MOBILE – Mobility Law Open Lab with Dimitry Kochenov

Victims of Citizenship: Feudal Statuses for Sale in the Hypocrisy Republic

Guest presenter: Professor Dimitry Vladimirovich Kochenov leads the Rule of Law Working Group at CEU Democracy Institute in Budapest and teaches at CEU Department of Legal Studies in Vienna. This year he has inter alia been awarded a EUR 1M grant from Stiftung Mercator to establish Clinical Rule of Law work at CEU. Prof. Kochenov's research focuses on the principles of law in the global context, with a special emphasis on the Rule of Law, citizenship, and the enforcement of EU values. His latest monograph, Citizenship (MIT 2019), has been translated into several languages and reviewed in NYRB. His latest edited volumes are Citizenship and Residence Sales, with K.Surak, LSE (Cambridge 2023) and Research Handbook on the Politics of Constituional Law, with M.Tushent, Harvard (EE, 2023) He taught citizenship worldwide from Princeton and Oxford to Rome, UNAM and the College of Europe and advised governments and international organizations on the matters of his academic interest.

Presentation: Professor Dimitry Vladimirovich Kochenov will introduce the concept of ‘victims of citizenship’, encompassing the majority of the world’s population for whom citizenship is a set of liabilities and obstacles rather than a bundle of rights, who are caged in spaces of no opportunity by border-crossing and visa rules designed to keep them out of the ‘First World’, and who thus find themselves on the ‘other side’ of the concept of citizenship, with its racist Western façade of equality, political self-determination and rights.

The global status quo that citizenship is there to perpetuate does not work in the victims’ favour: they are kept out for others to be ‘free’. The whole point of citizenship is to perpetuate the victims of citizenship exclusion from dignity and rights without any justification defensible in terms of the values officially underpinning any modern constitutional system: a passport apartheid.

In the majority of cases the status of citizenship worldwide is conferred by blood: dividing the world into a global aristocracy and the rest. Citizenship is sold to those among its victims who can afford it; and for the absolute majority of those not victimised by it, there is no need to buy. The path to the sale of citizenship is thus paved with the status’s conflicted nature. This includes: the hypocrisy and randomness underpinning contemporary citizenship as a legal carte blanche for the exclusion of its victims, rich and poor; citizenship’s consequential nature in terms of the unequal random distribution of rights and liabilities in the world based on the pre-modern principle of blood aristocracy; and the ongoing rights transformation leading to the rise in the prestige of personhood in constitutional parlance, as citizenship’s double and rival. Marketisation is helped by the uneven pace in the growth of global wealth when compared to the dynamics of the quality of particular citizenship statuses. Simultaneously, the same processes allow the normative compatibility of citizenship with the ideals alleged to underpin contemporary constitutionalism to be called into question as such.

Time: 8 September 2023 13:00-14:15

Place: MOBILE – meeting room 6B-2-22 Southern Campus

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