Modular Citizenship in Contemporary World Society

Recent theories of citizenship call into question the dominance of ancestry (jus sanguinis) and territory (jus soli) as the primary criteria for membership in a polity. Debates around postnationalism, cosmopolitanism, and transnationalism increasingly locate the legitimacy of citizenship in world-level models of rights that extend beyond the state. Yet national citizenship remains remarkably persistent, posing three interrelated puzzles for the sociology of citizenship: (1) How can rights-based and birth-based legitimations of citizenship be reconciled? (2) How can citizenship be conceptualized in non-national terms without eroding the state’s central role? (3) How can we account for the rise of multinational citizenship rights? Drawing on recent global shifts in nationality laws, this article offers a unified analytical framework to address these puzzles through the concept of modular citizenship, which inverts the conventional understanding: it is not the juridical category of citizenship that determines the scope of rights, but the enforceable rights themselves that determine the quantum of citizenship.