Tuesday, June 18, 2013

Prof. Ayelet Shachar has been awarded the inaugural Chapter Award of the Migration and Citizenship section of the American Political Science Association. She received the award for her chapter on “Citizenship” in the Oxford Handbook of Comparative Constitutional Law. Here is the citation by the selection committee:

The committee unanimously selected Ayelet Shachar’s chapter on “Citizenship,” in the Oxford Handbook of Comparative Constitutional Law as the first recipient. Her chapter provides not only a highly readable synthesis of the state-of-the-art on citizenship, but more importantly gives a critical and convincing account of the multidimensional nature of the concept of citizenship. Shachar deals particularly with the membership side of citizenship, discussing access to the status via birthright or naturalization, yet also takes into account the gradual disconnection between rights and status, through such innovations as European Union citizenship and the extension of voting rights to resident non-citizens and non-resident citizens. However, crucially, she avoids falling in the cosmopolitan trap of seeing these developments as a linear process towards some form of postnationalism. Rather, Shachar concludes that ‘it is too early to bid citizenship farewell.’ Citizenship may be changing in scope and scale, yet remains a crucial emancipatory instrument, ‘one of the finest institutions, to date, that we have created to justly govern our collective affairs and individual freedoms.’