The conference organisers have divided the presentations into three interrelated activities: struggles over recognition and justice; new modalities of democratic freedom and citizenship; and the relationship between academic research and practices of citizenship. I would like to say a few things about each of these three themes.
I believe that we can acquire a broader and deeper understanding of the character of democratic freedom and citizenship by reflecting on the struggles over recognition and justice that have taken place in the global north and south since Decolonization and the Cold War; struggles that are the diverse manifestation of democratic citizenship. And, this new understanding of practices of democratic freedom and citizenship brings along with it a new way of thinking about the reciprocal dialogical relationship between them and academic research.
At the heart of my presentation is the hypothesis that if citizenship is conceived exclusively as either the status one has relative to national and international institutional structures of law or as representative participation and public reason within these structures, then practices of citizenship (citizens engaged in civic activities) run up against incapacitating limits (aka low intensity democracy). However, if we survey how citizens have challenged and responded to these limits on the exercise of their democratic response-abilities, we can see the emergence and proliferation of alternative ways of being citizens that challenge the adequacy of the institutional structures and the theories developed around them. These alternatives ways of being citizens and acting together – from Gandhi’s satyagraha to food sovereignty and the Egyptian Spring - give us a deeper and broader understanding of the underlying characteristics of democratic citizenship in its countless manifestations and how to study them.
As Hannah Arendt pointed out in On Violence (1969), these underlying characteristics of ‘acting in concert’ are overlooked or misconstrued if citizenship is approached exclusively through the dominant institutions and their traditions of interpretation. However, given the multiplicity of practices of democratic citizenship both within and around the institutional structures for the contemporary practice of citizenship since 1969, and the equally impressive interdisciplinary research on this complex phenomenon in the global south and north, I think we have learned from yet also moved beyond Arendt’s important analysis in 1969 in certain respects.
These complex themes and their connections will be discussed throughout the conference. I would like to begin simply by saying a few things about these themes as I have introduced them here and in Public Philosophy in a New Key.
 

In this communication I wish to move beyond a paralysing ‘either’/‘or’ perspective that informs much debate on power/knowledge and representation. I will draw on a study of history textbooks in the Portuguese context, and most particularly on narratives of the period leading to the 1974 Revolution, to examine the ways in which so-called ‘other views’/perspectives are ‘included’. I conclude by arguing for the need to look at Eurocentrism in democratic systems in order to unravel the subtleties through which it is being reproduced and to challenge the (comfortable) idea that we have just ‘not yet’ eliminated racism.

I have in the past proposed a stakeholder principle for citizenship inclusion as an alternative to: (1) prepolitical inclusion criteria such as ethnonational identities, (2) a principle of associative self-determination, (3) a principle of including all affected interests, and (4) a principle of including all subjected to coercive legislation. I have defined stakeholding as an interest in membership in the polity that is grounded in biographical facts that link an individual’s autonomy and well-being to collective self-government and the common good of the polity concerned. I want to argue now that what it means to be a stakeholder depends not only on the strength of these links, but also on the nature of the polity. I will consider substate entities (municipalities or provinces), independent states, and the European Union as three different types of polities and will argue that they differ with regard to their normative principles for citizenship inclusion. Substate polities are communities of co-residents, independent state polities are intergenerational communities, and the supranational EU is a derivative polity constituted by its member states. Each of these polities ought to have its distinct rules for residential, intergenerational and derivative citizenship inclusion and together they form a normatively attractive multilevel polity that combines these three citizenship regimes. The actual constitution of the EU approaches this model only imperfectly. However, reform proposals that entail abandoning the multiplicity of interconnected citizenship regimes in the EU seem to me a step backwards. Instead, we should explore the potential of this model for answering to concerns about misrecognition of membership claims.

This paper will discuss a central dilemma facing liberal theory with regard to the place of religion within the modern public sphere. One the hand, there is a general acknowledgment that excluding religious voices from public debate treats religious citizens unfairly or at least places a heavier burden on them than secular citizens. Consequently, from Rawls’ proviso to Habermas’ post secularism there has been an attempt to include religious citizens as a matter of fairness. On the other hand, many still think that it is inappropriate for religious reasons to justify coercive law in liberal democracies. Legitimacy requires that such reasons be excluded from the public justification or public reason that underwrites legitimate law making. We appear to be left with a trade off. Strongly inclusive views that are primarily concerned with respect among and between citizens must be satisfied with a weak conception of legitimacy. Views that seek to articulate a strong conception of legitimacy almost always need a restrictive view of public reason that excludes at least some religious views that citizens might hold. This paper will seek a solution to this trade off.

One of the most striking developments in global politics in recent years has been the rise of the discourse of human rights and the slow (yet often fleeting) emergence of transnational modes of governance and rights protection. Thus cosmopolitan or postnational citizenship is the idea that citizenship is defined by one’s membership not in any particular political community (and therefore vulnerable to being revoked or denied according to particularist considerations), but by one’s membership in ‘humanity’ or some kind of postnational political order. But for postnational or cosmopolitan citizenship to be meaningful it must be the case that cosmopolitan norms of justice are both binding outside of the state and authoritative within it. They can’t simply be imposed on the basis of pre-given philosophical authority (either via God or Kant or whomever), but must appeal to some notion of democratic self-determination. Our universal ethics must be reconciled with the particularity of democratic authority and law. At the very least, the validity of cosmopolitan norms of justice must be grasped from within the perspective of the demos in some way. But here we face some difficult questions: Why and how would the demos incorporate those norms? How do we mediate between the seemingly unavoidable boundedness of democratic authority and the universal values associated with cosmopolitan justice?

The paper explores what epistemic injustice is, how previously colonized countries and internally colonized groups within countries such as India suffered from these injustices, how they must respond to these injustices, what an alternative epistemic 'regime' might look like, and why new political imaginaries depend on an adequate response to these injustices.

Historically speaking, Latin American Constitutions have been the object of two alternative legal interpretations. During many decades (and in many cases still until today), a conservative reading of the Constitution prevailed, which had profound consequences in the most diverse areas of the law: religion; privacy rights; freedom of expression and association; the separation of powers; etc. According to this reading of the Constitution, individual rights found their (strict) limits in the requirements of the dominant "public morality" (i.e., Catholicism). This view also favored the gradual centralization of power and the expansion of the powers of the Executive authority. According to a different, liberal reading of the Constitutions rights were seen as individual, universal and unconditional; and the authority of both the Legislative and Executive powers recognized significant limits. This reading of the Constitution, however, advanced a counter-majoritarian understanding of the Constitution and found significant problems for recognizing social and collective rights, in general. In my presentation, I want to ground and defend a different, more radical reading of the Constitution, and explore its scope and implications regarding the understanding of rights and the organization of power.

For most of the last two centuries, it has been thought that the idea of constitutionalism – defined in its traditionalist liberal rendering – would be sufficient to encompass meaningful citizenship. In other words, that notions of equal protection and anti-discrimination in a free market economy would realize the potential of citizenship within the state. But human privation, even in so-called advanced democracies, has proven this assumption to be untrue at worst, and incomplete, at best. While the state remains an important locus for contesting the construction of citizenship, the borders of the modern state have both normatively and practically began to wither away. Citizenship is now a moving target – perhaps it has always been so. To be sure, many human beings still find community in the old idea of patriotism, but many more are moving away from that narrow definition. Nationalism has lost its once powerful purchase. So has liberal theory and philosophy. Nor can we count on the idea of constitutionalism to rescue this void. In spite of the so-called Arab Awakening, the clamor is not just one for an accountable state.
There are overarching global concerns that have a large bearing on the reconstruction of citizenship. Global warming is a case in point. Huge migration flows from the South to the North are another. The unveiling of the state – as the opaque instrumentality of the elites – threatens to overwhelm the umbilical alliance between business and the state. The latest crisis of capitalism, and the near meltdown of the United States economy, unhinged many assumptions about the security and stability of modern states. Civil societies are poised to play a larger role in redefining the notion of citizenship across borders. But even they are undergoing profound transformation from elite-based and boardroom driven to mass social movements. The Internet has taken away the power of the narrow elite to control information, mobilization, and governance. These forces are coming together to create a new world and to scramble old and comfortable notions of citizenship. The bottom line is that we have to think beyond our comfort zones. What is evolving as citizenship will depend on how thinkers and grassroots mobilizers fashion theory and practice. Whatever the case, the state – and its central role – will continue to shrink as the citizen becomes a larger figure. In what communities will the new citizen be encased? These are enormous challenges, and that is why this conference is so crucial.

The crisis of social regulation in our time is linked to the crisis of social emancipation. As neoliberal capitalism seeks to destroy or erode the repertoires of rights and institutions through which non-mercantile relationships were built in capitalist societies throughout the twentieth century, it may be speculated that in coming years social struggles for social justice and social inclusion will take non-institutional or extra-institutional courses of action. Rebellious collective actions or revolutionary uprisings bring about partial inversions of hierarchies and forms of social inclusion as well as the breakdown of institutional arrangements which, even if momentary, may have an enduring impact on the subsequent reinstitutionalization of society and on the horizon of citizenship possibilities which are thereby opened up.