Citizenship

Contextual Quote

"Citizenship is a racist and sexist status of randomised violent segregation of the world population into relatively closed groups of varying objective value from the point of view of individual rights (Kochenov 2019). Some come with far-reaching rights – others with liabilities. Both are significant both in real life and in the cloud. If someone is assigned a humiliating set of liabilities in real life, say, a Central African Republic citizenship, instead of a noble and democratic status boosting one’s rights, say the citizenship of France, cloud communities will not change that, unless the distinction between being assigned to CAR as opposed to France is thereby undermined, and based on Orgad’s suggestion it won’t be. The ‘real life’ problem thus derives from real life inequalities between citizenships as bundles of rights and liabilities. It is not only that citizenships by definition exclude. It is the difference between different citizenships that matters. As long as these two premises persist in shaping our day-to-day reality, a ‘global’ cloud community is a meaningless proposition for those who hold inferior citizenships, reinforcing the gaps between CAR citizens and the French.

Citizenship’s core function throughout history, alongside sexism and a deep exclusion of women, has been to establish and police global race- and wealth-based hierarchies of opportunities and rights, while providing an impenetrable and punishing noble façade of equality and self-determination."

- Dimitri Kochenov [1]