1 - The Mobilizational Citizenship Framework

Summary

This chapter details this book’s theoretical contribution. It develops the notion of mobilizational citizenship, which synthesizes an innovative framework that explains how and why mobilization endures over time in highly inhospitable conditions at the urban margins. This framework’s conceptualization of citizenship goes beyond traditional, liberal approaches. It relies on a more flexible and informal notion of political incorporation, which depends on the ways in which collectives build their identity and rescale community-building beyond the framework of the nation-state. In other words, it captures an alternative type of politicization that is often neglected in studies of collective action. Mobilizational citizenship involves the dynamic interaction between four components: agentic memory, mobilizing belonging, mobilizing boundaries, and decentralized protagonism. The chapter’s framework also outlines the barriers to mobilization in the urban margins. It explains how political institutions regularly withdraw and control political capital within urban communities in the aim of demobilizing them. When mobilizational citizenship fails to develop, local dwellers engage in political capital hoarding dynamics within their neighborhoods, which further deactivates collective action.