Citizenship

Dimitry Kochenov is Professor of EU Constitutional Law at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. He has held visiting appointments and fellowships, among other places, at Princeton University (LAPA), the College of Europe (Natolin), the Universty of Turin, NYU Law School (Emile Noël Fellow), and the Institute for Global Studies (Basel). He has served as a consultant for governments, law firms, and international institutions, including the Maltese Republic, the Kingdom of the Netherlands, and the European Parliament. He is the author of EU Enlargement and the Failure of Conditionality.

"[A] spirited contribution to the MIT Press’s Essential Knowledge series. Kochenov sees the institution of citizenship, not its byproduct of statelessness, as the real problem. He does not hold back his disdain, defining citizenship as ‘a heritage glorifying servility, racism, sexism, and arbitrary exclusion,’ a tool for ‘simplifying the world’ and ‘rendering people governable,’ a gateway to complacency, intellectual laziness, and oppressive categorizations. Statelessness is a problem only because of how unequal and arbitrary the institution of citizenship is to begin with: it is assigned at birth and seldom earned, so most people never have a say in it. Further, the ‘mythology of the equality of different nationalities’ only makes things worse: it leads us to believe that any citizenship should be sufficient for meeting the needs of individuals."  –The New York Review of Books"Kochenov's book should be a wake-up call for constitutional and international theorists and practitioners to promote an agenda for redefining citizenship as well as the structures governing it." –International Journal of Constitutional Law