Once again, around the world we witness and endure traumatic displacements where citizens are transformed into refugees and asylum seekers on a massive scale. In terms of the global rhetoric that defined the beginning of the millennium, Europe (which symbolically includes North America and Australia) has become a focus for those seeking asylum. And yet what we see are those on the edges of Europe (those who aspired to become part of the economic European Union) create razor- wired barriers that keep out the refugees from countries torn by conflicts often created by European attempts to structure the globe in ways that would best facilitate transnational capitalism. For someone who recalls growing up in Australia alongside Hungarian refugees in the 1950s, the recent developments in Hungary and elsewhere in relation to closing borders to refugees are difficult to comprehend. As we move further into the twenty- first century, West and non- West are congealing once again into monumental phantasmatic binaries. An even more disheartening sign is that the “non- West” appears increasingly to be synonymous with Islam— an unexpected outcome of Edward Said's analysis of “orientalism” that was initially such an enabling interpretive lens. In the face of these developments, the debates in neo- cosmopolitanism over the past 15 years constitute recent attempts to imagine a new critical framework that is more culturally inclusive and to think in “planetary” rather than “global” terms. Here is Gayatri Spivak on this distinction: “The globe is on our computers. It is the logo of the World Bank. No one lives there; and we think that we can aim to control globality. The planet is in the species of alterity, belonging to another system; and yet we inhabit it, indeed are it. It is not really amenable to a neat contrast with the globe” (2012, 339).

What might it mean to assume an approach in which citizens of and in the world include all its parts? To unpack this last statement, the underlying concern is: what might it mean to consider everyone as having these rights? Due to various histories of imperialism and their latest incarnation in a globalization fueled by capitalism, as well as the structures of diverse nationalisms, this is a complex question to address.