Apr. 25 Jean Monnet Distinguished Lecture

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Professor Willem Maas will present the 2016-7 Jean Monnet Distinguished Lecture at the University at Buffalo.

Title: “Multilevel Citizenship in the Age of Brexit and Trump”
Time: 3:00--4:30pm
Location: 509 O’Brian Hall, The Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy
Date: Tuesday, April 25, 2017

Abstract: The dominant view of the growth of citizenship accompanying the rise of sovereign states since Westphalia sanitizes a complex history and ignores important developments both ‘above’ and ‘below’ the state. For example, the rise of European Union citizenship inspires other regional integration efforts to develop common rights as a form of supranational ‘citizenship’ while many states, particularly federal ones, face growing demands for special regional or group-based statuses. Similarly, cities sometimes reassert what citizenship meant until current forms of statehood crowded out alternatives: a member of a city entitled to the privileges and rights of that city. If only sovereign states can confer citizenship, then cities, provinces, nations (to the extent they do not coincide with a state), or supranational entities like the European Union cannot do so. But this view of citizenship obscures historical and emerging forms of multilevel citizenship that span the world.

Willem Maas (PhD Yale), Jean Monnet Chair and Associate Professor of Political Science, Public & International Affairs, Social & Political Thought, and Socio-Legal Studies, chairs the Political Science department at Glendon College, York University (Toronto, Canada). He co-founded the Migration and Citizenship section of the American Political Science Association and was recently Marie Skłodowska-Curie International Fellow at the European University Institute. Professor Maas writes on EU and multilevel citizenship, politics in Europe and Canada, migration, and related issues and has just received a SSHRC grant to write a political history of Canadian citizenship and nationality law and policy. He co-edits a new book series on the Politics of Citizenship and Migration.