This panel examines state-sponsored efforts both to afford historically marginalized persons the advantages of full citizenship and to exclude persons from such advantages. This exploration, which will take place from both comparative and historical perspectives, reminds us that citizenship is unavoidably at once inclusive and exclusive. As “nationality,” citizenship indicates an individual’s belonging to a political community; as a “bundle of rights,” citizenship is associated with a variety of benefits, protections, and obligations attached especially, if not exclusively, to the citizen. Non-citizens may enjoy certain rights, but admission to territories of which they are not citizens is not one of those rights, and exclusion can be more or less unpleasant depending on the circumstances. Yet citizens, while theoretically beneficiaries of rights, are not necessarily afforded those rights in practice; such circumstances may stimulate efforts to secure such rights. The papers presented in this panel examine various aspects of citizenship as an institution that both includes and excludes specific groups of persons, and how it may be brought to change its stance on those exclusions and inclusions. The focus will be on the ways citizenship contributes to both equality and inequality. Despite its comparative and historical bent, the panel is thus highly relevant to our own time and place, while also considering how contemporaries saw processes of inclusion and exclusion in their own time and how that may differ from our own vantage. Cases to be examined include the United States, post-independence India, China, and postwar Europe. The panel should therefore appeal to those interested in the historical backdrop to contemporary struggles for equality in much of the world.