Event Date: April 8, 2013 - 4:00 pm

LEA YPI, London School of Economics and Political Science.

Presented by CIPS and the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs.
Free. In English. Registration is not required.

The standard view on citizenship acquisition for immigrants has two features that this presentation seeks to challenge. Firstly, citizenship acquisition is perceived as voluntary on the part of immigrants: if the host society entitles an immigrant to acquire citizenship, the immigrant may or may not choose to apply for naturalization. Second, citizenship is perceived as a benefit: if an immigrant is granted permission to become a citizen, that entitles him to a range of claims that are typically thought to improve one’s social condition.  But as the normative literature on political obligation teaches us, citizenship is also a burden. This presentation will focus on the burdens of citizenship to argue that citizenship acquisition should be mandatory. Three arguments will be explored: an argument from fairness, an argument from the all-affecting principle, and an argument from democratic equality.

Lea Ypi is Lecturer in Political Theory in the Government Department, London School of Economics, and Adjunct Professor in Philosophy at the Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University. Before joining the LSE, she was a Post-doctoral Prize Research Fellow at Nuffield College (Oxford) and a researcher at the European University Institute where she obtained her PhD. She has also held visiting and research positions at Sciences Po, the University of Frankfurt, the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin, and the Italian Institute for Historical Studies.