Aliens

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)...