The Importance Of Citizenship

Citizenship, in popular consciousness, exists as a legal term to refer to a person’s identification with some nation-state, the presence of which endows them with specific rights and responsibilities enjoyed and borne by the country’s citizens. Simply, it is a legal contract: By being born in some place or inheriting status from one’s family, people live within the confines of what rights their history afforded and toil under the confines of their given duties. However, as the seven articles from the special issue on citizenship of the Journal of Community & Applied Social Psychology demonstrate, citizenship is not merely an agreement between the individual and the state but also a form of identification that individuals can be given or denied. Citizenship is a fundamental human right—yet in the social psychology of political behavior, it is a negotiable aspect of one’s identity.

Smaller and Smaller Circles:

That is, though people may identify and present themselves as exemplars of success in their own professions, other individuals may come to view them instead on an irrelevant dimension such as ethnicity. Such conclusion was made to surface in these researches by considering that European countries have considered immigration as a significant issue over the past years, and that “pure-blood” European citizens may reject these immigrants’ granted citizenship. Essentially, these ingroup-outgroup distinctions deny immigrants of their legitimate citizenships by emphasizing psychological differences while obscuring political similarities. “You may be European,” the purists may say, “but you are still a Muslim.” As if “Muslim” refers to a specific nation-state, and not a multinational network of people who subscribe to the religious