Kelly Staples is Lecturer in International Politics in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Leicester. She was awarded her PhD by the University of Manchester in 2008, and is author of 'Statelessness, sentimentality and human rights: A critique of Rorty's liberal human rights culture', published in Philosophy and Social Criticism in 2011.

• IntroductionMembership in World PoliticsMichael Walzer and the Denial of MembershipRichard Rorty on the Kindness of StrangersOnora O'Neill: Fixing the Scope of Ethics?Towards a Background Theory of MembershipContemporary Statelessness: eastern Democratic Republic of CongoContemporary Statelessness: the RohingyaRetheorising StatelessnessBibliography

This book is a significant contribution to ongoing debates about the tensions between citizenship rights and human rights. Staples refuses to identify exclusion from the state with exclusion from the human, and offers a promising alternative to predominant equations of statelessness with 'bare life'. Her argument will be essential reading for all those interested in steering a course between statism and cosmopolitanism in international political theory and international practice.