Solidarity and spheres of culture: the cosmopolitan and the postcolonial

Abstract Cosmopolitan thought and practice bring into sharp focus the question of solidarity, its articulations, and implications in relation to how the political is understood in the sphere of the international. Where liberal cosmopolitanism aims its remit at a transcendent sphere of humanity, seeking to place humanity as the constitutive feature of a redesigned political community, a cosmopolitanism that is distinctly political in its orientation takes the postcolonial critique seriously, unravels the complicities of liberal cosmopolitan articulations of solidarity in global structures of domination, and locates its self-definition in an imminent critique of modernity. The political cosmopolitanism defined in the article presents a conception of solidarity without community, a conception that at once both recognises modernity’s legacy in the perpetuation of inequality and enables a conception of the universal that is not complicit in such relations.