Citizenship-from-below constitutes one element of youth everyday citizenship. When asked the meaning of good citizenship, youth report emotional closeness, joy, and gratitude as key localized components, as well as moral character and concern over preserving one’s reputation. They particularly emphasize that citizenship manifests in local volunteering to help others and collective problem solving, and they often connect these acts to a broader commitment to building the nation. We juxtapose these youth perspectives with Afrobarometer data on reported attendance at community meetings and membership in a community or volunteer group to find that, although youth engage in formalized ways less frequently than their elders, they are locally engaged. They continuously contest their citizenship, framing it as distinct from that of their elders and highlighting their particular local contributions (e.g., security provision and environmental protection). Despite urban environments that stress individuality and uncertainty, urban youth citizenship is highly relational and embedded in obligations that undergird belonging.

Chapter 2 discusses how the sense of nationhood in Latin American countries has evolved since 1880, and how the construction of nations has been closely linked to racial and ethnic identities. It shows that nations were not built from scratch, and that nation builders were conditioned by legacies from pre-Columbian and colonial times. It also demonstrates that nation building is an ongoing, never-finished project. Indeed, it identifies three distinct periods in the process of nation building. In a first period, an elite vision of the nation, which took white, civilized Europe as a model, prevailed. In a second period, a national-popular vision of the nation took center stage, and el pueblo (the people) was considered the true essence of the nation. Finally, in a third, ongoing period, nationhood has been understood in multicultural terms and, for the first time in the history of Latin America, the distinctiveness of indigenous peoples and of Afro-descendants has been recognized and treated as legitimate. It argues that, over time, the sense of nationhood has become more inclusive of different races and ethnicities.

The chapter focuses on a persistent problem within nationalist ideology, as it emerged in Jacob Grimm’s reflections on the rise of mandatory schooling. School systems can impose a uniform language across a large territory, effectively giving shape to a national people. This became increasingly clear to Grimm as he witnessed the emergence of a veritable army of schoolteachers around the mid-nineteenth century. While he approved of greater national unification by means of mass schooling, the fact of public education also forced him to consider that the nation may not grow from below to delimit the proper reach of a state. Instead, an existing state apparatus could forge a more standardized culture by institutional means, at the expense of the more natural-seeming transmission of language and customs within families. Hence the state may not need a philologist to trace national boundaries. Indeed, the school system itself, a necessary institution in the developed modern state, threatened local cultures with extinction and hence deprived populations of the cultural memory that Grimm had pledged to protect as a scholar.

This chapter examines the contested concept of constitutional identity in the comparative constitutional law literature and situates it in the specific jurisdictional context of Nepal. In particular, the analysis concentrates on the foundational function of constitutions and explores the relationship between constitutionalism, identity politics, and constitutional design. Nepal is an ideal case study for exploring the notion of constitutional identity because it sits uneasily within the traditional taxonomies used in the discipline. For instance, Nepal is the only South Asian country that was never colonised and whose legal system does not operate in English, but in the country’s national language, Nepali. This unusual level of historical continuity in the process of nation-building has complicated the construction of constitutional identity, as demonstrated by the embattled historical relationship between the Shah-centered “national monarchy” and democracy, the enduring and controversial position of Hinduism in the constitutional framework, and the patterns of legal discrimination on the basis of identity that persist in the new 2015 constitution.

Chapter 3 examines post-1873 depression-era Ottoman novels and plays that articulate a language of difference by juxtaposing the success of industrious heroes against the failure of consumerist dandy anti-heroes. The representation of industrious and dandy characters in fin-de-siècle Istanbul shows the interconnectedness and interdependence between novels and the discourses and practices of productivity, in sharing the same new moral universe. Differing from the normative and distant language of the morality authors, or the authoritative and punitive language of the bureaucratic reforms explored in Chapters 1 and 2, the playful voices of novelists displayed dynamic and at times ambivalent representations of the idle and dandy, as an alternate, yet socially undesirable form of self-fashioning. By pitting a hardworking and upwardly mobile hero against the dandy anti-hero, novels thematized the period’s concern with valuing work as a constitutive element of character and nation-building, and also drew boundaries that defined who was and was not included in the nation. As a forum in which citizenship was debated, fiction established difference using ridicule, marginalization, and even criminalization as a social intervention.

Chapter 6 traces the logic beneath state-sponsored reconfiguration of family order in general, and generational relations in particular, within the context of China’s constitutional transformation in the first half of the twentieth century. Within a few decades, an empire that “ruled through the principle of filiality” became a modern republic that denounced the father–son cardinal bond in power succession and abandoned generational hierarchies in laws. Social practice on the ground witnessed gradual and uneven changes; but state builders, from late Qing legal reformers to Nationalist lawmakers, persisted in the statist direction they designed for China, in the hope of atomizing individual citizens as the first step to connect them directly to the state. The generation-long building of new sociolegal mechanisms, while obstructive to the formation of a stable political order in the short term, laid the foundation for the rebirth of China as a modern state.

“Democracy and its Limits” examines the problems of government and governance in Nigeria, one of the most populous yet least popular conglomerates of democracy (with additional reference to other parts of Africa). Nigeria returned to civilian democracy in 1999, but it was an elite exercise, and the governance has been disappointing. There has been much violence, religious and ethnic conflict, rising poverty, and blatant looting of public funds by the same people entrusted with the funds meant for the development of the nation. This discourse studies how the change in the state has a hidden context, while the critique of governance is regarded as like that of democracy. Despite the propaganda about its advantages and the near-global consensus about its values, democracy is riddled with a lot of contradictions that limit its functional value to a majority of the citizenry. It is expected that political modernity would cause an evolution of political culture and lead to the appearance of viable, resilient institutions that would produce stable politics. However, this study posits that democratic mechanisms can only be effective when the citizenry gives more attention to institutional development and nation building that can endure and function, and not to the politicians, elites, or the military.

This chapter summarises and discusses the findings of the book. It elaborates on how the hegemony of the Young Turks (and later Kemalist Republicans) and the Erdoğanist counter-hegemony in Turkey use very similar methods to build their nation, the same tools for social engineering, and the same procedures for the production of citizenship to establish and consolidate their respective hegemonies. The two opposing but influential political ideologies of modern Turkey have sometimes even used the same discourse, albeit for different purposes. There is also a significant degree of overlap between their undesired citizen categories. These are two different regimes relying on two different ideologies, but both of them target, otherise, and even demonise (mostly) the same groups, including Kurdish nationalists, Alevis, non-Muslims, leftists, liberals and practising Muslims who do not completely support the regimes. In addition to desired and undesired citizen typologies, Kemalism and Erdoğanism also have a liminal citizenship category, identity and typology: tolerated citizens (Homo Diyanetus). The chapter also summarises the innovations and contributions of the book, highlights its limitations and discusses potential future studied on the topic. Lastly, the chapter looks at the future of Erdoğan's nation.

This chapter analyses the Kemalism’s tolerated citizen creation project via the state’s powerful Presidency of Religious Affairs (Diyanet) that controls all mosques and employs all imams and preachers in Turkey. Kemalism wanted to keep Islam under its strict control to prevent its potential use for opposition. Thus, it made it illegal to have private mosques or to function as a non-state employer of imams. However, the Kemalist state also wanted to use Islam as a helping hand to build the nation based on the majority’s sectarian as well as ethnic identity. Thus, it worked to create a secularist and Turkish nationalism-friendly Islam –what I call ‘Diyanet Islam’. Before AKP came to power there were about 75,000 mosques in Turkey. The Diyanet used these mosques as adult education and indoctrination centres by politically instrumentalising weekly Friday sermons that are attended by about 60 per cent of the nation’s adult males. After elaborating on and defining Diyanet Islam, the chapter proceeds to discuss the Kemalist construction of a tolerated citizen category that I call ‘Homo Diyanetus’. Homo Diyanetus refers to a practising Sunni Muslim citizen of Turkey who follows the state manufactured Diyanet Islam, reveres the state and Atatürk, is Turkish nationalist, militarist and is definitely not a member or participant of any other religious group, brotherhood or movement.

This chapter discusses the Erdoğanist nation-building project, which aimed t to create its own desired citizen: Homo-Erdoğanistus. Erdoğanists openly express that they have a desired citizen creation project. However, they have a different name for it: Dindar Nesil, the pious generation. Erdoğan has consistently argued that it is the state’s duty to raise a religious generation. For at least the last decade, the AKP has been using many apparatuses of the state as well as the media, popular culture and Erdoğanist educational foundations to raise this generation, whichis not only religious but is also staunchly Erdoğanist. Homo Erdoğanistus emanates from Erdoğanism. Erdoğanist ideology and national identity, which is based on Islamism, majoritarianism, Muslim nationalism, authoritarianism, patrimonialism, personalism, the cult of Erdoğan, Ottomanist restorative nostalgia, Islamist myth-making, militarism, jihadism, glorification of martyrdom Islamist populism, civilisationism, anti-Westernism, resentfulness, vindictiveness, and anti-Western conspiracy theories. Thus, Homo Erdoğanistus citizens are under the influence of all these. Like the Kemalist relationship with Homo LASTus, Homo Erdoğanistus is the Erdoğanist regime’s favoured citizen who ascends to the critical positions of state and military bureaucracy and economic positions.

This chapter analyses the Diyanet’s Friday sermons delivered in the last two decades between January 2001 and July 2020. Attending Friday prayers is obligatory for Muslim adult males and, according to surveys, about 60 per cent of males attend Friday prayers. The state has always seen this as an adult education and indoctrination tool to propagate its religious doxa, the Diyanet Islam. To trace the change in the content and perspective of the sermons from pre-AKP times to the AKP 3.0 period, and also to investigate the worldview that is disseminated through these sermons, I have looked at topics and themes on ‘Love of Homeland’, ‘Turkish Nationalism, National Unity and Solidarity’, ‘Reconstructing History: From Nationalism to Islamist Populism’, ‘Disappearance of Atatürk’s Personality Cult’, ‘Conspiracies, Victimhood, and the Crusader West’, ‘Militarism and Sacrificing Life for Allah, Islam and Ummah’, andthe ‘Turkish Army’s Jihad’, Each of these are analysed in a separate section in this chapter. Each section starts with the last decade of Diyanet 1.0 (2001–2010); it then moves on to the Diyanet 2.0 period (2010–2020). The analysis shows that Diyanet Islam has significantly moved towards an Islamist, populist, Ottomanist with a restorative nostalgia and more intense resentment, ummatist, anti-Westernist, jihadist, conspiratorialist, and more militarist direction.

This chapter discusses the principle aim of the Kemalist nation-building project: the construction of Homo LASTus. Understood here as a Weberian ideal type, Homo LASTus refers to a new human being who is at once a laicist, Atatürkist (Kemalist), Sunni Muslim and Turk. Having determined, ethnic religious heterogeneity, Islamism and the Ottoman nostalgia as existential threats to the new secularist and Turkish nationalist state and national identity, the Kemalists were adamant to create a secular nation out of the country’s majority that happened to be Sunni Muslim and Turkish. After summarising Kemalist nation-building and its relations with Islam and minorities, the chapter briefly elaborates on the social engineering policies of the Kemalists and their securitisation of minority identities. It explains how the Kemalist state marginalised, securitised and even in some cases criminalised ethnoreligious and political minorities as well as religious Muslims; and the state’s assimilation and dissimilation policies in relation to these minorities. After discussing each parameter (Laicist, Atatürkist, Sunni Muslim, and Turk) in a separate section, this chapter discusses how the Kemalists created and made use of Atatürk’s personality cult in addition to education in creating their desired citizens.

This chapter analyses what happened to the undesired citizens of the Kemalism during the Kemalist nation-building project. The ‘other’ to the state’s desired citizen of Homo LASTus were practising Muslims, Islamists, non-Atatürkists such as leftists and socialists, non-Muslims, Alevis and Kurds who were discriminated against by the Kemalist state in a variety of ways. Not only were attempts made to assimilate or dissimilate them, but they were also denied important bureaucratic positions, despite officially being ‘equal citizens'.The chapter looks at the ‘others’ to the Homo LASTus in order: practising Muslims and Islamists (opposite to the laicist), leftists–socialists–communists (opposite to the Atatürkist), non-Muslims and Alevis (opposite to the Sunni Muslim) and Kurds (opposite to the Turk). Before concluding, the chapter discusses how, for a variety of reasons, these minorities felt a need to hide their identities in public, resorted to dissimulation and were constructed by the majority as villains in different conspiracy theories linked to the insecurities, anxieties, fears and paranoias of the state and the nation.

This chapter analyses how the state, under the rule of Erdoğanists, has been treating undesired citizen identity groups. In post-coup-attempt Turkey, the AKP has developed a staunchly populist narrative to divide the citizens of Turkey as factions of 'the people’ (or ‘the nation’) versus its out-groups: Kemalists, White Turks, Kurds, Alevis, Gülenists, leftists, liberals, etc. who are framed as citizen-enemies. All of these groups have been constructed as terrorists – internal enemies of the nation and pawns of Western powers that do not want Turkey to lead the Muslim world. The chapter starts with the most significant and oldest antagonists of Islamists – Erdoğanists – who arethe Kemalists and their desired citizens –the Homo LASTus – and also the non-Kemalist White Turks and secular elites who allegedly victimised Islamists in the past and who are allegedly stillplotting against them. Then, following the same order of the chapter on Kemalism’s undesired citizens, this chapter will discuss other undesired citizens of Erdoğanism: disloyal practising Muslims and Islamists; leftists, liberals, socialists; non-Muslims; Alevis; and disloyal Kurds.