ABSTRACT
Seyla Benhabib's The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents and Citizens has received its fair share of criticism. These critiques have dealt primarily with Benhabib's concepts of just membership and democratic iterations, and her binary portrayal of states and international human rights regimes. In response to various criticisms, Benhabib revisited and clarified some of the main ideas behind the conceptual framework that she develops in The Rights of Others. Most critics focused on various details or subordinate aspects of Benhabib's assertions while finding her overall conceptual scheme plausible. Benhabib asserted that nation-states have a right to impose reasonable legislative constraints on membership, including language competence, a demonstration of civic literacy, or residency requirements. The intellectual debate on how to concretely achieve a cosmopolitan global justice is far from over, but few would disagree that Benhabib raises the right kind of questions.
