1 - Introduction

Summary

Citizenship is closely tied to welfare reforms, providing access to various protections and promoting a sense of unity, social justice and equality in order to enhance state welfare provisions. This establishes citizenship as a crucial element enabling individuals to claim protection from the state against collective harms, which are often rooted in industrialisation and societal changes. Citizenship has become an increasingly contested concept. The term can invoke a sense of belonging to a particular community, a particular society as an equal member, and entitlement to the rights and protections that come with being a ‘citizen’. It is associated with a system of legal, political and social practices that offer a series of rights, protections and forms of support and redress that can be, and often are, denied to noncitizens. It can also be considered as participatory, including the acts through which we claim citizenship status. Fundamentally, much welfare provision is predicated upon the status of being a citizen, the social rights this confers and the access to welfare support that ensues.

For the starting point of this book and its study of welfare, citizenship can be understood as a way of defining belonging and, by default, a way of defining the characteristics which shape inclusion and exclusion. Although Chapter 2 will examine the concept in more detail, for now the term can be considered crudely not only in terms of nationality, but also in more nuanced social terms of ‘playing by the rules’ and maintaining ‘British values’. As the discussion will demonstrate through the account of citizenship theory and substantive chapters, such a view of citizenship is limited and problematic. It incorporates implicit assumptions and biases through its universal framing. As such, the universal notion of citizenship which helped to justify state intervention through welfare support has been seen to erase the broader diversity that significantly shapes individuals’ lives and their access to welfare support (Bhambra, 2015: 102). Welfare policies have historically made assumptions about who should receive support, such as the role of women in the family and the exclusion of people of colour from emerging welfare provisions. Prevailing societal institutions have internalised and normalised conventions that disadvantage women and racial minorities, even if they are not explicitly codified in statutes (Meer, 2020: 11).