This book presents a clear and comprehensive overview of citizenship, exploring its historical and conceptual origins, its contemporary dilemmas and its emancipatory potential for the future.

This book presents a comprehensive and authoritative overview of citizenship, which has become one of the most important political ideas of our time. It is contended that citizenship has great emancipatory potential as an egalitarian status which recognises both the rights to which we are entitled and the responsibilities upon which stable governance rests. For this potential to be fulfilled, however, Faulks argues that citizenship must be freed from its close association in modernity with the state and the market, which in practice has undermined the significance of our rights and responsibilities. In advancing a postmodern theory of citizenship this work addresses such topical questions as: Can citizenship exist without the nation-state? What should the balance be between our rights and responsibilities? Should we enjoy group as well as individual rights? Is citizenship relevant to our private as well as our public lives? Have processes of globalisation rendered citizenship redundant?

The idea of citzenship
citizenship and the nation-state
rights and responsibilities
pluralism and difference
enhancing citizenship
citizenship in a global age.