By asking how political communities are constructed and with what boundaries, this book has explored different conceptualizations of nation, different perceptions of territory and dynamics of unity and division. It has presented alternative notions of political community outside of the nation-state paradigm, in communities smaller than the state and going beyond the boundaries of the state. My work has devoted attention to the beginnings of political communities or to their reshaping processes. By establishing boundaries between ‘us’ and ‘them’, these communities defined themselves at different levels: the local, regional, transnational and national levels. In the border region between Ghana and Togo, these political communities were built on top of each other, like a palimpsest, and intersected with the Ghanaian and Togolese states that used these dynamics to their advantage. This book endeavours to make us rethink the notion of the nation-state and its associated concepts in light of these dynamics: citizenship, elections, border and nation-state.

This chapter concentrates on the conditions of access to and the nature of membership in the international system as established by international law—specifically, three issues. The first issue is the type of society that is presented as a legitimate collective member of the international order. One of the first steps that international law takes to determine legitimacy at the international level is to identify the criteria necessary for a collective actor to be viewed as a full-fledged legitimate member of the international community. The second issue is that after World War II and the creation of the United Nations (UN), access to international membership in the international order moved toward a form of universality that has been relatively pluralistic. The third issue is that despite this movement toward a pluralistic universality, there are limits to the universality and pluralism of international membership in the international system as defined by international law.

Chapter 2 theorizes the causes and consequences of state exit from IOs. We explain that IOs start as being beneficial to member states but may become dissatisfying to some states as preferences diverge, power shifts, or IOs themselves evolve. Leaning on the “exit, voice, and loyalty” framework by Hirschman (1970), we argue that dissatisfied states can voice their discontent but when this does not generate desired results, states sometimes use the process of IO exit to invoke change. Threatening and enacting exit can accelerate a tipping point by presenting states with a potential future without the exiting state, which could reduce institutional benefits. The ability to use exit as a negotiation strategy shifts with a state’s bargaining power as well as institutional constraints. As part of the negotiating process, many exit threats are not implemented and many exiting states return to IOs. But exit is costly: Given that exiting states may be perceived as reneging on an international commitment, they can incur negative reputational and cooperative consequences from other actors in the international community. Exiting states may therefore engage in stigma management. And while institutional change is often the goal, exit is usually an imperfect tool for achieving it.

Although they are stable, party constitutions are not immutable. Over the past decade, parties have become increasingly decentralized – especially with respect to leadership selection. Chapter 7 concludes by assessing the implications of the book’s findings for strategically motivated party leaders contemplating institutional change. The chapter also considers similarities and differences with US primaries and discusses how decentralized structures may shape candidate quality. Kernell concludes by discussing avenues for future research, arguing party – as well as electoral – institutions should be accounted for in studies of democratic responsiveness.

Chapter 6 shifts the focus from individual voter behavior to party responsiveness. Where decentralized rules foster internal competition, parties should select candidates and adopt positions that are more responsive to their core supporters and less responsive to the general electorate. To test these spatial hypotheses, Kernell employs computational simulations to identify vote-maximizing positions in the electorate and finds that decentralized parties adopt less competitive positions than their centralized competitors. All else equal, the electoral advantage for a party whose leaders select candidates over one whose members play a decisive role is close to 7 percent.

Chapter 1 introduces the reader to many of the topics and concepts that will be discussed in the book. The concept of a group and what differentiates it from a team, or a simple gathering of people is discussed. Additionally, the influence of social media on group establishment and membership is explored, along with a brief introduction to many other concepts. The chapter is intended to draw the reader in and to set the stage for much further and deeper investigation and discussion of the contents of the chapters that follow.

In Chapter 7, we explore why people choose to join groups and the factors that influence their membership decisions. We discuss factors that make groups more attractive as well as less attractive in the eyes of prospective members. We also discuss the challenges and benefits that can be derived from multiple group memberships.

The All-Affected Principle (AAP) is a simple idea that captures a core democratic intuition: enfranchising the people who are governed. Yet democratic theorists have often shied away from the various conceptual challenges that explicating its meaning arises. This chapter therefore articulates a reformulation of the AAP that is (a) pluralistic, which means it is more flexible in terms of both the kind of effect it examines as triggering right for participation as well as the kind of influence and forms of participation that may be required and (b) refocuses the principle around social power rather than mere affectedness. The implications of this reformulation are briefly considered in the context of referenda as a tool for determining the boundaries of political communities and it is concluded that such referenda need to be institutionalized and built into democratic system, in the same way procedures for constitutional amendments allow for infrequent but crucial examination of the political communitys foundations.

The Introduction proposes that a microhistorical lens on the departure of over 40,000 Italians from Egypt after the Second World War helps us to understand how historical temporalities and political membership shape migrant departures. It takes as its starting point the question of the memory of Italian departures from Egypt among Egyptian migrants in contemporary Italy. It frames the book’s argument in relation to ideas about historical time and conflicting notions of the Italian population in Egypt as ’out of time’, demonstrating that a history of temporalities which focuses on the future, present, and past can shed new light on processes of migration in the Mediterranean. It then articulates how political membership, as an encompassing concept functioning within these temporal frameworks, illustrates the construction of the categories normally ascribed to migrants and migrant communities in and beyond the Mediterranean. Finally, it draws these theoretical and methodological threads together to rethink periodisations of European and Mediterranean empires and decolonisation.

It is habitual among scholars to suggest that European nations were formed during, and to some degree because of, the colonial expansion.1 Many argue that this expansion, which placed colonizers in opposition to the natives they sought to control, to other Europeans with whom they competed, and to the large African population that they enslaved, led to the emergence of new identities. In the Spanish case, it enabled the move from multiple local distinctions to a unitary national designation, allowing individuals originating from the different Iberian kingdoms (Castile, Navarre, Aragón, and so forth) to assume a single identity as Spaniards. While some scholars pointed to the formation of nations (or proto-nations), others concluded that the colonial experience led Europeans to think of themselves as participants in a community, members of which belonged to a particular race. Imagining themselves to be distinct from both natives and Africans, these Europeans refashioned themselves as “white.”2