From Rights to Representation: Challenging Citizenship from the Margins Post 2011

This study asks whether we are the same citizens as we were before the civil awakening that spilled over from tyrannical Arab states to core cities of the global economy and beyond. To address this question it offers an historical account of the role of New Social Movements, civil society, and deliberative and radical democracy as the three epistemic frameworks that have shaped the figure of the rights-bearing citizen, and which have conceived the neoliberal citizen as a choice driven individual. Taking the neoliberal shift in Israel of the 1980s as its point of departure, it then places the 2011 Tents’ Protest in the broader context of acts of resistance to the entrenchment of neoliberalism. This is followed by a thorough exploration of two post-2011 Israeli activist groups in Jewish and Arab-Palestinian societies respectively, allowing voices and new conceptions of citizenship that had arisen from the margins of the 2011 protest to come to the fore. In the final analysis, this exploration traces how the shift away from the conception of the citizen as a rights-bearing individual challenges neoliberal governmentality. It thus enables us to configure the image of a post-neoliberal citizen, one whose political subjectivity is grounded not in the discourse of rights, but rather in a new discourse of representation.