Citizenship Article Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 4750 words

Citizenship - Article Example Philosophers and political theorists including Kant, Hobbes, Marx, Machiavelli and Locke etc have presented different views and articulated various theories to define the manners, rights and obligations of citizenship. Their works indicate directly and indirectly the factors supportive in maintaining peaceful atmosphere within a social set up. They have also indicated the basic causes and circumstances leading the nations towards the path of conflict and destruction. The term citizenship simply refers to the membership of a country, a state, a tribe, a community or an authority, which creates rights and duties between citizens and the state. The individuals are bound to abide by the norms, values, mores, taboos and laws determined by the authorities to keep peace and solidarity in its fold. Citizenship not only implements wide range of obligations on citizens, but also offers them many opportunities to grow, make progress, involve into social, political, cultural, religious, economic and other peaceful activities on the one hand, and assures the individuals peaceful environment, security of life, honour and belongings, legal remedies, justice and equality within its platform on the other. Looking into the history of the world from the most primitive societies of Palaeolithic and Neolithic eras to the most modern ones of contemporary technological age, it becomes evident that social inequality and injustices always existed in all human societies give birth to stratification and conflict. Philosophers and thinkers have defined the causes and consequences of conflict between different groups and remedies for it in order to escape anarchical situation in the society. Sociological researches too reveal the very fact that even during the ancient times different classes existed in every culture and civilization.Kant emphatically submits that the state of peace among the people living side by side and remaining in constant interaction with one another cannot be remained peaceful, as it is in the nature of man to contain differences with other fellow-beings. It is therefore it is war rather than peace which could be stated as the natural one. The same is the case with nations and states which are at warring positions in the one way or the other. Many wars took place between the Greeks and the Persians time and again sabotaging the peace and harmony of the countries. Absence of any regularity authority to check the advances of the c onflicting states kept them in constant war position. The Athenians declared these wars as the golden chapter of their history, though it cost hundreds of lives as well as pushed the economy to a sorry state. "In Ionia (the modern Aegean coast of Turkey) the Greek cities, which included great centres such as Miletus and Halicarnassus, were unable to maintain their independence and came under the rule of the Persian Empire in the mid 6th century B.C. In 499 BC the Greeks rose in the Ionian Revolt, and Athens and some other Greek cities went to their aid." (Quoted in http://www.crystalinks.com/greeksocial.html) The Persians invaded