Executive Director: Senior Fellow Mira Kamdar

Project Leaders: Senior Fellows Belinda Cooper, Ian Cuthbertson, Michele Wucker

The Program on Citizenship and Security (www.citizenshipandsecurity.org) emerged from the conviction on the part of a core group of WPI Senior Fellows that there is too little dialogue between individuals working on migration and social integration challenges facing major liberal democracies and individuals involved in the fight against terror in the post-9/11 environment. From the security perspective, minority groups–particularly Muslim groups–tend to be viewed primarily in terms of the potential security risk they pose. As a result, their civil and human rights have been and continue to be violated. When minority populations are targeted in this manner they invariably become alarmed and defensive, rejecting cooperation on security concerns with government agencies and institutions. Already marginalized, they end up feeling even more isolated, with even less of a stake in the larger society. On the other hand, immigrant and minority advocates sometimes fail to recognize the very real nature of the terrorist threat and may view security measures that disproportionately affect immigrant communities as unwarranted harassment. Moreover, the views and concerns of members of these minority communities themselves are, incredibly, often left out of discussions of both social integration and security. This is particularly true with respect to female members of these communities.

Beyond the rift between the immigration and security domains, there is a further problem in that the major democracies take different approaches to what is fundamentally a transnational issue. Each country's history with regard to immigration and citizenship differs, and the perception of the terrorist threat is different in each. Yet, we believe that a dialogue across borders is essential if the core values of open society are to be preserved.

The goal of the Program on Citizenship & Security is to create a networked environment where discussion and debate of these issues will lead to collaborative solutions to the serious challenge of reconciling enhanced national security in the face of a transnational terrorist threat with the rights and responsibilities of citizenship and the core values of democracy.   Working with institutional partners abroad, the program will initially focus on countries with important immigrant and minority populations: the United States, France, Germany, and India. The program will also bring the European Union and the United Nations into the dialogue as appropriate. As the program evolves, additional countries–such as Canada, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Spain and Turkey–may be added.