 Israel respected the citizenship rights of its Palestinian
citizens, although not to the same degree as those of its Jewish citizens. Until the
mid-1980s the dominant citizenship discourse in Jewish Israeli political culture
was the civic republican discourse. Based on a corporatist economy centered on
an umbrella labor organization – the Histadrut – it legitimated a virtue-based
community of Jewish solidarity, and mediated between the contradictory
dictates of the two others discourses of citizenship present in the political
culture – the liberal and the ethno-national. Since then, the globalization and
consequent liberalization of the Israeli economy has weakened the republican
discourse and the Jewish political community it sustained. Initially, the liberal
discourse seemed to be the beneficiary of the decline of political community, but
its victory was short-lived, except in the economic sphere.
The decline of Jewish political community had a paradoxical effect on the
citizenship rights of Israel's Palestinian citizens. Initially it provided them with a
wider political space in which to struggle for their rights, but when they began
to use this space in order to demand that the state be transformed from an
ethnic into a liberal (and lately even consociational) democracy, they
encountered fierce Jewish ethno-nationalist reaction. The high (or low) point of
this reaction so far has been a citizenship law that denies the Palestinian citizens
the basic human right of family unification, and that has withstood two
constitutional challenges in the liberal high court. Thus, the decline of Jewish
political community proved detrimental to the interests of its excluded other.
10.10
Discussion
10.50
Tea, coffee and biscuits
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New forms of political community?
11.10
Márton Rövid “On the transcendence of national citizenship in the
light of the case of Roma, an allegedly non-territorial nation”
The Roma are increasingly seen as a group that challenges the principle of
territorial democracy and the Westphalian international order. While diverse in
customs, languages, church affiliations, and citizenship, the Roma can also be
seen as members of a non-territorial nation. One international nongovernmental organization, the International Romani Union, advanced claims
for the recognition of the non-territorial Romani nation and advocated a general
vision in which people are no longer represented on the basis of state. The
manifesto “Declaration of Nation” claims that the Roma have survived for
several centuries as distinct individuals and groups with a strong identity
without creating a nation-state, so therefore, their example could help humanity
find an alternative way to satisfy the need for identity without having to lock it
to territorial boundaries.
The paper studies theories of post-national citizenship in the light of the case of
Roma. What are the empirical preconditions of the transcendence of liberal
nationhood? Under what circumstances can claims of post-national citizenship
be justified? To what extent do transnational social, religious, and ethnic
movements challenge the foundations of the so-called Westphalian international
order, in particular the trinity of state-nation-territory? What forms of political
participation do they claim? Do transnational nations pose a different challenge
to normative political theory than other transnational communities?
By studying the case of Roma, the paper relates the literature on diasporas and
global civil society to cosmopolitan theories thus offering a new typology of
boundary problems. The paper demonstrates that the trinity of state-nationterritory is challenged from all three directions. Trans-state, transnational and
non-territorial forms of solidarity and political action are thriving. Such
developments challenge state-centric liberal, multicultural and nationalist
theories alike. However, these developments in themselves are not sufficient for
the emergence of transnational forms of democracy. On the contrary, by
studying the case of Roma, the paper identifies three dimensions of exclusion:
ethnic stigmatization, social exclusion, and denial of citizenship. These forms of
exclusion may reinforce each other and push the racialized poor and the
racialized stranger to the margins of the polis.
11.30
Sourayan Mookerjea “The politics of community and the
community of politics: Athabaskan Tar Sands Development”
This paper explores how the crises and contradictions of tar sands mining
development in Fort McMurray, Alberta enable us to re-theorize the concept of
community. How are we to assess and understand the prolixity of the rhetoric of
community in this context? Does the incitement of discourses on community in
this instance stand as a symptom of a governmental strategy by now, in the
endgame of neoliberal ascendency, tried and true? Or is there something else at
stake here? After the complications and critiques of the politics of identity and
difference, what lessons regarding class politics do we draw from the crisis of
community in the northern boom-towns of Alberta? Especially in the past five
years, big and small environmental organizations, activists from the First
Nations of Athabasca Chipewyan, Chipewyan Prairie, Fort McKay, Fort
McMurray, and Mikisew Cree, the Alberta Federation of Labour, the Council of
Canadians, to name only a few organizations, have launched public campaigns to
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either reform, slow, scale back or stop tar sand mining. This mobilization has
continued to burst back into flames in ever different situations, beginning with
the National Energy Board hearings regarding the Northern Gateway Pipeline
proposal, opposition to the broad legislative sweeps of the Harper government’s
omnibus bills and most recently with the Idle No More movement. Given this
diversity of social movement organizations and subject positions mobilized,
how do we understand the affinity or alliance that is emerging as a new kind of
politics here, the new form of subjectivity or becoming in common this
development and its social crises brings to life? Bringing into critical
juxtaposition the post-Gramscian and postcolonial theorization of subalternity
with Hardt and Negri’s concept of the multitude, this paper queries the
historical content of the truth that binds political rhetoric enabling various
social movements to act in solidarity in opposing tar sands development, and
interrogates the community of politics that this politics of community seems to
promise. In doing, I argue for the importance of a Utopian social poetics of
mediation to what Boaventura de Sousa Santos has called the project of a
“sociology of absences”.
11.50
Discussion
12.50
Sandwich lunch
Global political community?
1.40
Raul Acosta “Constructive hostilities: dissent, transnational
activism and the ethical imagination”
An aggregation of individuals does not constitute a community, as this entails
some level of intimacy among its members. In much of the literature focused on
social collectives, group solidarity is sought in shared ethnic or religious traits,
or perhaps a common heritage of life in a locality. Those focused on
cosmopolitanism tend to focus on mechanisms through which differences
among individuals may be bridged. Both logics appear to assume positive
attitudes towards those included, and negative to those who are not. The
cosmopolitan effort is thus to extend the net of inclusion. This paper argues that
the conflictive negotiations over what is shared among a community’s members
render a collective political. Discords in political scenarios are usually portrayed
as power struggles, with the class struggle as the best example. Although such
disparities are clear breeding grounds for conflicts, apparently calm situations
among members of a similar status may also originate strong disagreements. It
is open dissent over public affairs that creates a sense of community. The
processes of negotiation over what is shared, either in physical form (such as
territory or goods) or in intangible form (e.g. ideas or symbols), are thus
essential in the making of the community. The form in which dissent is
performed and dealt with in turn shapes the collective. It is a becoming of the
political dimension of social relations within it. Political anthropology has
sought to examine the many forms through which people resolve such matters.
Various ceremonial strategies to channel commotions have been documented in
valuable ethnographies. As contrasting cultural traditions have travelled and are
increasingly interpreted and assimilated, a new political landscape is emerging.
The methodological nationalism that pervades most political analyses is no
longer useful to understand the processes of construction of collectives. Some
identities, as many considered indigenous in Latin America, have become
reinforced and used in political struggles without negating external influences.
What these appear to show is an exercise of an extended ethical imagination,
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seeking to reinvent local political communities while at the same time
collaborating across borders.
2
Gal Levy “An end to political community: the global social protest
and the future of citizenship”
In the last decade or so, it has become more and more prevalent in citizenship
studies that the notion of citizenship is much more encompassing than is the
idea of citizen as a right-bearing member in a political community, namely the
nation-state. The study of citizenship has long left its formal, legal confines and
even the mere investigation of 'who is a citizen?'. It has thus grown from a legal
concept to a rich sociological and political concept, depicting not only ideological
regimes and discourses, but also the power of citizenship as it is enacted by
citizens and non-citizens alike. In this context, the idea of citizenship as merely
as a prerogative of the state, and as a manifestation of state power, has been
replaced by new understanding of 'citizenship beyond the state' (Gordon and
Stack 2007).
On a different level, the notion of community has also taken various faces. More
importantly, with the rise of neo-liberalism and globalisation, and against the
erosion of the notion of national, territorially-bounded societies, 'community'
rose as an alternative 'spatialisation of government' (Rose 1996). This, to cite
Rose further, had had several implications not only on the territory of the
political, but also gave rise to 'anti-political motifs' (Rose 1996: 352).
Consequently, the notion of community, which was partly born against the ills of
modernising societies, turned into another means of government, and an
expression of the weakening of 'the hold of "the social" over our political
imagination' (Rose 1996: 353).
Against this backdrop, and in light of the social protest that swept the world
after the 'Arab Spring' and against the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, it is timely to
ask what does it mean to have or to build a political community at these times,
and what it entails to the future of citizenship in the aftermath of the World
Social Protest.
2.20
Discussion
3
Tea, coffee and biscuits
3.20
Matyas Bodig “States, peoples, communities: the construction of
collective subjectivity in international law (and its political
implications)”
3.40
Nigel Dower “tbc”
4
Discussion
NOTES FOR ATTENDEES
REGISTERING
Space is limited at the workshop so please do register as soon as you can (and let us
know immediately if you change your mind). You should do the following:
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1. Register for the workshop by clicking on:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dFR3ZjYwZFdxTk5IZ
k5VR2JqVGJLaEE6MA
Registration is free and includes tea and coffee, sandwich lunches and a buffet dinner on
Tuesday 25th June. We do ask in return that you commit where possible to attending the
whole workshop.
2. Sign up to the network of the Centre for Citizenship, Civil Society and Rule of Law
(CISRUL) by clicking on:
http://cisrul.ning.com
You should enter a sentence or two about yourself. Some of the workshop papers will be
posted to the network website.
You can also view previous and future CISRUL activities (including PhD studentship) at
www.abdn.ac.uk/cisrul.
ACCOMMODATION
Attendees should email Tracey Connon (t.connon@abdn.ac.uk) to ask about
accommodation options. There are a good number of nice B&Bs that cost £48-60 per
night close to the University in Old Aberdeen, but do book ahead because the workshop
coincides with graduations.
TRAVEL
There are regular direct flights to Aberdeen from most UK cities (British Airways, BMI,
Easy Jet, Eastern Airways) and from Paris and Amsterdam (Air France/KLM). There is
also a very frequent train and bus service from England. A taxi from the airport to Old
Aberdeen, where the University is located, takes 15 minutes and costs around £12; from
the train/bus stations there are buses or a taxi that takes 15 minutes and costs around
£8.
CONTACT
Email Tracey Connon (t.connon@abdn.ac.uk) or phone her on +44 (0)1224 273575.
WORKSHOP LOCATION
The workshop will be held at the beautiful Old Aberdeen campus of the University of
Aberdeen on Tuesday 25th and Wednesday 26th June. It will be held in Committee Room
2 of the University Office, which is marked on the campus map below.
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KEY TO MAP
18. University Offices – where workshop will be held
25. King's College Chapel
28. King’s College entrance (where PhD summer school staff will take the bus on Thursday
morning)
CENTRE FOR CITIZENSHIP, CIVIL SOCIETY AND RULE OF
LAW
The workshop and PhD summer school are hosted by the Centre for Citizenship, Civil
Society and Rule of Law (CISRUL), whose mission is to produce conversation across
the social sciences and humanities on key concepts of the modern polity. Citizenship,
civil society and rule of law are three such key concepts, all three of some pedigree but
enjoying a new lease of life, prescribed by bodies such as IMF and United Nations,
championed by social movements, and debated in the media and in academic research,
although we are also interested in related notions such as democracy, human rights,
multiculturalism and pluralism. We are distinguished by:
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


our conceptual approach, which contrasts with the often uncritical adoption of
citizenship, civil society and rule of law as catch-all slogans or as fix-all solutions;
instead we ask searching questions about the concepts themselves, less to define
them more clearly than to consider how they get deployed in practice
our serious inter-disciplinary commitment, which goes beyond occasional
encounters to aim at full engagement between up to 8 or 9 disciplines, in which
we take time to learn the premises of each other’s disciplines in order to
understand each other
our global and historical reach that includes but goes beyond the usual focus on
contemporary Europe and North America, looking at medieval and early modern
Europe but also a range of contexts across Latin America, Africa and Asia.
We also offer PhD studentships and would be grateful if you could draw them to the
attention of promising, inter-disciplinary Masters students.
Our interest in political community runs through two other CISRUL activities which
are detailed on the website:
1. Citizenship Education forum and project
We held a forum for parents, teachers and researchers on 22-23 March 2013 to launch a
project designed to improve the delivery of education for citizenship, working closely
with schoolteachers, NGOs, and local and national government. The next stage will be a
larger conference in 2014, prior to writing classroom materials and/or making policy
recommendations. The project is relevant in that citizenship education is arguably all
about building a political community, and conversely political community comes sharply
into focus when looking at citizenship education.
2. Politics of Oil & Gas in a Changing UK public conference
Follow the link on the website for a detailed summary and audio recordings of the sessions.
We held a major public conference on 8-9 May 2013 that focused on the politics of oil
and gas but which has at its heart difficult questions about political community. To begin
with, in 2014 Scottish voters face a referendum on whether they remain citizens of the
United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Their understanding of the
political economy of oil and gas is likely to play a significant part in how they decide
their future. But Scottish independence – with its obvious ramifications for political
community - is only one of many decisions to be made about the future of hydrocarbons,
and whether Scotland is independent or not, they are decisions that need to be taken.
Public debate of the many aspects of this looming future is scarce, almost as if the future
was inevitable or we were unable to influence it. Many decisions are being left to
lawyers, government, experts or the market. As well as staging a public debate, the aim
of the conference was to reflect theoretically on the dynamics of political community
when valuable resources are at stake.
Information about all our activities, including our PhD studentships, is available
at www.abdn.ac.uk/cisrul
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