The rights of others : aliens, residents, and citizens

The Rights of Others examines the boundaries of political community by focusing on political membership - the principles and practices for incorporating aliens and strangers, immigrants and newcomers, refugees and asylum seekers into existing polities. Boundaries define some as members, others as aliens. But when state sovereignty is becoming frayed, and national citizenship is unravelling, definitions of political membership become much less clear. Indeed few issues in world politics today are more important, or more troubling. In her Seeley Lectures, the distinguished political theorist Seyla Benhabib makes a powerful plea, echoing Immanuel Kant, for moral universalism and cosmopolitan federalism. She advocates not open but porous boundaries, recognising both the admittance rights of refugees and asylum seekers, but also the regulatory rights of democracies. The Rights of Others is a major intervention in contemporary political theory, of interest to large numbers of students and specialists in politics, law, philosophy and international relations.

• Introduction
• 1. On hospitality: rereading Kant's cosmopolitan doctrine
• 2. 'The right to have rights': Hannah Arendt and the contradictions of the nation-state
• 3. The law of peoples, distributive justice and migrations
• 4. Transformations of citizenship: the case of the European Union
• 5. Democratic iterations: the local, the national and the global
• Conclusion
• References
• Index.