ABSTRACT
The Rights of Others addressed tensions between transnational migration, universal human rights, state sovereignty, and democratic politics. Benhabib described these as "the constitutive dilemma at the heart of liberal democracies". More specifically, she examined the stark divide between the "decline-of-citizenship" and cosmopolitan camps. Eventually, she attempted to reconcile this debate through, on the one hand, advocating porous borders; and, on the other, asserting that sovereign states should maintain the authority to dictate their own paths to full citizenship, as long as they adhere to international human rights law. Benhabib specializes in European—particularly German—political thought. Immanuel Kant, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and Jurgen Habermas, among other scholars, have had a major influence on her work. In The Rights of Others, Benhabib examined Kant's doctrine of cosmopolitan right by focusing on the Third Article of his 1795 essay, "Perpetual Peace".
