Cosmopolitanism is a theory about how to live together. The earliest formulation of
cosmopolitanism in the West could be dated to as early as the fourth century BCE in ancient
Greece by Diogenes who famously said that he was a citizen of the world - kosmopolitês an
idea later picked up by Immanuel Kant the German philosopher who proposed a philosophy of a
world of perpetual peace. When cosmopolitanism first emerged as a political idea for modernity
in the European Enlightenment the project embraced the liberal promises of a globalizing
economy yet remained oblivious to and even complicit with capitalism slavery and
colonialism. It centered on the male bourgeois and white liberal subject irrespective of the
ongoing disenfranchisement dehumanization and extermination of its Others. At the dawn of the
21st century and in the wake of rapid globalization however academics politicians and other
pundits enthusiastically declared cosmopolitanism to be no longer just a philosophical ideal
but a real existing fact. Across the globe they argued people were increasingly thinking and
feeling beyond the nation considering themselves citizens of the world. Meanwhile the global
ecological crisis worsens fascism with different outfits returns in many places of the world
the repression of women sexual racial class and other minorities on a global scale persists
the so called refugee crisis inundates the mediascape and political spectacle. Not much of
those cosmopolitan promises have left it seems. Perhaps precisely because of this however it
seems to be an absolute necessity for scholars activists and artists today to face the
complexities and promises cosmopolitanism has raised although not adequately answered. What has
happened to the cosmopolitan promise and who betrayed it? Minor cosmopolitanisms wishes to
challenge the underlying premises of 'major' cosmopolitanism without letting go of the
unfulfilled emancipatory potential of the concept at large. It wants to rethink
cosmopolitanisms in the plural and trace multiple origins and trajectories of cosmopolitan
thought from across the globe. Regarding cosmopolitanisms as emerging through diverse locally
historically and politically specific practices minor cosmopolitanisms are predicated on
difference without abandoning the quest for a shared vision of conviviality and justice. It
seeks to answer: how to live at once with our difference and shared struggle? How to think our
complicity with even those we most resist? Who sustains the world's flourishing despite all
this?
