Engaging Authority: Citizenship and Political Community aims to explore how authority is entailed in different versions of citizenship and political community. Who or what claims authority in the name of "a people," and to what effect? What kind and scope of authority is claimed? And who is held to be part of such a community? Such questions have long been asked by scholars across many disciplines. Engaging Authority brings together scholars from anthropology, constitutional studies, cultural studies, politics, political theory, sociology, and philosophy in a collaborative project to develop a multifaceted understanding of citizenship in political community. The volume begins with the premise that to describe or identify oneself as a citizen entails a particular relationship to authority. Citizens are understood to be members of a community which we consider "political" in that members are invoked, and may also be involved, in the business of governing. How does this relationship function? How is community invoked by those exercising authority, and in what senses do citizens partake in its exercise? In this volume, the authors explore different forms of the citizen's relationship to authority in political community, across and beyond the variations that usually concern scholars, such as the self-governing people, nation-states, popular sovereignty, and democratic citizenship.
Trevor Stack is Director of the Centre for Citizenship, Civil Society and Rule of Law at the University of Aberdeen, where he also teaches in the Department of Hispanic Studies. Rose Luminiello is a Research Fellow at the Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies (RIISS) at the University of Aberdeen and the Cushwa Centre for the Study of American Catholicism at the University of Notre Dam.
Preface 1. Introduction: Citizenship and Political Community in Four Questions, Trevor Stack 2. Political Community in a Plural Society: Reflections from India, Gurpreet Mahajan 3. Recasting Political Community: The New National Identity of Hungary, Balazs Majtenyi 4. Political Community under Communism: Regime, Dissidents and Church in Post-World War II Poland, Anna Grudzinska 5. Schooling in Citizenship and Political Community, Nadia Kiwan, Rachel Shanks, and Trevor Stack 6. Sovereignty, Autonomy and Citizenship in the Kurdish Model of Political Community, Hanifi Baris 7. Overcoming the Myth of the Sovereign, Self-Governing People, David Thunder 8. Civic Friendship, Economic Justice, and Political Authority, Nathaniel Jezzi 9. Studying Political Community from the Citizen Up, Trevor Stack 10. Competing Models of Islamic Political Community: ISIS and the Amman Message and Shariah Index, Ionut Untea 11. Community as Referent and Effect of Authority Claims, Trevor Stack
