Data-Driven Citizenship Regimes in Contemporary Urban Scenarios: An Introduction

This Special Issue presents new perspectives on the idea of digital citizenship by delving into the nexus between its emerging concepts, the consequences of the global pandemic crisis, and the urban environment. It does so by addressing a wide range of case studies from three continents and developing two main hypotheses. First, the COVID-19 outbreak has expanded the impact of digital technologies on citizens' everyday life. Second, the urban realm is the environment where new citizenship regimes are emerging through platformization, datafication, and the rescaling of the state. To introduce the Special Issue, this article: (i) examines recent scholarship about the effects of the pandemic on digital citizenship;(ii) discusses and expands concepts of digital citizenship through case studies;and (iii) assesses how emerging forms of digital citizenship are fostered by uneven ‘pandemic citizenship' regimes worldwide.

Re-imagining the nation-state: An impetus from the pandemic.

In this article the positive lessons from the coronavirus pandemic are examined, focusing on the intensive activities of solidarity at the local, national, and transnational levels, the increase in scientific cooperation, the implementation of assistance policies by states, and the various endeavors of NGOs, religious communities, private organizations, wealthy and less wealthy donors, and charities to support individuals and groups affected by it. It is argued that the pandemic is not only a tragedy that revealed some of the disintegrative processes of global risk society but is also a matchless opportunity for acknowledging what can be (and is) done in the globalized world when guided by positives such as cooperation, coordination, and solidarity. Discussing the theories of globalization, nationalism, and cosmopolitanism, with special attention to Ulrich Beck's theory of reflexive society, the core point of this article is that, considering upcoming global threats of even greater magnitude, such as climate change, potentially deadlier pandemics, and nuclear conflicts, a new world order based on cooperation, coordination and solidarity between nation-states is not only desirable but necessary for survival.

Emotions against images. Motive and meaning of symbolic attacks towards 19th Century sculptures. Pre-democratic action?

In the 21st century and especially during the Covid-19 pandemic, a wave of attacks against sculptures whose past revealed colonialism, racism or slave exploitation erupted in Europe and America. The attacks evidenced the persistence of a monumental heritage that represented symbols of oppression, and that questioned the representation of human rights. This study explores several historical backgrounds and current cases to analyze the nature and underlying motives of this type of symbolic vandalism. © GKA Ediciones, authors.

Data-Driven Citizenship Regimes in Contemporary Urban Scenarios: An Introduction

This Special Issue presents new perspectives on the idea of digital citizenship by delving into the nexus between its emerging concepts, the consequences of the global pandemic crisis, and the urban environment. It does so by addressing a wide range of case studies from three continents and developing two main hypotheses. First, the COVID-19 outbreak has expanded the impact of digital technologies on citizens’ everyday life. Second, the urban realm is the environment where new citizenship regimes are emerging through platformization, datafication, and the rescaling of the state. To introduce the Special Issue, this article: (i) examines recent scholarship about the effects of the pandemic on digital citizenship;(ii) discusses and expands concepts of digital citizenship through case studies;and (iii) assesses how emerging forms of digital citizenship are fostered by uneven ‘pandemic citizenship’ regimes worldwide. [ FROM AUTHOR]

Sustainable Statehood: Reflections on Critical (Pre-)Conditions, Requirements and Design Options

Thirty years after the seminal UN conference on environment and development, where the global agenda for sustainable development was agreed upon by the international community, uncountable initiatives in public policy, business and civil society have been activated. Despite all efforts, pressure on life-supporting Earth systems remain on an ecologically, socially and economically unsustainable pathway. Global collective action for sustainable development has so far been insufficient regarding the scientifically well-diagnosed need for substantial transformation. Given that the world remains a world of nation states, notwithstanding processes of globalization and transnationalization, internationalization and subnationalization, the quest for sustainable statehood is of utmost importance. Based on the expectations of nation states expressed in the UN Transformation Agenda 2030, it is argued that underlying and cross-cutting structures, procedures and instruments of statehood, which precede decision-making processes and policy-making in specific fields of sustainable development, such as climate change or biodiversity, are of key relevance. In this regard critical requirements and (pre-)conditions for sustainable statehood are discussed and design options for sustainable statehood in the Anthropocene are proposed.

Negotiating Sovereignty in German History—Historiographical Challenges

This article introduces a special issue on the politics of sovereignty in German history. Historical work provides an important corrective to understand the current discursive resurgence of sovereignty. Historians (and other scholars) should treat sovereignty not as a factual description of the world, but rather analyze it as a rhetorical claim to assert power in territorial, political, economic, legal, and cultural disputes. Much of the power of sovereignty lies in the power to define its boundaries, whether geographical or conceptual. German history offers a particularly fruitful route to historicize the concept, as Germany is arguably both a paradigmatic and a special case in the history of sovereignty. From late-nineteenth-century colonialism to contemporary disputes around gambling restrictions, German discourse on sovereignty has intertwined with and challenged international understandings of sovereignty together with neighboring concepts, such as independence, autonomy, supreme authority, and control. In the twentieth century, perhaps no country experienced stronger affirmations of both sovereignty and the necessity to integrate into inter- and supranational structures than the country at the center of the two world wars and subsequently divided during the Cold War.

Covid-19, Risk and the Global Society of Mask

Proximity has become our Achilles heel. We live in a global, tightly networked world whose keyword is "safety gap"! Individuals, families, communities, cities, states, and countries will keep their distance from each other. The use of masks has become a kind of metaphor to depict a wide-ranging of hazards and our human insecurity in the middle of this global chaos. Not in vain: 3 million loss of human beings and 30 trillion USD financial loss only in 2020 is only part of the Covid-19 pandemic cost calculation. We are in the face of the most fundamental questions of sociology: Trust, which is the cornerstone of our social life, is threatened. The epidemic has roots in human lifestyles and choices as well as in decision-making. Thus, the concepts of risk and risk society have become more relevant. This paper discusses this reality in dialogue with the risk society literature and utilizing facts related to the pandemic in a global sphere. The purpose is to perceive how a global risk society is formed around the pandemic and how normative choices, rational measures, and expert solutions will lead to an additional sense of insecurity.

Inhabiting the state subjunctively: Transgender life-making alongside death and a pandemic.

The Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, while addressing the United Nations General Assembly on 26 September 2020, stated that India had introduced legal reforms to accord rights to transgender citizens. Even though there is not much material basis to these rights, transgender communities have been protesting against the state and at times negotiating with it to get laws that are more in alignment with their rights. In the wake of serialised deaths and precarity intensified by the Covid-19 pandemic, transgender communities also stage other negotiations in the everyday with activists, transnationally funded NGOs and academics researching their communities, encounters that are not as spectacular as the protests against the state, but that which ensures their daily sustenance. This paper investigates how they inhabit these systemically violent institutions. Deploying ethnographic field notes from eastern India, this paper argues that they inhabit them subjunctively, which is not about refusing engagement with what is oppressive but about the ceaseless conjuring of improvisatory and contingent gestures that are marked by hope as well as uncertainty. The simultaneity of protests, rage, hopelessness, hope, negotiations, supplications and scepticism allow them to not only endure the violence of institutions but also to rupture them and imagine them otherwise.

COVID-19, nationalism, and the politics of crisis: A scholarly exchange.

In this article, several scholars of nationalism discuss the potential for the COVID-19 pandemic to impact the development of nationalism and world politics. To structure the discussion, the contributors respond to three questions: (1) how should we understand the relationship between nationalism and COVID-19; (2) will COVID-19 fuel ethnic and nationalist conflict; and (3) will COVID-19 reinforce or erode the nation-state in the long run? The contributors formulated their responses to these questions near to the outset of the pandemic, amid intense uncertainty. This made it acutely difficult, if not impossible, to make predictions. Nevertheless, it was felt that a historically and theoretically informed discussion would shed light on the types of political processes that could be triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic. In doing so, the aim is to help orient researchers and policy-makers as they grapple with what has rapidly become the most urgent issue of our times.