Comparing Citizenship and Kinship: Commentary on Mills

October 1, 2025

[Editor’s note: This is the third of four posts on Aaron Mills’s article “First Nations’ Citizenship and Kinship Compared: Belonging’s Stake in Legality”, The American Journal of Comparative Law, Volume 72, Issue 4, Winter 2024, Pages 892–932, https://doi.org/10.1093/ajcl/avae032]

Decolonization requires Indigenous peoples governing themselves on their own terms, and Mills’ article articulating an Anishinaabe political theory of kinship offers an illuminating account of what this might mean. But as he notes, there is disagreement about whether kinship-based ideas and practices can be reconciled with citizenship-based ideas and practices: can they co-exist and supplement each other, within or across different forms of political community?

Mills is pessimistic: he views kinship thinking as incompatible with citizenship thinking. Whether one shares his pessimism may depend on a prior question about the purpose of politics. Why do we need theories of political membership in the first place? Within the mainstream Western citizenship tradition, the answer goes something like this:

• Social beings engage in politics to “get things done” (in Mansbridge’s pithy formulation): certain important goods require that we act collectively.
• Getting things done collectively in turn requires legitimate public authority: the ability to make decisions that are binding on the governed. (Anarchists insist we can get things done without coercion, but mainstream Western political theory assumes the need for public authority).
• One requirement for coercive public authority to be legitimate is that it be authorized by, and accountable to, the governed.
• That in turn requires creating a bounded demos composed of people with the formal status of citizenship: we need to know who is governed and who has the right to authorize authority. The process of constructing legitimate authority requires “citizenization”, turning the subjects of law into citizens who co-author the law.

In short, citizenship in the Western tradition is the flip side of legitimate authority; it is the solution to the problem of needing public authority to get things done. The task of citizenship theory is to align who is governed with who can authorize government, and to design mechanisms of horizontal co-authorship (amongst citizens) and vertical accountability (between citizens and the public authority).

As Mills rightly says, conceiving of membership as citizenship pushes one in the direction of drawing clear lines around the people and territory of the demos, which he says is at odds with the Anishinaabe belief in the flux, contingency and gradations of our relationships. But a commitment to citizenship needn’t rest on a distinctly liberal individualist ontology. One can recognize the irreducible reality of the ‘social self’ and relationality while also believing in the need for legitimate public authority. Citizenship is endorsed by social democrats and conservatives, not just liberals, precisely because they share the belief that getting things done requires public authority. Indeed, one could argue that liberal individualism on its own leads not to citizenship theory but to anarchism or isonomia. It is those with a more expansive view of the role of government and collective action in the Western tradition who are most committed to citizenization as a tool for constructing legitimate authority.

This suggests that one’s view of the merits of citizenship depends in part on one’s view of the need for public authority. And I think Mills agrees with this: he emphasizes that his account of kinship does not, and cannot, generate coercive public authority, but instead relies on persuasive authority. But he says little about this crucial premise: is it really true that kinship-based political communities can get things done without public authority? There is in fact surprisingly little discussion in the article about what needs to get done, let alone how persuasive authority would operate to get those things done.

For example, the vast majority of people in Canada – including Indigenous peoples – strongly support the idea of a single-payer health care system. Indeed, in Canada as in many other Western democracies, when people are asked what citizenship means to them, public health care is often the most common answer. But this system only works if there is a public authority that can compel citizens to pay taxes and that can prohibit doctors from selling medical services on the market: it’s not clear how persuasive authority on its own could create such a system.       

And this may help explain why many people, including some members of Indigenous societies, seek to reconcile kinship and citizenship. They may have a strong attachment to ideas and ideals of kinship, and its associated ideas of relationality and reciprocity, but they may also have come to believe that binding public authority is crucial to achieve certain collective goods, both within Indigenous communities and in their relations with settler society. Perhaps a division of labour is required: perhaps kinship is needed to address certain issues and citizenship is needed to address others. If so, one might then think about how kinship and citizenship can be part of a complementary political order.

I suspect that Mills would respond that once one reaches for binding authority, one loses touch with the central ethical values of kinship. To invoke or threaten coercive authority is incompatible with the vision of trust and gift-giving that underpins kinship. But is this so? Or can plural authorities grounded in different values operate side by side without undermining one another? Indeed, is it possible that coercive authority helps to secure a context within which kinship and persuasive authority can flourish? In my own work with Sue Donaldson, I have attempted to show that kinship with the more-than-human world can be reconciled with a multi-level account of nested citizenship. More generally, citizenship theorists have long argued that coercive authority, while an essential backstop, recedes into the background, and that for most people and most contexts, social life operates through ideas of trust and reciprocity.  We needn’t presuppose a zero-sum relationship between coercive authority and relational kinship responsibilities, and I think it’s worth exploring contexts where the two might support each other, and not just the contexts where they might displace each other. Perhaps in the end, this sort of synthesis of kinship and citizenship is doomed to fail, but I think it is premature to foreclose that possibility.