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Partisan citizenship for SRO - November 2019.pdf (454.9 kB)

Partisan citizenship and its discontents: precarious possession and political agency on Harare City’s expanding margins

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posted on 2023-06-09, 19:52 authored by JoAnn McGregorJoAnn McGregor, Kudzai Chatiza
On the margins of Zimbabwe’s expanding capital Harare, the ruling ZANU–PF party promotes a view of access to urban land, housing and security as ‘gift’, conditional on demonstrations of party loyalty. This article discusses contestation over this form of partisan citizenship, making the following broader arguments. First, it argues that the notion of partisan citizenship draws attention to the role of party political affiliation as a source of differential entitlements in illiberal democracies, countering a tendency to emphasise ethno-regional, racialized or religious communal identities as the primary sources of graduated citizenship in Africa. Second, it casts clientelist subjection as a contextual and contentious domain of ideas and action, rather than presenting it as cultural persistence or reducing it solely to material bargaining. Third, the article uses the Zimbabwean case to caution against a tendency within debates over southern urbanism to celebrate land occupations and informal construction as political resistance and route to full citizenship. In these ways, the article offers partisan citizenship as a means of taking forward debates over re-configurations of citizenship in Africa’s illiberal democracies and the politics of precarious peripheries in the urbanising global South more broadly.

Funding

ESRC; ES/N004140/1

Migrants on the Margins (Zimbabwe - Harare); G2085; ROYAL GEOGRAPHICAL SOCIETY

The Unknown City: the (in)visibility of urban displacement; G2003; ESRC-ECONOMIC & SOCIAL RESEARCH COUNCIL; ES/P005128/1

History

Publication status

  • Published

File Version

  • Accepted version

Journal

Citizenship Studies

ISSN

1362-1025

Publisher

Taylor & Francis

Issue

1

Volume

24

Page range

17-39

Department affiliated with

  • Geography Publications

Full text available

  • Yes

Peer reviewed?

  • Yes

Legacy Posted Date

2019-12-05

First Open Access (FOA) Date

2021-05-26

First Compliant Deposit (FCD) Date

2019-12-04

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