Introduction

Abstract

A panoptic conceptWithin the last 10 years, cosmopolitanism has become, among other concepts, a popular notion in a broad spectrum of disciplines such as philosophy, law, political sciences, sociology, anthropology, and history. Many authors have tried to grasp its contours in an expanding literature in which it ranges from an ethics of encounter (Appiah, 2006), to the celebration of a common humanity, to a Western-based universalism (Gilroy, 2004) or some 'translocal' citizenship (Appadurai, 1996). However, defining its meaning still is difficult. In the midst of this now large and somehow overwhelming literature, the political scientist James D. Ingram provides some valuable insight to answer the question: 'why is it so difficult to define cosmopolitanism?':Cosmopolitanism has an ancient pedigree and today, in the wake of its recent resurgence, it is used to refer to a great variety of things. This terminological imprecision [...] is compounded by the fact that, at least if it is taken literally, the term is impossible, hyperbolic or paradoxical. We cannot in any literal or legal sense be 'citizens of the world, ' let alone of the 'cosmos, ' since neither is a political unit. Any use of the concept is necessarily figurative. (Ingram, 2016, p. 68) Beyond the hyperbolic character of this notion, Ingram's comment confirms that cosmopolitanism imposes a challenge to social sciences: it usually refers to some global citizenship and therefore deals with power and power relationships. This is how the first studies on cosmopolitanism that developed in the late 1990s and the early 2000s, envisioned it. As the Cold War ended and while global studies emerged in the academy, political scientists and philosophers engaged in a discussion about new models of global governance and the