ABSTRACT
The Rights of Others engages with a theoretical debate that continues to vex political theorists, politicians, and lawmakers around questions of how nation-states ought to incorporate others into their existing polities and what obligations they have to do so. The originality of Seyla Benhabib's normative contribution derives principally from her assertion of the right to membership as a human right. The Rights of Others is a product of the empirical and normative challenges facing contemporary democracies in terms of citizenship, the rights of immigrants and asylum seekers, the accommodation of difference in multicultural societies, and territorial sovereignty in an age of globalization. Essentially, the "paradox of legitimacy" that sets the stage for Benhabib's argument—the tension between a state's commitment to universal human rights principles and claims of self-determination and territorial sovereignty—concern a broader range of states than Benhabib explicitly acknowledged.
