Democratizing citizenship. On the tension between radical democracy and citizenship

The premise of this project is the observation that classical accounts of citizenship – focusing on citizenship as a status or habitus – fail to take note of political actors that appropriate the language of citizenship outside of the dominant institutions of citizenship. This is why this project will take cue from Étienne Balibar and Engin Isin: according to these philosophers, we should stop thinking of citizenship as a status that is (or is not) conferred upon individuals by a state because of the particular community they belong to, but as something that is, in the form of political struggles, collectively claimed (Balibar) or enacted (Isin). Moreover, this project will argue that Balibar and Isin take account of extra-institutional citizenship practices because they think of citizenship practices as democratic practices. However, since they conceive of democracy not as a regime, but as the process of 'the democratization of democracy', we are confronted with a tension between democracy (as a force that is always in excess of political institutions) and the institution of citizenship. In order to work through this tension, this project will turn to radical democratic interpreters of Machiavelli, demonstrating that (a) citizenship is an important worksite of the democratization of democracy and (b) democracy – as a force of political transformation – should not necessarily endanger the institution of citizenship.