Boundaries and Birthright: Bosniak's and Shachar's Critiques of Liberal Citizenship

Abstract

This review essay argues that citizenship in contemporary states exposed to migration should be understood and evaluated as membership in territorially bounded and intergenerational political communities that are no longer fully separate from each other. Linda Bosniak’s book exposes the ways in which the hard territorial border has been increasingly folded into the inside of the American polity but does not take sufficiently into account the complementary extension of membership boundaries beyond territorial borders through transnational citizenship links. Ayelet Shachar’s book is marked by a tension between a luck egalitarian critique of the privileges attached to birthright citizenship and a relational principle of jus nexi for determining claims to membership. I defend a principle of stakeholder citizenship that builds on the same intuition but includes a normative argument for birthright membership.