ABSTRACT
Seyla Benhabib's The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents and Citizens explores the philosophical and institutional meaning of political membership in liberal democratic states. By drawing attention to the transformation of conventional conceptions of national citizenship, territoriality, democratic voice, and representation in a globalizing world, Benhabib engaged in a topic that has received minimal attention from global justice theorists. The Rights of Others contributed to prevailing debates between "decline-of-citizenship" theorists and political philosophers of global justice and cosmopolitanism. More specifically, Benhabib's concept of "cosmopolitan federalism" intends to mitigate the tension between those who condemn the closed-door policies of wealthy nations and those who insist that migrations pose a threat to the values and identities of liberal democracies. While other scholars such as Thomas Pogge and Charles Beitz have explored the possibility of a new kind of cosmopolitan politics, Benhabib focused specifically on migration and asylum seekers.
