The Practice of Global Citizenship

In this novel account of global citizenship, Luis Cabrera argues that

all individuals have a global duty to contribute directly to human
rights protections and to promote rights-enhancing political integration
between states. The Practice of Global Citizenship blends careful
moral argument with compelling narratives from field research among
unauthorized immigrants, activists seeking to protect their rights,
and the ‘Minuteman’ activists striving to keep them out. Immigrantrights
activists, especially those conducting humanitarian patrols for
border-crossers stranded in the brutal Arizona desert, are shown as
embodying aspects of global citizenship. Unauthorized immigrants
themselves are shown to be enacting a form of global ‘civil’ disobedience,
claiming the economic rights central to the emerging global normative
charter while challenging the restrictive membership regimes
that are the norm in the current global system. Cabrera also examines
the European Union, seeing it as a crucial laboratory for studying the
challenges inherent in expanding citizen membership.

The Practice of Global Citizenship

Luis Cabrera
9780521199360pre_pi-xiv.indd iii 8/17/2010 5:21:41 PM
CAMBRIDGE UNI V ERSITY PRESS
Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore,
São Paulo, Delhi, Dubai, Tokyo, Mexico City
Cambridge University Press
The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK
Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press,
New York
www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521128100
© Luis Cabrera 2010

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception

and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without the written
permission of Cambridge University Press.

First published 2010

Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge
A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data
Cabrera, Luis, 1966–
The practice of global citizenship / Luis Cabrera.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-521-19936-0 (hardback) – ISBN 978-0-521-12810-0 (pbk.)
1. World citizenship. 2. Human rights. 3. Cosmopolitanism. I. Title.
JZ1320.4.C33 2010

1
323.6–dc22
2010024607
ISBN 978-0-521-19936-0 Hardback
ISBN 978-0-521-12810-0 Paperback
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or
accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in
this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is,
or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

CONTENTS:

Introduction 1

Part I: Theoretical concerns 11

1 Global citizenship as individual cosmopolitanism 13
2 Rights, duties, and global institutions 34
3 Defining and distributing duties 66

Part II: Global citizenship in practice 97

4 Minutemen and desert samaritans: citizenship practice
in conflict 99
5 Mobile global citizens 131
6 Global citizen duties within less-affl uent states 154

Part III: Advocacy and institutions 179

7 Regional citizenship and global citizenship 181
8 Advocacy duties and global democracy 211
9 Education and motivation for global citizenship 238
Conclusion: the practice of global citizenship 258

Appendix 263
Works cited 265
Index 303

Preface
You have to burn some shoe rubber to get the story. That was the axiom
drilled into me as a cub reporter for The Associated Press, some time
ago now. Only so much can be learned through the telephone, my senior
colleagues advised. To tell the story right, you need to be able to take
in the look, the feel, and even the smell of a place. You need to observe
your subjects in their own surroundings, try to develop a genuine sense
of where and how they live their lives. Something similar is true, I am
increasingly coming to believe, of the political theorist’s work. A theory
argument, especially if it has clear policy implications, can benefit
enormously from engagement with salient actors in their own contexts,
offering their own justifications for action, and their own insights on
possibilities for change.

When I began this book, I was already several years distant from filing

2
my last story on the AP wire. I had completed the transition from
reporter to academic, fulfilling a long-held ambition to be able to delve
more deeply into arguments and issues, and to develop my own positions
on them. I knew precious little at first about the immigration
context that figures so centrally in this work. I quickly became frustrated
with trying to think through the issues arising, especially around
unauthorized immigration, using what I could glean from theoretical
treatments, news, and non-fiction accounts. So, I began to accompany
colleagues’ classes on experiential learning trips to the border between
the US state of Arizona and the Mexican state of Sonora. I was exposed
with their students to ground-level views of border economics, deprivation,
and the reasons behind mass unauthorized entry. I began to meet
some of the activists who had for decades been bringing issues of social
justice from the borderlands to national and global audiences.

My intention had been to follow an earlier theoretical argument for

institutional cosmopolitanism – a macro-level case for the desirability
and feasibility of some forms of global political integration – with
a straightforward theoretical treatment of the individual duties that
could arise in such a frame. Unauthorized immigration had seemed to
be an area in which many issues of global justice came to a head, and
one which could be a productive site for the exploration of duties applicable
to all persons. It became apparent, after my first few trips to the
border, that I would have to conduct some more systematic field study
if I were to fully grasp the significance of unauthorized immigration
for individual duties, or global citizenship, as I was coming to conceive
of the project. With the help of numerous colleagues, I took what was
effectively a crash course in qualitative methodology. I also gave close
study to the relatively few political theory works at that time which had
sought to incorporate original empirical research – in particular Jane
Mansbridge’s ( 1983 ) seminal study of democracy in practice at Vermont
town meetings and among workers at a community crisis center.

I began to seek out those conducting humanitarian patrols for unauthorized

crossers who were stranded and at risk of dying in the desert, as
well as immigration-rights activists more generally . Both groups seemed
to me to be clearly practicing aspects of global citizenship. I also wanted
to observe and interview those “civilian border patrol” members of the
Minuteman Project in Arizona. They appeared to be enacting a stringently
nation-centric form of citizenship in taking it upon themselves
to guard their own international boundary against unauthorized entry.
Initial interviews and field observations quickly corrected an error in
my approach. I found that I had neglected perhaps the most important
set of global-citizen actors: unauthorized immigrants themselves.

Such individuals were, more than any others, acting as though it were
already possible to be a global citizen. They crossed borders in search
of opportunities for themselves and their family members. They often
made civic contributions in both their host and sending communities.

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Further, they appeared to be practicing something akin to global “civil”
disobedience in attempting, by violating entry laws, to claim economic
and other rights that are enumerated in major human rights treaties.
They had a strong sense that their violation was morally permissible.
Later fieldwork involved going closer to the source of unauthorized
immigration in North America, in this case the immigrant-sending
state of Veracruz, Mexico. Veracruz was a particularly significant site.
It provided the opportunity to speak with groups of ordinary Mexicans
offering food and shelter to Central Americans riding atop freight trains
to the US border . That is probably the most dangerous means of making
the journey. Riders are frequently preyed on by gangs and Mexican
authorities, and many lose limbs or their lives when they fall under the
moving trains. Interviews and observations with those aiding the riders
reinforced a sense that individuals within less-affluent states could, and
often already did, discharge significant global-citizen duties.

Field research in Western Europe, and especially in the North African

Spanish enclave of Ceuta , helped to complete the picture and reveal
important similarities across contexts. European activist groups lobbied
to have rights protections extended to all persons, regardless of immigration
status. Prospective unauthorized entrants went to often extraordinary
lengths to try to reach European soil. They spoke of weeks-long
treks through the Sahara Desert, where many saw their companions
drop and die beside them. Or they had tried to run the gauntlet of the
Gibraltar crossing, or the more dangerous ocean crossing from Africa’s
northwest coast to the Spanish-controlled Canary Islands, a route that
has claimed thousands of lives in the past decade. It would take a book
much longer than this one to do such stories justice. What hopefully
will emerge, however, is the richness of both the empirical and theoretical
contexts of global citizenship, and the importance of bringing
excluded voices into global justice debates, including within works such
as this one. Individuals who are pressing at the normative edges of the
current global system are often capable of speaking eloquently, or with
simple power, about why they act as they do. Their insights fundamentally
inform the theoretical treatment of global citizenship here, as well
as the possibilities identified for institutional transformation.

Introduction
Arivaca, Arizona , USA : Presbyterian seminary student Luke Roske
pushed through low-hanging branches in a dry creek bed that cut
through the desert around this ranching community some fifteen miles
north of the Mexican border. He paused and knelt, lighting a cigarette
and peering silently up the wash. All around were strewn the signs of
fresh migrant travel: empty food tins and gallon water jugs, discarded
clothes, shoes, backpacks. Roske shrugged out of his own thirty-pound
pack and let it fall to the ground. Inside were several half-liter bottles
of water and perhaps a dozen “migrant packs,” the clear plastic bags
distributed by members of the No More Deaths humanitarian patrol

4
group. Each bag was stuffed with potato chips, Vienna sausages, crackers,
cookies, an electrolyte drink – food to sustain those exhausted or
lost in a harsh desert landscape that has claimed more than a thousand
crossers’ lives in recent years. Roske tipped his straw cowboy hat back
on his head, wiped sweat from his brow with a sleeve, and pulled hard
on the cigarette. Nearby, but invisible in the brush, another volunteer
called out to any who might be hiding around them: “Somos amigos.”
“We are friends.” No one answered (author observation, July 2005).

Tierra Blanca, Veracruz, Mexico : In this city of 45,000 in

Veracruz state on Mexico’s eastern coast, where thousands of Central
American migrants pass through each day clinging to the tops of freight
trains, a group of volunteers prepared for their nightly service. Bearing
a massive pot of simmered beans, hot tortillas and coffee in a fivegallon
bucket, they emerged from their albuerge , or migrant shelter.

Outside on the pavement, perhaps two dozen men sat or lay on makeshift
beds of cardboard and blankets, waiting to be admitted for the
night. The volunteers passed them and trudged, two per bucket, about
three-quarters of a mile to the area around the rail yard. There, they set
the food on a folding card table and broke out cups and plastic utensils
as a crowd gathered, almost all men, and all waiting to transfer trains
and continue their northward journeys. One volunteer, a local evangelical
musician named Ignacio Lara, called, “Hermanos migrantes,” or
“migrant brothers,” and led them in a prayer. Then each lined up for
a cup of beans, tortillas, and sugared coffee. “People here don’t have
much, but what we have we try to share with those who have less,”
noted Miguel Angel Ochoa Cruz, a founder of the albuerge and deacon
of the local church that supports it (author interview, March 2007).

Algeciras, Andalucía, Spain : Isidoro “Padre Pateras” Macías

Martín ducked out of the rain pelting a busy street in this workingclass
port city on the Strait into a two-story home with iron bars on
each ground-floor window. He poked his head into a room off the main
hallway and greeted the women and young children seated inside, all
sub-Saharan Africans working on their Spanish by watching a daytime
drama. Entering the kitchen at the end of the hallway, he greeted several
more women with handclasps or quick kisses on the cheek, patting
the babies that two of them held. All of the women had entered Spain
by sea, making the oft-treacherous Gibraltar crossing in small boats
while pregnant, hoping that having a baby on Spanish soil would permit
them to remain in Europe. Macías, a brother of the Franciscan order
of the White Cross, began working with unauthorized immigrants in
Algeciras in the early 1980s (see De Russe 2003 ; Vallejo-Nágera 2004 ).

By 1999, he had begun to see much larger numbers of economic fugitives

arriving in the often rickety small boats, or pateras , including a
number of pregnant women. The following year, he opened the home,
which has since served hundreds of women and their children. Most
face hard times once they land in Spain , even with the several months’

5
shelter provided by the home. Macías himself has faced pressure from
some Spanish clergy, among others, for possible violations of laws
against harboring unauthorized immigrants. “I only know one law,” he
said. “That is the law of love. I do exactly what Jesus said to do. I don’t
look at the color of the people. I just open the door” (author interview,
March 2006).

Naco, Arizona, USA : “If your basement is flooding, you first stop
the leak and then try to fix the problem,” noted Wanda Schultz, 68, a
retired legal secretary from Houston, Texas, as she stood at her border
vigil site. “My citizenship is becoming worthless with 3 million illegals
coming through the border every year” (author interview, April 2005).
Schulz was one of hundreds of Minuteman Project volunteers who converged
on southeastern Arizona from sites around the United States in
April 2005. After an opening rally at Minuteman headquarters in the
Old West tourist town of Tombstone, Arizona, they set up vigil sites off
Border Road, a dirt track running parallel to the four-strand barbedwire
fence marking the line between the United States and Mexico.

There, equipped with walkie-talkies, and often with handguns belted

on, they stood for eight-hour day or night vigils, reporting any suspicious
activity to the US Border Patrol and fielding questions from global
media, documentary filmmakers, and sympathetic public officials.
“I think it’s an outrage,” one project participant said of the migrant
flows, as he searched the parched brown hills on the Mexican side. “It’s
a disgrace. I write e-mails to the president all the time telling him he’s
supposed to be representing the people, and he’s not, because the people
are all for what we’re doing here” (author interview, April 2005).

. . .

With one notable exception, the scenes above depict individuals who
are reaching across national boundaries, or internal boundaries of differential
citizenship, to aid individuals at risk from exposure, physical
threats, or economic deprivation. As such, they are seeking to protect
fundamental human rights. In the frame of this work, they are practicing
some significant aspects of global citizenship. By contrast, the
Minuteman group enacts a conception of citizenship or duty to others
that is far more nation-centric. Its members fiercely claim the prerogatives
of state sovereignty, especially a state’s presumed right to permit
or deny entry as it chooses. At a more implicit level, the Minutemen
espouse an “absolute ownership” view of state citizenship, where sets of
compatriots are seen as possessing firm rights to determine their own
distributive obligations to those outside their set.

I argue in this work for a global citizen orientation. I take as my departure

point recent cosmopolitan thought, which views individuals, rather
than states or other groupings, as morally primary. Cosmopolitans have
offered important insights about injustices produced within the current
global system, as well as about some possible state and individual

6
duties obtaining within that system (Beitz 1999a ; Caney 2005 ; Pogge
2008a ; Brock 2009 ; see Shue 1996 ). The account here seeks to build
on such insights and develop a more comprehensive approach to individual
duties in the global context. I argue that crucial questions about
the definition, distribution, and reliable discharge of such duties can be
addressed by incorporating a specific, institutional conception of global
citizenship into the cosmopolitan framework.

Theorists of citizenship per se have offered perhaps the most detailed

guidance on individual duties within political community. Accounts of
global citizenship have attempted to extend such guidance to the global
sphere, though they have been primarily concerned with possibilities
for promoting some form of human solidarity or global ethic, rather
than with identifying packages of individual duties. The approach
developed here views institutions as vital for the protection of human
rights, because they have the potential to provide full coverage for all
individuals in a given set, and to obtain full compliance from all with
duties corresponding to others’ rights. Thus global human duties are
defined by reference to a set of institutions that would plausibly be able
to protect the core rights of all persons. Identified are three categories
of duties corresponding to such rights, and which are seen as incumbent
on all.

The first category is that of contributory duties . Like the activists

and humanitarians noted above, individuals in the current system can
take significant steps toward closing gaps in rights protections for noncompatriots.
They can make direct contributions of time, energy, and
expertise, in addition to contributing personal resources for humanitarian
assistance, development initiatives, and rights promotion and
protection.

The second category is that of accommodation duties . In contrast

to ardent nativists or immigration restrictionists, those discharging
accommodation duties will be willing to shoulder the burdens of more
expansive distributive regimes, and other moves consistent with securing
core rights for all persons. They will also be willing to accommodate
the adjustment pressures associated with expanded distributions
of membership, in the form of more flexible immigration regimes or
free movement across borders, as has developed within the European
Union.

The third category is that of institutional advocacy duties . Nonelites

within states routinely assume some types of advocacy duties,
lobbying or protesting to promote reform in their domestic governing institutions.
Likewise, those calling for their states to meet overseas aid goals
are viewed here as discharging duties of interstate advocacy. Finally, and
most significant for this work, those demanding reform in institutions of
global governance such as the World Trade Organization are assuming
vital suprastate advocacy duties. I argue that a fully realized conception
of suprastate advocacy duties would include promoting the development

7
of institutions capable of comprehensively protecting individual rights,
at the regional and ultimately the global level. The resulting institutions
would, over time, constitute a framework within which an actual practice
of global citizenship could be realized. The current European Union
represents an incomplete but potentially very important model.

The argument is structured around these categories or aspects of

global citizenship practice. They are viewed as deeply complementary
rather than discrete. Even individuals who do not consciously assume
advocacy duties may, by their efforts to contribute to and accommodate
others, engage in de facto advocacy for suprastate institutional reform.

For example, the desert humanitarian patrollers in the No More Deaths

group can be seen as engaging in a form of direct-action advocacy. Their
efforts to render aid to vulnerable noncompatriots highlight what they
see as significant flaws in US immigration enforcement policy, while
also filling gaps in rights protections for individuals. At a deeper level,
they may be calling attention to institutional gaps in economic rights
protections throughout the North American region that figure significantly
in producing the mass northward migration and unauthorized
penetration of the US border. The Minuteman civilian border patrollers
also are engaging in a form of direct-action advocacy, but for a very
different purpose. Their stated aim is to strengthen institutional protections
for their own citizens by helping to exclude those who would
illicitly compete for national resources, or could pose some physical
threat to compatriots. Their actions are designed to call attention to a
perceived need for more institutional resources devoted to such exclusions,
while contributing directly to enforcement.

Examining the actions, stated motivations, and moral beliefs of such

individuals can give insight into how conceptions of both global and
rigidly national citizenship are enacted in the current system. It can
highlight some obstacles to promoting a global citizen orientation in
each of the categories of duty identified. Findings from research conducted
with the Minutemen, No More Deaths, and a range of other
groups are woven throughout the text, along with findings from scores
of interviews conducted with authorized and unauthorized immigrants,
enforcement officers, diplomats, government officials, and others in the
United States, Mexico, and Western Europe. All contribute to the construction
of a more comprehensive view of the issues at stake in defining
and distributing duties, as well as identifying ways of promoting the
actual discharge of duties corresponding to human rights.

Structure of the argument

I begin by offering details on the specific conception of global citizenship
advocated and situating it in the broader literature on cosmopolitan
distributive and political justice. Global citizenship, I argue, can be
understood as the fully realized form of individual cosmopolitanism.
It provides a guide for individual action within a globally oriented but
still individualistic moral frame. I consider some candidate approaches

8
to global citizenship and offer critiques. A “good international citizenship”
approach would be an important advance on the global
status quo, but it may be too closely tied to the norms of a sovereign
states system to reliably secure the rights of those within less-affluent
states. Conceptions of global citizenship as global ethic likewise offer
important insights into appropriate orientations toward the human
community, but they give relatively little guidance on specific duties to
be discharged or ensuring that individuals in that community will be
protected. An institutional approach, in which duties are defined and to
some extent distributed with reference to a defensible system of global
institutions, offers greater definitional precision and a concrete route to
enhancing rights protections.

Chapter 2 explores in detail why human rights protections are likely

to remain insecure in a sovereign states system, and thus why duties
and protective institutions should be conceived as extending to the fully
global level. After detailing a conception of human rights based on vital
human interests, I turn to recent thought on political obligation and
legitimacy, where significant emphasis has been given to obstacles in
the way of securing rights for individuals. I consider justifications for
state coercion that are grounded in natural duties owed to all other
persons, rather than in consent or with reference to benefits received. I
argue that, while an emphasis on such natural duties gives strong reasons
to support the creation of rights-protecting political institutions,
we should not presume that the duties halt at domestic boundaries.
In fact, because of specific biases that arise within a sovereign states
system, the scope of rights-protecting institutions should extend well
beyond current states.

In Chapter 3 , the kinds of institutions that would most likely be

needed to overcome the biases are detailed, as are the duties that would
be incumbent on individuals within such institutions. I discuss ways in
which duties in the current, far less integrated system, could be identified
and distributed by reference to the fully integrated aim, and I
consider and critique two prominent alternatives. One of these would
argue for securing subsistence rights, but no more, for all individuals,
while to some extent holding those within less-affluent states collectively
responsible for their own poverty (D. Miller 2007 ). Such an
approach, I argue, gives too little emphasis to the limited means which
most non-elites have to affect such macro outcomes, especially in terms
of decisions taken before their birth. Some of the same problems attend
a cosmopolitan approach that would seek to distribute duties to the
globally affluent according to harms they are said to perpetrate on the
less-affluent (Pogge 2008a ). Global duties, I argue, are more defensibly
seen as natural and distributed according to ability to contribute,
accommodate, and advocate, than according to a scheme that would
attempt to hold all responsible at some baseline level.

That concludes the presentation of theoretical concerns in the first

section of the book. The second section focuses on those organizations

9
already practicing aspects of global citizenship, as well as those enacting
a nation-centric conception. In Chapter 4 , findings are presented from
field research among immigrant-rights activists in the US Southwest.

Such activists, in particular those in the No More Deaths and related

groups, are discussed as exemplar practitioners of global citizenship in
the current system. Interview findings give insight into their justifications
for action to aid the excluded other, often in the face of resistance
from their own state authorities. They understand their work as defensible
in an explicitly universalistic frame, whether Christian or secular,
in which the need of the other exerts its own moral pull, and where all
are seen as having duties to respond. Findings from Minuteman interviews
reveal a more fundamentally group-centric view, where strong
duties to members are understood to override most general duties to
others.

Chapter 5 offers a novel way of thinking about advocacy duties and

how rights-enhancing integration could be promoted. It presents an
argument that unauthorized immigrants to such regions as Western
Europe and North America are already practicing a concrete and
mostly defensible form of trans-state citizenship, though not one identical
to that of immigrant-rights activists. They are, as suggested earlier,
engaging in de facto forms of global civil disobedience. They act in
general fidelity to an emerging global normative charter grounded in
state-transcendent rights, even as they violate laws against unauthorized
entry. Mass street protests across the United States, and smaller
but significant actions by undocumented persons in Western Europe,
add a significant publicity dimension.

The actions and moral understandings of such border crossers help

to point us to some agency-respecting ways of thinking about the duties
of the globally less-affluent . In Chapter 6 , I outline an approach that
would view the global poor as morally co-equal agents capable of discharging
a range of rights-protecting duties, rather than merely as
the objects of other people’s duties overseas. I consider and critique
some non-cosmopolitan approaches to the duties of the global poor.

Those include accounts that make reference to ostensibly rigid empirical

constraints – the prospect of looming famine – to justify claims
that the poor have, for example, duties to submit to harsh population control
measures. Drawing on the fieldwork conducted in southern
Mexico, I detail voluntary actions that individuals within less-affluent
states are already taking to protect vulnerable others, including those
who do not share their citizenship. I then discuss reasons for moving
from a strict conditionalities framework in overseas development aid,
where recipients are held to externally determined standards and action
requirements, toward a genuine partnership framework, in which they
are treated as fully equal participants in cooperative schemes to improve
their own circumstances.

10
The final section of the book focuses on existing trans-state institutions
and some possibilities for transformation in line with institutional
global citizenship. Chapter 7 examines the trans-state citizenship regime
emerging across the still-expanding European Union. After sketching
the evolution of actionable EU citizen rights over several decades, I consider
how far EU citizenship can serve as a model, including in relation
to “Fortress Europe” critiques focusing on the hardening of external
borders as internal ones have opened. I discuss ways in which some tensions
identified in the treatment of global civil disobedience are being
manifested in the European context, and how some immigrant-rights
groups are highlighting those tensions to try to extend rights protections.

I close by considering some insights from the EU context that could be

applied in the consideration of deeper North American integration.
Chapter 8 offers a proposal for moving in the near term toward a
concrete practice of citizenship at the global level. Specifically, I argue
for the creation of a World Trade Organization parliamentary body
that would ultimately exercise co-decision powers analogous to those
of the European Parliament. I begin by demonstrating that arguments
against opening supranational institutions actually resonate strongly
with past arguments for “elitist” forms of domestic democracy, and are
vulnerable to the same critiques. I then detail a principle of democratic
symmetry, according to which individuals would be afforded input on
policy formation because of the increasing impact of WTO rules and the
potential impact on them of exclusion from trade governance. Insights
presented earlier, about the importance of empowering individuals to
challenge possible biases, are shown to be significant in the WTO context.
The argument could also inform democratic reform proposals for
the United Nations and other suprastate institutions.

I close the discussion in Chapter 9 by considering some means of

enhancing and expanding efforts at education for global citizenship,
understood as one means of encouraging the discharge of global citizen
duties in the current system. I discuss the increasingly prevalent
efforts to move beyond state-centric citizenship in standardized curricula,
as well as normative theoretical arguments for global education. I
discuss salient findings from social psychology on ways in which some
kinds of information about others in need can promote positive valuations
of them and a willingness to aid. Findings are offered from fieldwork
with humanitarian patrollers which highlight the importance of
similar information and valuation across barriers of citizenship. The
discussion concludes with an exploration of ways in which such insights
could inform expanded efforts at education for global citizenship, with
emphasis both on experiential education and on interventions in academic
and public discourse.

In sum, the full argument has three primary aims. The first is to
develop a defensible conception of global citizenship to fill the theoretical
space of individual cosmopolitanism . It is a conception grounded

11
in duties corresponding to widely recognized human rights. Duties are
defined and distributed in part through reference to ones that would
be incumbent on all individuals in a global system capable of reliably
protecting individual rights. Because of biases and related tendencies
endemic to a sovereign states system, it can plausibly be presumed that
the more cohesive, inclusive, and accountable a system of global institution
is, the more effectively it will protect individual rights.

The second aim is to offer substantive guidance on how and why

individuals act as global citizens in the current global system. In itself,
the fact that so many are willing to make sacrifices of time, energy, and
personal resources to protect vulnerable noncompatriots challenges any
categorical view that strong group identification is necessary to motivate
such sacrifices. Even if committed activists are viewed as taking
action that borders on moral heroism, and thus could not be prescribed
to all, they embody and exemplify a set of moral understandings that in
fact could be widely generalized. They and like groups, intended here
to include development NGOs, human rights NGOs, anti-corporateglobalization
activists, and many others, also create myriad opportunities
for individuals within states to make contributions consistent with
a global citizen ethic.

The final, closely related aim is to highlight ways in which activists,

NGOs, unauthorized immigrants, and those working on their behalf in
receiving states, discharge vital advocacy duties. Few at present serve
as direct advocates of the wholesale transformation and integration of
the global system. By their daily actions, however, they call attention
to deep moral tensions in the current system between individual rights
and the sovereign prerogatives claimed by states. They help to create
continuous pressure for the greater recognition of rights claims, and
thus opportunities for the promotion of rights-enhancing institutional
transformations at all levels. Were such activists to place more emphasis
on transforming suprastate institutions, then “globalization from
below” could become a powerful force for creating morally defensible
institutions above.

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