Who Are the Subjects of Justice in a Globalized World? From the ‘Unidimensional Identity’ to the ‘Diversity of Identities’

: This article states that the idea of national citizenship, bound to rights and duties circumscribed to a State, is no longer fit to reflect upon the political challenges of a globalizing world. Instead, I argue in favor of the ‘ diversity of identities ’ as a ‘ political heuristic ’ that offers an alternative frame to the question about who is the subject of justice. Our current understanding of the political and social action lacks of something: the concept of a citizen that we inherit from Modernity — the citizen as the subject of rights and duties — doesn ’ t let us explain its current dynamics in a globalizing world. Problems such as migration, refugees and contemporary social movements, among others, have led us to problematize two ideas associated with that concept: a) citizenship is defined based on exclusively national rights and duties, that is, those which are circumscribed to a politically and geographically well limited territory; and b) a State ’ s citizens are the only subjects for whom justice is understood as the equal distribution of those rights and duties. But the paradigms of national citizenship and just distribution are being undermined by globalization ’ s dynamics, since we are shown that their effects are transna-tional and that the expressions against these effects can also have a global character. This context rushes us to find new forms of understanding for those transformations, as well as the political action of people. To meet this challenge, this work argues in favor of the idea of the ‘ diversity of identities ’ as a way to understand people close to their concrete experiences of injustice, and as a ‘ political heuristic ’ that lets us offer an alternative frame to national citizenship as an answer to the question about who are the subjects of justice in a globalizing world.