ABSTRACT
Seyla Benhabib's The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents and Citizens engaged with contemporary debates around political membership in Europe and the United States and the cross-border movement of migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers. Extending the ideas of Immanuel Kant and Jürgen Habermas, Benhabib advocated for a cosmopolitan notion of universal, permanent hospitality, the conditions of which all individuals concerned deliberate and decide. Benhabib presented a theoretic grounding of rights claims which led her to argue that the right to membership was a human right. The opposite of this right to membership in her view was the interdiction against denaturalization or loss of membership. Benhabib argued for the recognition of a right to political membership for all persons regardless of their citizenship status. Two related ideas that are central to Benhabib's conceptual scheme are those of democratic iterations and jurisgenerative politics.
