CFP: Citizenship and Global Inequality (Moral Philosophy and Politics (Special Issue))

CFP: Special Issue of Moral Philosophy and Politics on “Citizenship and Global
Inequality”
Edited by Daniel Sharp (University of Vienna)
Citizenship has an ambivalent status in egalitarian thought. On the one hand, citizenship is often connected to equality (Marshall 1950; Mason 2012; Sharp 2023). The demand for equal citizenship has been central for egalitarian social movements. Although full social equality has not been achieved, and racial and gender exclusions remain a part of contemporary citizenship regimes, the struggle for genuinely equal citizenship, understood as equality of social, civil, and political rights and opportunities, remains central to emancipatory political struggles. On the other hand, citizenship also serves as an instrument of social closure (Brubaker 1992). It plays a key role in maintaining global distributive inequalities of wealth, income, and opportunity by confining people to lowincome states where their economic prospects are limited. Citizenship has thus been criticized by both distributive egalitarians for its deeply inegalitarian global role (Carens 1987; Shachar 2009) and by theorists of global justice who emphasise that the global inequalities correlated with one’s citizenship deny some conditions of sufficiency or result in the violation their basic rights.
There is thus a marked tension between the moral and political ideal of equal citizenship, viewed from the perspective of a single society, and the reality of citizenship as an exclusionary engine of global inequality, viewed from the global perspective. What should we make of the institution of citizenship and of equal citizenship as a moral and political ideal in light of this tension? How should we understand citizenship’s dual role, as a badge of civic equality, on the one hand, and as a mechanism for preserving global inequality, on the other? Might citizenship regimes be reformed in ways that limit their globally inegalitarian functions (Shachar 2009), or are these functions so essential to citizenship that we should abolish the status itself (Kochenov 2019)?
This special issue aspires to explore these issues. In so doing, the aim is to collect work that fills important research gaps. For example, although there is a burgeoning literature on citizenship’s role in cementing and maintaining global hierarchies in law (Kochenov 2019), sociology (Harpaz 2019, Kalm 2020, Boatcă 2016), and economics (Milanovic 2016), this debate has often remained disconnected from other discussions in citizenship studies: for example, debates about statelessness (but see Kochenov 2024), naturalization, and refugee protection. Moreover, few attempts have been made to systematize both the varieties of global inequality that citizenship plays a role in preserving—from passport apartheid to global spatial inequalities, on the one hand, to colonial and racial hierarchies, on the other—and to bring these phenomenon into dialog with broader theories of global justice. As a result, discussions of citizenship and global inequality have often remained in their disciplinary confines and important connections have been missed between those examining citizenship and inequality from different disciplinary perspectives. On the one hand, the work of sociologists (Kalm 2020, Harpaz 2020), economists (Milanovic 2016), and legal scholars (Kochenov 2019) writing on citizenship and global inequality work has not received sufficient uptake among political philosophers. On the other hand, empirically-minded scholars who discuss citizenship and global inequality often do so without detailed normative and moral evaluations of these inequalities and without developing detailed proposals for what sort of institutional transformations are called for to redress these inequalities. Work that develops concrete institutional or policy proposals for how to redress citizenship-based global inequalities is thus, with a few notable exceptions, largely absent from the debate.

This special issue thus aims to bridge these gaps and bring together different disciplinary
perspectives on citizenship and global inequality. We are particularly interested in contributions that explore the following topics:
1. The relationship between the egalitarian and inegalitarian dimensions of citizenship: How should we conceptualize and evaluate the egalitarian and inegalitarian dimensions of citizenship? How are these different dimensions related? What is the best way to conceive of the domestically egalitarian role of citizenship? Is this role undermined by citizenship’s inegalitarian role, and if so, in what respect(s)? How should we conceive of the relationship between domestic and global inequality, and how might different answers to this question shed new light on the nature and function of citizenship?
2. Evaluating and understanding citizenship inequalities: How should we understand and normatively evaluate various forms of global inequality, and how closely are these inequalities related to citizenship as a legal status? What (if anything) is specifically problematic about citizenship equalities? Is the objection to (e.g.) passport apartheid egalitarian in nature, or is the objection better understood as concerning the violation of people’s mobility rights? Is it helpful to view citizenship inequality through the prism of unjust inheritance (Shachar 2009)? If not, what is an alternative way to understand it? How are citizenship inequalities connected to other forms of global inequality, such as racial or postcolonial inequalities?
3. Measuring and studying citizenship inequalities: What might philosophical theories contribute to the quantitative study of citizenship inequality (see, e.g., Milanovic’s (2016) notion of a citizenship rent or Kochenov’s Quality of Nationality Index) or qualitative study (see, e.g., Harpaz 2019) of global citizenship inequality? What kinds of citizenship-based inequalities should social scientists be measuring? Conversely, what can engagement with such empirical work teach political philosophers about citizenship? How can it inform (e.g.) debates about inequality and global justice?
4. Responding to citizenship inequalities, citizenship abolition and alternatives to citizenship: What sorts of institutional and political responses are required to reconcile the ideal of equal citizenship and the actually-existing institution of citizenship? What sorts of institutional reform might be required to address citizenship’s globally inegalitarian role? Is, for example, “global citizenship” a viable alternative to national citizenship? What about regional forms of citizenship (e.g. European Union citizenship)? Would a redistributive response, such as a citizenship levy or tax, be justified (Shachar 2009; Dumitru 2012)? If so, how might such a policy be designed? Does selling citizenship offend against equality or provide a reasonable pathway to status change? Does allowing multiple citizenship create problematic transnational inequalities (Tanasoca 2018) or is it largely unproblematic (Carens 2013; Spiro 2019)? Is citizenship abolition (Kochenov
2020) a tenable philosophical position? If so, how would (if at all) an abolitionist approach regulate membership, residence, and the distribution of political rights? If not, what kinds of reform can address the problems identified by citizenship abolitionists?
5. Citizenship policy and global inequality: How might taking global inequality seriously transform our view about various aspects of citizenship policy? What concrete implications does the fact of global inequality have for debates about naturalisation, citizenship testing, integration requirements, denationalisation, the social rights connected to citizenship, citizenship sales, or related aspects of citizenship policy?
We especially encourage submissions that engage closely with other disciplines outside philosophy and also welcome submissions by authors from other disciplines interested in bringing their work to bear on existing philosophical debates. Note that authors interested in submitting to the special issue should be sure that their submission focuses on the connection between citizenship and global inequality in particular, rather than the many other empirical and philosophical debates concerning migration and inequality. For questions about whether your paper fits within the purview of the special issue, please contact the guest editor ([email protected]).
Submission Deadline: November 1, 2026.

Submissions should no more than 10,000 words. All submissions will undergo MOPP’s double-blind refereeing process. Papers will only be accepted for publication if they are approved for publication by both the guest editor and the journal’s founding editors. Accepted papers must follow the journal’s style requirements. The journal’s manuscript submission site can be accessed at http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/mopp