Wednesday we had our last class on "We, the citizens!". And it was devoted to Constitution "beyond the borders"👌🤓

In fact, the very notion of Constitution is connected to "nation state", as "we, the people" of a certain country come together to decide, how "their land" is going to be governed, through them "delegating" their rights to govern over society and the state - to their representatives.

In classic Constitutional LAW the very notion of "citizenship" is defined as "relations between the person and nation state, where he/she was born or choose to live" - and implies set of "rights" and "obligations".

Modern state offers their citizens lists of rights and benefits - protecting from invasion, protecting life, property and dignity, offering lists of services - from roads, trade, infrastructure to education, healthcare, providing access to culture, science , sports facilities, healthy natural environment 😉 and various ways of creativity and self-development. Naturally, every state can provide its citizens all those various resources according to the level of its development and the ways, in which these resources are been managed and distributed😁. 

As countries are very different in terms of their development, they can provide to their citizens different level of goods and services and their different level of rule-based culture and rule-of-law practices - provide different amount of rights and protection of legitimate interests, which provokes people to leave one country's "regulatory regime" and move to other country, where the level of legal protection is higher.

Important, that there is no "free 🆓 land" on the globe 🌍, it is all divided between between nation states by state borders, specifying its own Constitutional order, with its unique set of rights and obligations of its inhabitants.

Provided resources and personal will, citizens can move between countries and aspire to change citizenship, if they decide so.

But what happens, when Government starts deliberately abusing rights of their citizens? Physically and morally abusing, arresting, beating, torturing, raping, killing its own citizens?

Those, who had not done any harm to other citizens, but have different views from those in power? When citizen's rights and even the citizenship itself is cancelled?

Who would protect such people, 🤔 if not their state, "designed to protect rights"?

Is there any other Constitution, beyond the borders of the nation state? How are those international "rule-or-law" and regulatory regimes function?

And it there any "citizenship" - beyond "national citizenship"?

Using many practical examples - from the recent "soviet past" we discussed "national citizenship", the emotional connectedness with national state through concept of "pride" and "belonging" and mechanisms of breaking this emotional connection, turning to  disagreement and "dissent" and how authoritarian nation state reacts to such behavior .

 We discovered the concept of "global citizenship", which is based on key notion of "caring",  "feeling connected" with events and people in different parts of the 🌎 and "taking responsibility to act" when injustice happens far away from your nation state, involving with other "global citizens" in solidarity campaigns, involving international protective mechanisms.

We explored three very telling cases , manifesting protective force of global citizenship - Vladimir Bukovsky ( USSR),  Afgan Sadigov (Azerbaijan) and Mzia Amaglobeli ( Georgia) how international community worked on saving citizens of very different countries, that could not offer their rights recognition and protection.

All of these cars and many others were only possible through campaigns of international SOLIDARITY, which demonstrated, how many people and their associations in many different countries demonstrated that "they care" and demanded appropriate actions from national and international regulatory institutions. It brought results: visibility, "shaming mechanisms" application of international norms of pressure and national authorities actions ( still pending in case of Mzia)

This is why, by our course itself, we got engaged citizens of different countries - Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Georgia - in supports of georgian civil society, as well as US citizen's rights to Freedom of Peaceful Assembly, and Harvard University fight against current US Administration for Constitutional right to Free Education. Because "We, the citizens!" - implies nit only "national" citizenship, but nomadic, global one, as well! 😄