An Analysis of Seyla Benhabib's the Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents, and Citizens

In The Rights of Others, Benhabib argues that the transnational movement of people across the globe has brought to the fore fundamental dilemmas facing liberal democracies: tension between a state’s commitment to universal human rights, and to its sovereign self-determination and its claims to regulate its national borders on the other. Re-conceptualises the boundaries of political membership in liberal democracies instead proposing ‘porous’ borders rather than open ones and a right to ‘just membership,’ advocating cosmopolitan federalism in the tradition of Kant. Banhabib’s work goes to the heart of key issues faced in a world of forced displacement, Brexit, and increased protectionism.

Burcu Ozcelik is a Teaching Associate in the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Cambridge. Her broader research engages with human rights reform and constitutionalisation, political theories of reconciliation and recognition, agonistic democratic theory, and evolving understandings of self-determination, and she has conducted empirical research into contemporary Kurdish politics in Turkey, Iraq and Syria and Turkey’s foreign policy in the Middle East.