Abstract: Citizenship identity is a research field that has developed from a partial merge of lines of studies on citizenship and identity, a result of expressing the subethnic local identity and the beyondethnic regional identity at the political level. This has greatly pushed the emergence and construction of modern citizenship and different forms of its identity in Western countries. In this field with two cores, citizenship and identity are opposed to each other yet they are partially integrated. As a new field resulting from the intersection of the two, research on citizenship identity is focused on individuals’ or groups’ psychological cognition and phenomenological experience of their membership in political communities (selfsafety, belongingness, solidarity and inclusion/exclusion) with a wish to promote the sense of dignity and status as members in a political community. Examined externally, research on citizenship identity in the Western academia has centered around three sociopolitical schools of thought, namely, constitutional patriotism, pluralism, and radical democratism. Researchers of each school, respectively, have worked out relatively coherent political views. Examined internally, research on citizenship identity has branched out into three lines, namely, legitimating construction, rejecting, and reconstructing, each of which, independently, is concerned with the power construction in modern citizenship identity, challenges from religions and local cultures in the age of globalization, and new issues coming with the citizenship of the European Union. This paper, based on the literature of the sociopolitical theories in the West since the 1990s, reviews the processes through which the two topics of citizenship and identity have come together, illustrates different theoretical discussions of citizenship identity and its internally differentiated aspects. Citizenship identity, as a new research field, is gaining high attention in the academia. The internal differentiation of citizenship identity is challenging the conception of a single homogeneous identity structure in regards to modern citizenship identity.

Key words: citizenship, citizenship identity, identity, legitimately constructed, reconstructed, rejecting