When Fannie Lou Hamer testified before the Credentials Committee at the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City on August 22, 1964, she vivified the devastating consequences of American apartheid. Speaking on behalf of generations of African Americans who had been denied access to the ballot and those who had risked their lives to cast votes for the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, the activist and former sharecropper concluded: “We want to register, to become first-class citizens.” The image of Hamer still resonates as a reminder of an era when full citizenship was marked “for whites only,” just as, for many, the image of Barack Obama on the Capitol steps marks the successful conclusion of the quest for equal citizenship regardless of race. Elizabeth F. Cohen's Semi-Citizenship in Democratic Politics urges us to consider a more complicated story. Full citizenship, she contends, is a myth, a misdescription whose grip on the theoretical imagination blinds us to the range of in-between statuses that proliferate in democratic politics. Cohen challenges political theorists to suspend the commitment to an ideal of full citizenship in order to look more carefully at the plural ways in which actual liberal democracies have categorized their inhabitants. The landscape she traverses is not populated by insiders and outsiders, full citizens and their others, but by women and men who enjoy different combinations of rights. Provocatively, Cohen not only argues for the inevitability of such arrangements but she indicates how the flexibility they engender may allow for more democratic solutions to conflicts about inclusion. Cutting through the heat of debates about membership and migration, she offers a powerful analytical framework and an exciting new direction for democratic theories of citizenship.

Cohen ably demonstrates what we can see when we regard citizenship, not as a goal or ideal, but as a political category divisible into component parts. Against T. H. Marshall's influential account of the civil, political, and social rights of citizenship, Cohen advances a view in which no aspect of citizenship is primary and none is contingent on any other. She unpacks the bundles of rights that comprise citizenship to distinguish between those that are relative, specific to a particular political context, and those that are absolute. Surveying different combinations of these rights, which may themselves be strong or weak, she reveals a far wider spectrum of statuses than theorists often acknowledge. In doing so, Cohen enables us to ask stimulating questions. In what ways is the citizenship of members of the military, for example, similar to that of children? On what basis do states distinguish between refugees and economic immigrants, and what are the effects of those discriminations? In addition, her analysis is broadly comparative, revealing unexpected similarities among semi-citizenships in different states.

Cohen's approach also penetrates the thicket of laws and regulations that define citizenship in liberal democracies to lay bare three, often conflicting, logics: liberal, democratic and administrative. One of the book's contributions is its investigation of the interplay among these three to illustrate why heated contests over who can marry or vote or reside in a particular polity ought not to be regarded exclusively through the lens of domination or marginalization. “Rather than representing mistakes or bias,” Cohen avers, “semi-citizenships are the institutional embodiments of compromises between conflicting logics of membership” (96). She turns to Foucault's concept of governmentality to examine how populations have been produced and managed and to caution against ideals of citizenship that are incompatible with the functioning of the modern state. If the book takes the undemocratic features of democratic citizenship as given, however, it also supplies tools with which we might reflect more precisely on the differences between those forms of semi-citizenship that are incompatible with democratic or liberal ideals and those forms that may, in fact, be the best alternative to complete exclusion. Further, the theory of semi-citizenship offers new resources to enrich the work of feminist theorists and scholars of indigenous politics, among others, who have queried the desirability of full inclusion.

Cohen's book does an important service in chastening any theorist who would move too quickly to interpret anything less than full citizenship as an injustice, thereby perpetuating the invisibility of partial citizenships and preventing consideration of their possible democratic effects. Nevertheless, returning to Hamer's statement in Atlantic City illustrates how such an approach can produce its own blind-spots. The first of these is the elision of the structural work done by ascriptive categories. Rightly warning against “conflating social identity with a structural category such as semi-citizenship, or using only identity groups as reference points for identifying who is, or is not, a semi-citizen” (91), Cohen makes a clear distinction between “political structures” and identities. Yet Hamer's testimony to the violent, sexually degrading treatment she endured when she was arrested for attempting to register to vote indicates why this distinction ought not to be overdrawn. Close examination of the scanty bundle of rights available to black Americans in Jim Crow Mississippi may yield fruitful comparisons to semi-citizenships in other times and places. Still, the analysis loses force if we overlook the fact that Hamer and her colleagues were challenging the practices and institutions of white citizenship that defined the American South after Reconstruction. A more interactive approach, one that investigates the linkages between ascription and political institutions and practices, not only in the case of the U.S., would give more force to Cohen's aspiration to “revise definitions of citizenship” (205).

The image of Hamer, appealing for an America in which she would be recognized as a “first-class” citizen, suggests another invisible element in Cohen's framework: citizenship as an object of intense desire. Hamer's words recall both the experiences of women and men who have risked everything for full membership and the convictions of citizens who have fought equally passionately for their right to exclude. Even as these men and women have been governed by states that have their own ends, they have invested the category of citizenship with meanings not captured by those ends. The recognition that citizenship is a matter of degrees, furthermore, ought not to supplant consideration of its continuing force as a binary concept and the political work done by the category of anti-citizens, whose status as criminals or slaves or undocumented immigrants or the chronically unemployed, confirms that the rest of us belong. My point here is not to diminish Cohen's achievement. Rather, there is further work to be done to develop the idea of semi-citizenship and, to that end, this book offers a crucial spur to thinking.