How to respect universal rights in a globalized world?
It is impossible to read Seyla Benhabib’s The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents, and Citizens without thinking about Swedish immigration policy. The book discusses the state’s — admittedly indisputable — right to determine who may become a citizen, who may stay, and who must leave the country. In a world filled with refugees seeking a better future, and migrant workers being invited to come to a new country to work, that right will be confronted with the rights of the individual, including the right to be treated with dignity.
The book was published in 2000, but every page of The Rights of Others feels like a commentary on today’s Swedish politics, with its proposals to revoke permanent residence permits, conduct as grounds for deportation, repatriation grants that signal “you are not welcome here,” and ever-increasing demands for self-sufficiency, even as immigrants in Sweden often struggle to find jobs.
This year’s Skytte Prize in Political Science is awarded to Seyla Benhabib, for her “deep respect for both individual and state rights, and her exploration of how justice is possible in a world where people are constantly on the move.” Benhabib has been affiliated with Yale University in the U.S. for many years, where she is the Eugene Meyer Professor of Political Science and Philosophy. Her roots, however, lie in Istanbul, where she grew up in a Sephardic family.
Seyla Benhabib works in the area of political science that borders on political philosophy. Her research therefore involves maintaining a constant dialogue with earlier thinkers. One of them being the recently deceased Jürgen Habermas (also a recipient of the Skytte Prize, 2024), whose ideas on deliberative democracy — based on the desire to understand one another through sincere listening — she herself embraces. Only through repeated conversation, dialogue, and constant reinterpretation of norms can we reach what Benhabib hopes for: universal rights in a world of diverse cultures and political systems, and where states still can act with legal authority on their side.
Benhabib is far from the first political thinker to tirelessly explore the question of how a society — in this case, one that spans borders, transnationally — can define and realize a state that individuals experience as just. Plato believed that justice is achieved when everyone is in their rightful place, the place that corresponds to their form in the world of ideas. The most rational, the philosophers, to whom he himself belonged, had, for example, found their rightful place when they were among the rulers. But it is Immanuel Kant who lays the foundation for a modern way of viewing justice based on the individual as an end in itself, not, as in Plato, a means to achieve social harmony. Consequently, Kant is present as an inspiration, conversation partner, and mentor in nearly everything Benhabib writes.
The same applies to Hannah Arendt, as well as John Rawls. Rawls’s A Theory of Justice from 1971 shaped the late 20th-century view that fair distribution should prioritize the interests of the least advantaged. To achieve this, decisions would need to be made behind the “veil of ignorance,” without knowing one’s own lot in society beforehand.
The distribution of resources — both economic and educational — was at the center of politics and public debate when Rawls developed his renowned theory. Since capitalism exploded in the 1990s following global deregulation, other rights have taken the central stage of political contestation. Large-scale migration gave rise to questions of political and social belonging and the right to be treated with dignity in multinational and diverse societies. It is these kinds of conflicts surrounding justice and rights that Benhabib has devoted herself to trying to pin down. The ones she highlights as the least advantaged are not, as with Rawls, primarily the poorest, but women and children who in many parts of the world live under patriarchal oppression. In doing so, she combines her ideas about universal justice with an explicit feminism.
It is also in feminism and gender inequality that she finds her starting point in her early works. In Situating the Self: Gender, Community, and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics from 1992, she engages in a tour de force in which she situates the universalism of the Enlightenment — which concerns both humanity’s shared nature and the equal rights of all individuals — in relation to its modern critics: the communitarians, the feminists, and the postmodernists. While communitarianism, with leading figures such as Charles Taylor and Alasdair MacIntyre, criticizes the liberal Enlightenment for having misunderstood human nature and the significance of belonging, feminists such as Carole Pateman and Susan Moller Okin argue that both human nature and the equal rights of all are in fact limited to men. Postmodernists, on the other hand, reject the Enlightenment ideal of a common reason, arguing that even reason is subsumed within hierarchies of power.
But Benhabib argues that it is wrong to abandon modernity simply because it has not brought about peace, happiness, and harmony. Instead, universalism — the idea of the universal value of every human being — is a concept worth preserving and developing in the postmodern world we live in. And it can be developed with the help of modernity’s critics, who all have thought-provoking objections: regarding the fundamental need for belonging, the systematic exclusion of women, and reason — not as something inherent in the human psyche, but as something created within various cultural contexts. One concept she uses to explore this is interactive universalism.
Just a short while ago, Sweden was the country with open borders, large-scale family reunification, and residency in the country as almost the only requirement for citizenship. In 1975, the previous assimilation policy was replaced with multiculturalism. Today, it doesn’t even help if, as an immigrant, you assimilate as much as you can. Hospitality has vanished; in its place has emerged an ambition to make all those who have immigrated, whether recently or long ago, to feel uncertain, insecure, even unwelcome. In that light, the failed repatriation project is still a success, for if nothing else, it at least sends a clear signal: Go home!
In a world in constant flux, differing cultural perspectives on what is right and wrong and which norms should apply lead to provocation and confrontation in many countries, including Sweden. In The Claims of Culture: Equality and Diversity in the Global Era (2002), Benhabib scrutinizes multicultural practices. Here, her examples from American court rulings on cultural accommodation serve as a reminder of the long-standing, manifested, Swedish reluctance to confront the issue of honor crimes within certain cultures. Such practices, she argues, expose the most vulnerable — often women and children — to violence and arbitrariness.
Legal pluralism — the existence of parallel systems of justice based on different cultural customs— may seem liberal in theory, but in practice it is determined by prevailing social power relations. Women and children are expected to submit, dress in a certain way, and are forced into marriage or forbidden from doing so. When courts acquit defendants by citing cultural differences such as honor culture, Benhabib argues that this violates women’s universal rights and citizenship.
When Benhabib published The Claims of Culture, a wave of multiculturalism through swept many Western countries. Certain areas of life — the private ones — could be regulated formally or informally by embracing cultural customs and norms. Social Democrat Nalin Baksi (then Pekgul) was among the few in Swedish public debate who openly warned that multiculturalism in Sweden condoned male oppression. She was then ostracized by Islamists and subjected to outright threats.
In the same book, Benhabib points out that cultural differences are most pronounced “at the intersection of the public and the private.” Indeed, countries such as Indonesia, Singapore, and India practice legal pluralism when it comes to marriage and spheres considered private, even though India strives for a more monistic (unified) legal system. In the cradle of multiculturalism, Canada, there are elements of legal pluralism when it comes to Indigenous peoples. In the multinational United Kingdom, the state permits cultural legal traditions alongside common law; for example, Sharia councils. In Sweden, however, a monistic tradition applies.
A Swedish study from 2022 also shows that the family sphere and private relationships are among the most contentious issues in multinational societies. In Integration bland unga – En mångkulturell generation växer upp (2022), sociologists Jan O. Jonsson, Carina Mood and Georg Treuter demonstrate that what most distinguishes young people with foreign backgrounds from those with Swedish backgrounds is their views on gender roles, divorce, homosexuality, and religion. Here, too, there are significant differences between the sexes. At opposite ends of the spectrum are young women with a Swedish background, who view gender roles as restrictive, embrace the possibility of divorce, and champion the rights of sexual minorities and young men with a foreign background.
Although Benhabib constantly explores the position of the weaker and how it can be strengthened, she never becomes dogmatic or detached from reality. A risk with political philosophy is that its delving into issues that must necessarily be made quite abstract leads it to move beyond the diverse world that is humanity’s. But Benhabib does not fall into that trap. Principles must be applicable in practice, and the conditions and constraints of politics, as well as prevailing power relations, set the limits of what is realistic. Seyla Benhabib is a pragmatic political theorist who is not afraid to advocate a compromise-oriented approach rather than ironclad principles. This makes her politically relevant, and what she writes about the major issues of our time is of great concern to many.
On behalf of the Prize Committee,
Li Bennich-Björkman, Johan Skytte Professor in Eloquence and Political Science
The original article in Swedish can be found here.