The question of what it means to be a citizen has, from the dawn of Western politics, been anything but clear and straightforword, and in modern societies it has become even more enigmatic and contested. Inseparable from democracy, and the demoands for equality and liberty from which democracy draws its origins, citizenship is constantly being redefined within the unresolved contradiction between universal principles and the discriminatory mechanisms that regulate membership of a political community. Not everyone is a citizen, even within one nation-state. The dynamics of inclusion and exclusion continue to generate dramatic asymmetries and create openings and closures, especially today in a time of particular fragility and when national sovereignty is in flux. Balibar does not shy away from the antimonies of citizenship, but he knows that to renounce citizenship would be to abandon the chance to create new modes of collective autonomy, in short, to democratize democracy. -- Publisher's description.