ABSTRACT
In our contemporary world, explicit and arbitrary exclusions from membership and participation in the determination of social and political life remain numerous. And even where such exclusions are in principle unwanted, they lurk in the background of many a liberally well-intended city. Though women have gained the right to vote in many places around the globe, they still suffer from various types of injustice inflicted on their bodies, their family situation, their financial autonomy or their work possibilities. Although slavery is internationally forbidden, similarly, it is still practised more frequently than we would care to know and its prime victims are children. And even where slavery is not formally practised, work conditions can be so deplorable as to be comparable to it – and the international system of production, maintaining as it does huge ‘North-South’ disparities, favours social dumping. The persistence of such conditions as well as the increased possibilities of movement for people – against a background of decades of either multiculturalist or assimilative policies in the case of Europe – have intensified demands for political asylum and economic immigration. A reflection on the stranger inside – a term by which we refer to lack of full citizenship status, whether in legal or ‘merely’ in social terms – and the stranger outside the ‘polis’ is, thus, one of the most acute contemporary issues.
