The original essays in this anthology make a significant contribution to the ongoing debates about citizenship, human rights, and the future of the nation-state by exploring the contradictory impacts of globalization on the provision of individual rights. On the one hand, the transnational flows of people, capital, and technology associated with globalization have led to a deflation of citizenship rights, particularly for members of vulnerable groups, and created large noncitizen populations with significantly fewer rights than citizens. Yet on the other hand, the cosmopolitan aspects of globalization, such as the evolution of human rights and the expansion of liberal legal norms, create new levels of membership and new venues in which to claim rights. The book has two related goals. The first is to describe the complicated processes by which globalization is altering the nature of nation-state citizenship and creating a “citizenship gap” among global elites, legal citizens, marginalized citizens, and migrants. The volume's second goal is to determine whether the cosmopolitan aspects of globalization can remedy the citizenship gap. Will existing nation-state citizenship and emerging universal rights regimes be sufficient to protect the rights of marginalized citizens and noncitizens? Or must human rights be embedded in global governance in order to close the citizenship gap?

Building on an historical introduction by Gershon Shafir, the essays in Parts II to IV masterfully accomplish the book's first, descriptive goal. Part II provides fresh insights into the specific ways that the globalized political economy is reshaping the material and symbolic aspects of nation-state citizenship. It is widely agreed that neoliberalism inherently diminishes the social rights of citizens. Ronnie Lipschultz's genealogy of citizenship lends new theoretical support to the view that neoliberal policies marginalize and constrict the national political sphere, thereby also weakening substantive political rights. Aihwa Ong's chapter provides a fascinating account of a particular dynamic of economic globalization—the role of Asian entrepreneurs and techno-migrants in the Silicon Valley—and its impact on the social and symbolic meanings of American citizenship. She argues that the successes of Asian entrepreneurs and high-tech managers, which come on the backs of piecework and in-home migrant workers, have created a new class of elite, transnational citizens while consolidating the notion that citizenship, and indeed humanity, must be earned through economic contribution, as measured in capital investment or transnational skills.

The chapters in Part III focus on the cosmopolitan aspects of globalization, describing the impact of human rights norms on state immigration laws, and ultimately, the practice of liberal democratic citizenship. Historically, states have enjoyed nearly complete authority to adopt whatever immigration policies are deemed to be in the national interest, and many have implemented discriminatory and exclusionary guidelines. Recently, however, argue David Jacobson and Galya Ruffer, and Peter Spiro, international law has begun to constrain state discretion over immigration and citizenship (e.g., requiring states to adopt nondiscriminatory admissions criteria). The most intriguing arguments in this part charge that the imposition of such universal norms, while moderating the citizenship gap between migrants and citizens, diminishes national democratic governance. Jacobson and Ruffer argue that the notion of individual agency implicit in human rights is displacing traditional democratic and republican practices. Political agency is no longer a matter of asserting one's voice in the public sphere, but rather of pressing one's rights via new judicial and administrative institutions. Echoing liberal nationalist concerns, Spiro warns that the external imposition of membership policies will erode national solidarity by undermining the connection between national identity and citizenship.

Together with Ong's contribution, Part IV includes the book's most illuminating chapters. Combining rich empirical studies with sophisticated theoretical analyses, these essays develop the volume's central argument that globalization tends to benefit elites, while putting migrants and “second-class” citizens at risk. Gay Seidman argues that increasingly liberalized trade regimes provide a limited number of well-paying jobs to highly trained individuals, but generally worsen conditions for workers by weakening labor unions and undermining the ability of states to sustain labor and social rights. These effects are particularly acute in developing countries, where both unions and the state must be concerned with creating jobs and preventing capital flight. Kristen Maher's chapter provides an insightful analysis of the new global “trade in domestic workers” (p. 131). Migrant domestic workers enhance the citizenship of their employers, she argues, but at a cost to their own rights: Domestic workers are subject to the same deficit of citizenship rights as other relatively poor migrants, and their gendered and racialized social positions in host states raise significant obstacles to claiming universal rights. Finally, Alison Brysk examines a neglected consequence of globalization: the increase in intercountry adoption and its contradictory impacts on migrant children.

Despite the promise of these chapters, however, the book falls short of accomplishing its second, explicitly normative goal. Theorists of globalization, including those in this book, frequently argue that neither the weakened nation-state nor nascent human rights regimes is sufficient to remedy the citizenship gap. As Brysk and Shafir put it, the forces of globalization “construct rights without sufficient institutions to enforce them, identities without membership, and participation for some at the expense of others” (p. 209). Thus, we would expect the volume's final chapters, in Part V, to theorize new institutions and forms of governance capable of providing the rights, membership, participation, and accountability that would constitute substantive, universal, democratic citizenship. Regrettably, these essays fail to meet this critical challenge. Saskia Sassen's contribution consists largely of a restatement of her earlier work on the emergence of “denational” citizenship in global cities. Although Richard Falk describes four possible modes of transnational citizenship—regionalism, a world state, international activist communities and nongovernmental organizations, and the “global pilgrim”—he offers little by way of critical evaluation. Finally, Brysk and Shafir evaluate various models of global governance in their concluding essay, but their appraisals are too brief to be of much use. Thus, People out of Place is likely to leave political theorists and philosophers unsatisfied: The book makes a strong case that globalization has created a multifaceted citizenship gap, yet leaves the pressing normative issues associated with it unresolved.