Key Concepts
Political freedom, residence, and membership
Why should the political community assigned to us at birth be the only place where we can become equal political members?
World Citizen Theory approaches that question through two dimensions of political freedom: governing the community in which we live, and having a meaningful choice among communities. The ten concepts below connect those freedoms to movement, residence, and membership. They are principles and analytical concepts developed or used in The World Citizen Revolution and The World Citizen Society, not a description of a system already fully in place.
Governing and Choosing
Hand Democracy — Taking part in making, challenging, and changing the common rules of the community where we live. It concerns collective self-government through democratic institutions.
Foot Democracy — Individual freedom to choose and change political community, with usable routes to entry, residence, and membership, and the freedom to stay.
Voice — Trying to influence or change an institution from within. It includes expression, organization, negotiation, and challenges to decisions. Hand Democracy requires a wider institutional relationship of democratic participation.
Making Another Community a Real Option
Migration Freedom — The practical capacity to enter another community, establish a life, preserve important relationships, and choose again, with movement able to develop into durable membership.
Exit — Leaving a specific relationship or institutional setting. In political-community choice, departure is necessary but does not by itself provide a usable destination or establish consent by those who stay.
Entry — Admission to another community. Meaningful Entry is a lawful route capable of leading to ordinary, sufficiently stable residence; in the proposed stable order, it is an ordinary legally protected possibility.
Effective Mobility — A legally available move can realistically be used to establish ordinary life, without avoidable institutional barriers making it merely nominal. This does not guarantee that every move succeeds or that everyone can move equally easily.
Belonging and Standing as an Equal
Resident Sovereignty — Durable residence, rather than inherited nationality, becomes the primary basis of ordinary political membership and democratic authority.
Resident Equality — Full political members may not be placed in a lower civic category merely because of nationality or birthplace. Equal membership must carry substance in ordinary political life.
Membership Security — Full political members are protected against involuntary loss of residence and membership through ordinary immigration law merely because they retain another nationality.
How to Read the Concepts
Each concept has a separate explanation with a short definition, a question, an example, important distinctions, and book references. Begin with the question that matters to you. These concepts are connected; they are not steps that automatically produce one another.
Hand Democracy and Foot Democracy protect different freedoms. Migration Freedom, Entry, and Effective Mobility help make another community a usable option. Resident Sovereignty, Resident Equality, and Membership Security explain the membership relationship that movement alone cannot complete.
The aim is meaningful choice, including the choice to stay and participate where one lives.
