Cosmopolitan state citizenship: realistic utopias and their limits

ABSTRACT

In this Comment, I focus on the state-based approach to citizenship and global justice adopted by Christine Hobden in Citizenship in a Globalised World. I briefly reconstruct the methodological justification Hobden provides before identifying what I take to be innovative in this approach, and the contribution Hobden makes to extant debates between nationalist and cosmopolitan conceptions of justice and responsibility. I then consider the limitations of a state-based approach, in particular, questioning the extent to which the public authority necessary for the protection of equal moral freedom should be conflated with sovereign states. I conclude by gesturing towards the ways that Hobden’s account can provide guidance on global justice beyond and without the state.

KEYWORDS:

• Citizenship
• cosmopolitanism
• non-ideal theory
• state
• global justice

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ashwini Vasanthakumar

Ashwini Vasanthakumar is an Associate Professor at Queen’s Law School. Her research interests are in political and legal philosophy. She is the author of The Ethics of Exile: A Political Theory of Diaspora (Oxford University Press, 2021).