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Max Planck Encyclopedia of Comparative Constitutional Law [MPECCoL]

Aliens

Gregor Novak

From: Oxford Constitutions (http://oxcon.ouplaw.com). (c) Oxford University Press, 2023. All Rights Reserved.date: 11 December 2024

Subject(s):
Acquisition of citizenship — Illegal aliens — Stateless persons — Migration

General Editors: Rainer Grote, Frauke Lachenmann, Rüdiger Wolfrum
Managing Editor: Martina Mantovani

1 The ‘alien’ refers to a particular category of the ‘other’, one often defined in opposition to its correlative of the ‘citizen’ or ‘national’ (Bauböck (2017) 65; Shachar (2012) 1012–13; Benhabib (2004) 1; Joppke (2010) 1–33; Honig; Walzer 34; Arendt). As a concept and condition, the alien complicates key questions of constitutional law and theory. It reveals the tension between constitutionalism’s ‘moral and political universalism, as anchored in universal human rights, and the particularistic and exclusionary conceptions of democratic closure’ (Benhabib (2004)...
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