Between 1910 and 2000, the world's population more than tripled, from 1.6 to 5.3 billion. The number of persons who live as migrants in countries other than those in which they were born increased nearly sixfold, from 33 million to 175 million, and more than half of this increase has occurred since 1965. Almost 20 million of these are refugees, asylum seekers, and internally displaced persons. In her book, Seyla Benhabib grapples with both the political and moral implications of this rapid increase in transnational migration, arguing that the central principles that shape our thinking about political membership and state sovereignty are in tension, if not outright contradiction, with one another. “From a philosophical point of view,” she writes, “transnational migrations bring to the fore the constitutive dilemma at the heart of liberal democracies: between sovereign self-determination claims on the one hand and adherence to universal human rights principles on the other” (p. 2). She argues for an internal reconstruction of both, underscoring the significance of membership in bounded communities, while at the same time promoting the cultivation of democratic loyalties that exceed the national state, supporting political participation on the part of citizens and noncitizen residents alike.

International human rights treaties and conventions that guarantee the minimal well-being of noncitizens, Benhabib points out, contribute to the erosion of national states' prerogative over their inhabitants. Yet even as these instruments prohibit signatories from stripping individuals of national citizenship or refusing them the right to emigrate, among other things, they offer no safeguards to ensure that emigrants will be accepted by second- or third-party states. Paradoxically, then, treaties like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights simultaneously extend their reach into what was once the exclusive jurisdiction of national states while also upholding the state's sovereign right to refuse entry or permanent residence to migrants, in effect contributing to the dilemma of the stateless. “Thus,” Benhabib argues, “a series of internal contradictions between universal human rights and territorial sovereignty are built into the logic of the most comprehensive international law documents in our world” (p. 11).

States tend to respond to the intensification of global interdependency by working to contain the transborder migration of peoples; by contrast, Benhabib argues for enhancing the responsiveness of political institutions to migrants and refugees. However, while concerned with remaking democratic citizenship in light of migration, she by no means advocates neglecting local forms of political identification in favor of a rootless and detached cosmopolitanism. To the contrary, she insists that local engagements provide us with some of the most meaningful forms of democratic attachment and political action. She envisions new forms of cosmopolitan citizenship that privilege neither the local and particular nor the global and universal, but tack between and among these creatively and productively, offering new forms and opportunities for politics by “reclaiming and repositioning … the universal … within the framework of the local, the regional, or other sites of democratic activism and engagement” (pp. 23–24).

This “disaggregation of citizenship claims,” in which the rights, responsibilities, activities, benefits, privileges, and entitlements of national citizenship are first unbundled, sometimes deterritorialized, and then recombined variously according to place, jurisdiction, and circumstance, is already taking place. For example, citizens of European Union nations who are resident in other EU member states can vote in both local and EU-wide elections, and local jurisdictions sometimes allow these noncitizen residents to hold local office in the cities where they live and work. Even, and perhaps especially, conflicts between migrants' cultural-political practices and the conventions of their adopted lands, as in the various “headscarf affairs” in France and Germany, offer opportunities for the productive redefinition of citizenship through what Benhabib characterizes as democratic iterations, “complex processes of public argument, deliberation, and exchange through which universalist rights claims and principles are contested and contextualized, invoked and revoked, posited and positioned, throughout legal and political institutions, as well as in the associations of civil society” (p. 179). Such engagements are occasions to rethink and refigure democratic practices and institutions in light of global migration. They are not indications of a decline of citizenship so much as its resignification and reinvigoration, bringing people who may or may not be citizens in the legal sense into democratic deliberation about the proper bounds of politics itself. They effect the transformation of the populations of democratic nations from an ethnos, a “community of shared fate, memories, and moral sympathies,” to a demos, “the democratically enfranchised totality of all citizens, who may or may not belong to the same ethnos” (p. 211).

However much the exclusive power of national states over the populations that reside within them has been attenuated, Benhabib argues, this does not mean that state sovereignty's “hold upon our political imagination and its normative force in guiding our institutions are obsolete” (pp. 178–79). Thus, it bears asking about the consequences for national states of such democratic iterations. What sorts of adjustments, alterations, and even transformations of the national state are occasioned by these developments? How might the transfiguration of a citizenry from ethnos to demos alter the terms in which nations and national peoples—once mythologized as springing full-grown from an immemorial past—are imagined, and what transformations of both national and global political vision might be generated? In short, what sort of future is portended here for the national state in a global and thus newly historicized world, and how will that future alter the ways in which nations imagine their pasts and organize the present? Benhabib does not approach questions like these, concerned as she is with making a normative case for the regeneration of moral universalism and the development of cosmopolitan federalism. Yet these questions inevitably flow from The Rights of Others. If we are left with them, this is testament to the importance of Benhabib's meditation as the ground upon which subsequent work might build.