Elizabeth Cohen

European Journal of Political Theory, Volume 21, Issue 3, Page 585-586, July 2022. Ayelet Shachar's lead essay in The Shifting Border draws out dramatic transformations of bordering practices currently taking place worldwide. These have yielded spatial relocations for bordering, a privatization of enforcement, and legal innovations that tie the border to individual people as they move, among many other changes. Shachar argues in favor of a form of reciprocity, in which states that shape shift their borders are also compelled to recognize rights for people who require humanitarian assistance. In response, Shachar's interlocutors offer an array of reflections and friendly amendments.

The usual representation of quantum algorithms is limited to the process of solving the problem. We extend it to the process of setting the problem. Bob, the problem setter, selects a problem-setting by the initial measurement. Alice, the problem solver, unitarily computes the corresponding solution and reads it by the final measurement. This simple extension creates a new perspective from which to see the quantum algorithm. First, it highlights the relevance of time-symmetric quantum mechanics to quantum computation: the problem-setting and problem solution, in their quantum version, constitute pre- and post-selection, hence the process as a whole is bound to be affected by both boundary conditions. Second, it forces us to enter into relational quantum mechanics. There must be a representation of the quantum algorithm with respect to Bob, and another one with respect to Alice, from whom the outcome of the initial measurement, specifying the setting and thus the solution of the problem, must be concealed. Time-symmetrizing the quantum algorithm to take into account both boundary conditions leaves the representation to Bob unaltered. It shows that the representation to Alice is a sum over histories in each of which she remains shielded from the information coming to her from the initial measurement, not from that coming to her backwards in time from the final measurement. In retrospect, all is as if she knew in advance, before performing her problem-solving action, half of the information that specifies the solution of the problem she will read in the future and could use this information to reach the solution with fewer computation steps. This elucidates the quantum computational speedup in all the quantum algorithms examined.

Theorists of democratic politics have long noted the importance of citizenship to the realization of liberal norms. Citizenship provides an artificial identity to members so that they may meet as equals in the public domain. The constraints of equality dictate that this identity will have a unitary face: citizenship must be a single status if it is to serve its stated purpose. However upon examination, citizenship appears to take multiple forms that reflect a range of political statuses that exist within the confines of democratic politics. The civil, political and social rights of citizenship as well as the status of nationality come unbound from one another in ways that create multiple forms of partial, or semi-citizenship. Semi-citizenships provide states with opportunities to organize and govern otherwise "illegible" or "irrational" sub-sections of the population. They also often offer individuals the chance to adopt identities that diverge from those referenced by classic notions of the citizen. ;This dissertation combines a theoretical inquiry into the realities of modern citizenship with focused case studies examining instances of semi-citizenship. Each case study demonstrates the degree to which semi-citizenship is inevitable in democratic politics both by looking at various national contexts and by recalling the presence of such statuses throughout the history of the modern state. The statuses held by non-nationals, GLBTs, children and convicted felons demonstrate a unique set of state responses to forms of membership that do not correspond to the categories of citizen or non-citizen. Each of these statuses has existed in a wide range of temporal and geographic circumstances. Deprived of nationality, civil rights and political rights, these groups exist in democracies without being governed democratically, yet in some cases they are able to turn such statuses to their advantage. States compensate in a variety of ways ranging from special or additional rights, to benign neglect, to paternalism. While vulnerable to critique, these compensatory measures indicate an acceptance of the fact that citizenship is composed of several distinct forms of membership and may also provide opportunities for tailoring citizenship to meet individual needs