Since the dawn of politics in the West, the meaning of being citizens was the opposite of something univocal and of broad consensus. Modernity transformed this condition into something even more enigmatic and conflictive. Inseparable from democracy and the demands for equality and freedom in which it has its origin, citizenship is always redefined within the unresolved contradiction between the universal vocation of the principles and the selective devices that regulate membership in a political community. Not everyone is a citizen, even within the same nation-state. It has been sharply said that “some people are in society, without being of society.” The dynamic of inclusion and exclusion continues to produce dramatic asymmetries, generating openings and closures, especially today, at a time of special fragility of public space and transformation of national sovereignty. Perhaps the concept of citizenship involves too many antinomies. In any case, Balibar does not hide it, and he knows that renouncing them would be equivalent to denying himself the possibility of devising new modes of collective autonomy; In a phrase, ways to democratize democracy. With enormous lucidity, Étienne Balibar analyzes the complexity that citizenship entails today.