The Question of Political Community

Unity and sameness are usually assumed to be inseparable but in this deeply thoughtful book Jonna Pettersson parses them, offering a much richer understanding of relationality as a result. What emerges is a notion of politics that is based, not on exclusion, but rather on the myriad ways that we are together and many, the same and different, both calculable and incalculable. -- James Martel, Professor of Political Science, San Francisco State University
Against the closure of politics wrought by theories of political community predicated on unity, Pettersson incisively argues that place and dwelling open up an “incalculable space” as conditioning the possibility of a political community which, resisting exclusion, makes room for all. This book is an important contribution to the highly topical debate about boundaries and community. -- H.K. Lindahl, Chair of Legal Philosophy, Tilburg University, The Netherlands
In this book, Jonna Pettersson addresses how sameness grounds membership in the political community, and simultaneously closes some people off from the spaces in which they live and dwell. Arguing for a political community where there is space for all, this book makes an essential and timely intervention in contemporary debates on sovereignty, statelessness and democratic membership. -- Sofia Näsström, Associate Professor in the Department of Government, Uppsala University