The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents, and Citizens

Extract

The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents, and Citizens. By Seyla Benhabib. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 251p. $65.00 cloth, $23.99 paper.

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.