"Margaret Somers has an astonishing variety of disciplinary competences and constantly poses new questions and working on parallel fields in order to build a network of concepts and arguments. The strong connection that she establishes between conceptual analysis and a practical commitment to the emergence of new democratic forms and republican citizenship is an essential aspect of the creative character of her work." Etienne Balibar, Emeritus Professor of Moral and Political Philosophy, Universite de Paris X Nanterre, and Distinguished Professor of Humanities, University of California, Irvine 'In these wide-ranging essays, glistening with brilliant turns of phrase about our contemporary social condition, Margaret Somers brings together normative citizenship theory, sociological analysis, history and political economy at the highest level of synthesis. Citizenship is not only a boundary-marker between polities; the loss of 'the right to have rights' does not only mark the refugee, the asylum seeker and the undocumented worker, it also stigmatizes the others within societies by social exclusion. Focusing on the events surrounding Hurricane Katrina, Somers shows how 'statelessness' became the condition of citizens of the USA at the beginning of the twenty-first century. To retrieve 'the right to have rights' for all means going beyond the 'romance of the market' and 'reviling the state." Seyla Benhabib, Eugene Meyer Professor of Political Science and Philosophy, Yale University 'Genealogies of Citizenship might well provide the definitive sociological and political critique of the era of market fundamentalism. Building on the insights of Karl Polanyi, T. H. Marshall, and Hannah Arendt, Margaret Somers demonstrates that civil society rests on the 'right to have rights'. But this right has been swept away by three decades of market-dominated discourse and policies. Somers brilliantly shows how Hurricane Katrina's devastating impact on New Orleans' African American commu