Refusing citizenship is a unique process of politicization, where marginalized subjects make inequality visible through gathering and protest

By politicisation, I mean a process of political subjectification where subjects excluded from the institutional world direct attention to their situation and, through public action, bring visibility to the inequalities and injustices permeating this world (see Rancière, 1999). Politicisation, therefore, like the category of noncitizenship, confronts relations of power and inequality, presupposes agency and involves practice. In particular, subjects who politicise seek to challenge the established order. They bring into view the power dynamics behind this order – its closures, injustices and inequalities; and, in so doing, they openly unsettle these. Although it can be credibly objected here that the noncitizens (the poor, excluded, marginalised) are not always in a position to politicise and confront the power order – and this alone reveals the force of noncitizenship as an analytical category; it can be argued that noncitizenship, much like the concept of politicisation in this sense, promises something more than a comprehensive exposé of the inequalities perforating a given power order. It promises citizenisation. Citizenisation involves political subjectification – as is the case with politicisation. At the same time, politicisation, like citizenisation or noncitizenship for that matter, gains momentum through references to a variety of scripts, from ‘justice’ and ‘equality’ to even ‘citizenship’ – and this means that either sections of society politicise to give visibility to the position/demands of those who cannot, or the excluded and marginalised subjectify and politicise. Therefore, the point here is that there is significant overlap between the concepts of politicisation and noncitizenship when it comes to matters of subjectification and counter-power. There is also overlap with respect to practice. 15 Politicisation is practice, for subjects politicise against or for something– for example, by setting up a sit-in, a protest, an occupation etc. In fact, political protests (against the state) can be seen as exemplary moments of politicisation, where the binary citizen/noncitizen becomes redundant. In particular, what makes protests exemplary moments of politicisation (at least in the way I use the term here) is their public nature – the publicity, connection, openness and generality that they encase. Protests publicise exclusion X; they make it visible. They are public events and this means that they both reach out to the public and draw in (the support of) the public – broadly understood. At the same time, public protests are sites of assembling. They gather the people together and, in this gathering, it makes little difference who is the citizen and who is not, or who initiated the protest and who did not. What matters is that protests remain open and, as a result of this openness, demands flesh out, intermesh and expand. More than that, the openness of the protests compounded by the indeterminacy of the subject ‘people’ as a democratic actor has the additional effect of drawing sharper attention to the political demand or claim eliciting the protest. This is where, in the end, the greatest difference between the concepts of politicisation and noncitizenship lies: in their telos. Whereas the telos of politicisation, say in the case of public protests to stay with the same example, is to have the particular (series of) demands or claims met in the here and now – thus it has a rather limited, provisional, target that does not always or necessarily coincide with an expansion of rights; the telos of the category of noncitizenship is often, inadvertently, citizenship – and, this implicitly enfolds the aspiration to expand on existing rights.