Community and problematic citizenship

Lynn Staeheli's elegant and insightful work on “Citizenship and the Problem of Community” is an agenda-setting essay. I highlight three issues that merit further research: the implications of the “moral turn” in politics for territorially based institutions of government; the questions raised by problematic understandings of citizenship; and the need for better specification of the institutional contexts in which inclusion/exclusion mechanisms operate. Although community can be the basis for inclusion/exclusion at a micro scale, as Staeheli describes, analyses at more macro scales suggest citizenship—more often than not defined in terms of national identity and a culturally defined civic identity—can precede community as the basis for inclusion/exclusion. This indicates that citizenship is as problematic as community.