ABSTRACT

While sociology has contributed significantly to the study of social rights in the form of social citizenship, it has, until recently, generally neglected the question of rights as such. However, the global growth of human rights in the second half of the twentieth century has begun to attract attention from sociologists (Woodiwiss 2003), especially in the context of debates about cosmopolitanism. Human rights are central to the so-called ‘juridical revolution’ (Ignatieff 2001) and they underpin the notion that cosmopolitanism involves both recognition and respect for other people. Because citizenship is often associated with exclusionary national entitlements, many social theorists have criticized traditional forms of citizenship as national membership, because it, seemingly, cannot provide answers to transnational identities and membership, to growing refugee and asylum problems or to migrant and diasporic communities. In this chapter, while recognizing the merit of much criticism of national citizenship, we offer a modest defence of the tradition of citizenship. It is now widely argued that a global world requires a new set of cosmopolitan values and institutions (Appiah 2006), but what part can national citizenship play in such a context?