Introduction : citizenship in the Maltese Islands

Abstract

The collection of papers in this book focus on the issue of citizenship as it is played out in the Maltese Islands in the first decade of the twenty first century. The Maltese Islands in 2005 consisted of 410,290 people, 50.3 percent being female: of these, 96.2 percent were Maltese citizens (National Statistics Office, 2007, p. vi). Citizenship for all these individuals means different things, as social factors such as gender, age, disability, sexuality, religion, social class, nationality, race or ethnicity interact and intersect with the everyday experiences and vagaries in the histories of the persons involved.