Securitising Citizenship: (B)ordering Practices and Strategies of Resistance

This article builds upon Yasemin Soysal's early work on post-national citizenship as constituting sites of resistance in contemporary European politics. Post-national citizenship provides every person with the right and duty of participation in the authority structures and public life of a polity, regardless of their historical ties to that community. This celebration of human rights as a world-level organising principle is, however, constantly challenged by liberal discourses and practices aimed to securitise identities and citizenships through the bordering of space, place and identities. Proceeding from a critical take on securitisation, we propose that in addition to a focus on the exceptional and on elite speech acts, we need to recognise that it is through everyday practices that people engage in (de)securitising strategies and practices that both rely upon and contest notions of belonging and borders. We exemplify by looking at two (diverse) minority communities in Britain and Canada that have been securitised at transnational, national and local levels, and study the extent to which we can see evidence of everyday resistance through the explicit or implicit use of desecuritising strategies. In both settings, the communities we study are young Muslims.