hal-05031882 Multiple ways to citizenship and multifaceted archaic cities

Classical political thought, from Herodotus' constitutional debate (3.80-82) to Aris- totle's Politics, has long been an important inspiration for political science. However, citizenship studies have now taken up other approaches and opened to the social scien- ces far beyond the realm of law and formal institutions. According to Engin Isin, three main approaches to citizenship can be distinguished today: status, habitus and acts. The dominant approach to citizenship is undoubtedly to view it as a legal status and to focus on rules, regulations and laws that determine who can and cannot be a citizen. In short: What are the rights and duties of citizens? In addition to the legal approach, which is too often seen as the only legitimate one, other definitions have been deve- loped, leading to new approaches. Another way is to look at citizenship as a habitus, as sociologists and anthropologists do by studying the practices of citizenship. How enfranchised individuals enact citizenship? How do they behave as citizens in accor- dance with established norms and expected attitudes? Finally, scholars also consider citizenship as acts. How do people constitute themselves as political subjects through their actions? How do the various things they do make them who they are? There is an essential, albeit subtle, difference between the latter two approaches. While the first deals with already constituted political groups and existing social norms, the second allows us to think about how citizens can break through the expectations, routines, and rituals of their habitus and how non-citizens can act as if they were citizens and claim rights that they may not have in the hope of becoming enfranchised.