Author Archive

Lion Koenig

Lion Koenig is a Post-Doctoral Researcher at the Department of Politics and International Relations, the University of Oxford. Prior to that, he has taught at Jawaharlal Nehru University and Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi, and has held Visiting Fellowships at the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (IDSA), the Centre de Sciences Humaines (CSH), and the Institute of Social Sciences (ISS) in New Delhi. His research interests include nation-building, citizenship and identity politics, as well as political communication in the South Asian context. Among his recent publications are Cultural Citizenship in India: Politics, Power, and Media (Oxford University Press, 2016), and the co-edited volumes Politics of the ‘Other’ in India and China: Western Concepts in Non-Western Contexts (Routledge, 2016), and Globalisation and Governance in India: New Challenges to Society and Institutions (Routledge, 2016).

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My new book Cultural Citizenship in India: Politics, Power, and Media (Oxford University Press, 2016) analyses the role which cultural participation, understood in terms of media representation, plays for citizenship. Drawing on the hypothesis of Mitra (2012), that citizenship is a two-dimensional concept, comprising of a legal right to the soil and a moral affiliation to it, the book explores the question of the ways in which people ‘belong’ to a nation as citizens. Based on the assumption that the nation is an imagined community created through discourse (Anderson, 1983), the moral side of citizenship is understood in cultural terms, and in analogy to the two-dimensional model noted above, is explored in terms of the rights and duties granted to groups …