Cosmopolitan politics, security, political subjectivity

Conventionally, the concept of cosmopolitanism is dealt with as a normative discourse. However, a far more useful understanding is to focus on the practices that the concept enables. The aim in this article is to highlight two manifestations of such practices, namely those that have as their imperative security, the cosmopolitanism of government, and those that might be defined in terms of solidarity, the cosmopolitanism of politics. Both the socio-historical context of the rise of liberal modernity as well as its late-modern manifestations in contemporary security practices suggest that these two articulations of cosmopolitanism should not be seen in oppositional terms, but rather as being mutually implicating and mutually present. While the concept enables a government of populations, containing within it a colonial rationality, the article suggests that there is an excess to the concept that steers it beyond government through security and towards the politics of solidarity. Placing the lens on the forms of political subjectivity generated through cosmopolitan practices, the article highlights the concept's potential in revealing the political implications of contemporary practices that have the postcolonial world as the primary target of their operations.