Can Human and Non-human Animals be Political Equals?
Rainer Bauböck (Austrian Academy of Sciences and European University Institute)
Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka show how the “political turn” in animal philosophy challenges conventional citizenship theory. In this response from the perspective of citizenship theory, I will accept their basic claim that animals need to be regarded and respected not only as sentient beings but also as social, cultural and political ones. What should be clarified then is how human politics ought to relate to political behaviour of non-human animals and to the political communities they form. Donaldson and Kymlicka’s distinction between relations to domesticated animals (DAs), liminal animals (LAs) and wild animals (WAs), which they have laid out in two books (Donaldson & Kymlicka 2011, 2025) is very helpful and I will lean on their approach. What I think calls for further elaboration and some qualifications of their argument is whether humans have to treat other animals not only as moral but also political equals.
Inclusion and equality are at the very core of citizenship theory. Some theorists, like T.H. Marshall, have taken inclusion for granted and have focused on equality. For Marshall, citizens are the members of a society organised as a nation-state. What he is concerned with are the conditions under which they can consider each other as equals. He concluded that civil and political rights are not sufficient. In a capitalist market economy, extensive social rights are required to make the promise of equality among citizens plausible. By contrast, Donaldson and Kymlicka focus on inclusion into citizenship and extend it to non-human animals. They promote “an expanded conception of who can belong to the polity” and “an expanded conception of the relevant kinds of polities and politics.” If Marshall has been criticised for ignoring the inclusion of women, ethnic minorities and migrants, might Donaldson and Kymlicka’s theory conversely lack a proper account of the conditions under which non-humans can be regarded as equal citizens of interspecies polities and under which their own separate polities can be considered as equal members of the international community?
Relations with Political Communities of Wild Animals
Let me start with the latter question: What are the implications of recognising territorial sovereignty rights of wild animals for citizenship theory?
One could be tempted to claim, first, that recognition is conditional on such communities providing their members with protection and basic rights, similar to basic human rights catalogues that lay out conditions for the legitimate exercise of state power. Donaldson and Kymlicka resist this approach when rejecting the idea that many communities of wild animals should be regarded as failed states. Making norms of internal equality and non-violence that have evolved over millennia of human history a condition for recognising the rights of wild animals to self-determination within their own territories would be anthropocentric hubris and a poor excuse for continuing human oppression and violence towards such species.
It is much more plausible, as Donaldson and Kymlicka do, to adopt the second interpretation that basic norms of non-interference and friendly relations that apply to international relations between states must also apply to relations between states and wild animal communities.
Yet this cannot be the end of the story. There is a third interpretation of sovereign equality of states that does not easily apply to interspecies relations. In international law, states are not only internally sovereign but are also equal as sources of such law. Just like citizens in capitalist market societies, states are hugely unequal with regard to their material resources and their de facto powers in relation to others. Yet, citizens are political equals as co-authors of legislation that binds them collectively. Similarly, states are equally sovereign not just because they enjoy the same right to non-interference, but also because they are equal as authors of international law generated through agreements among them or the evolution of state practices. This normative political equality among states is an important second layer of equality in citizenship theory. Citizens have a claim that their government treat them as political equals and that other countries treat their state as an equal in the making of international law and organisations – a norm that is currently openly challenged by the US administration in its attempt to dismantle liberal international norms in order to create an anarchic order where might makes right.
In chapter 9 of their book, Donaldson and Kymlicka provide fascinating models of interspecies diplomacy that could result in international treaties. The purpose of such agreements is to oblige states to respect the territorial sovereignty of WAs and enable their communities to flourish. But these would still be essentially treaties among states, and international institutions would be tasked with monitoring them. None of this amounts to treating WA communities as equal co-legislators of international norms. My intuition is that norms of equality between states in the international arena cannot be extended to WA communities. Interspecies relations will inevitably remain highly asymmetric. They will focus on the task of protecting WA habitats rather than treating them as equal participants in global governance. Acknowledging this inevitable asymmetry is important because preserving the higher standard of legislative equality in international relations is. It is the condition for making states collaborate in global responses to the climate catastrophe or the risks of Artificial Intelligence and in efforts to preserve international peace.
Co-citizenship in the Agora
Turning to domestic politics, Donaldson and Kymlicka argue that DAs have been selectively bred and trained to interact with humans in such a way that their political autonomy must now be respected by treating them as co-citizens. They retain exit rights from human society, if they so choose, but societies must also accommodate them as political members. I will again accept the baseline of this argument, but ask what standards of equality can reasonably apply to intra-communal relations with DAs.
Extending citizenship to workers, women, racialised and ethnic minorities, or migrants was not only meant to make sure the specific interests of these groups would be represented and their historic oppression would be overcome. It was also meant to ensure that they could participate as equals in democratic politics and their equal participation came to be regarded as a condition for the legitimacy of democratic legislation. Does this rationale apply to the inclusion of DAs?
Donaldson and Kymlicka provide the example of DA sanctuaries that function as an agora in which practices of interspecies co-decision making have emerged. This can indeed be described as a form of co-citizenship in small-scale local communities in which humans and animals treat each other as equals. The question I want to raise, and of which Donaldson and Kymlicka are perfectly aware, is whether such examples can be scaled up to larger polities at the level of the nation-state.
Donaldson and Kymlicka seem ambivalent about this. While distancing themselves from “a naïve call to abandon politics at state and supra-state scales in a world of 8 billion humans”, they point out that “animals tend to have more grounded, embodied and immediate ways of doing politics” and call for “re-imagined democracies where the agora is the real heart of politics, and is essential to converting relations of domination into legitimate politics.” This reimagination of human politics inspired by interspecies agoras is further deepened in Maneesha Deckha’s response. She carries the emphasis on small-scale “embodied” politics one step further by emphasising the political aspects of animals’ family lives.
Regarding emotions and decisions about everyday life as inherently political facilitates indeed the inclusion of DAs as equal members of households, but turning the oikos into the heart of the polis does not help to address most of the tasks of self-government among the larger collectives of diverse and unfamiliar individuals for which the institutions of the ancient polis and modern nation-states were created.
Should the institutions of human politics be really transformed to become more grounded, embodied and less abstract so that human and non-human animals can relate to each other as equal co-citizens also beyond the small-scale agora? Or is it instead necessary to maintain the highly legalised, formalised and complex institutions of human politics, not least in order to prevent that the enormous aggregation of power in these institutions can be abused by populist and authoritarian leaders who successfully whip up citizens’ emotions and pretend to represent them in an unmediated, embodied and personal relationship?
If we want to save liberal democracy from the current onslaught of authoritarian populism we need to defend the rule of law and the institutional division of powers. Clearly, the alienation of citizens from the institutions of liberal democracy must be taken seriously. One way of mitigating it is to promote deliberative democracy innovations, such as citizens assemblies (see the GLOBALCIT forum on a European Citizens Assembly). However, neither strengthening the resilience of liberal democratic institutions nor promoting deliberation among citizens about the common good will enable non-human animals to participate much in large-scale and higher-level politics. The reason is that holding political office and participating in deliberative forums require demanding capacities and knowledge. Humans do not possess these naturally but can be politically socialised in a way that cultivates such capacities and makes sure that every citizen has them at a minimum level. This is an expectation that cannot be met by DAs. It seems thus likely that the agoras that humans and domesticated animals can share and where face-to-face politics prevail will remain distinct localised polities within national political systems.
Although Donaldson and Kymlicka are highly critical of the exclusionary implications of the “capacity contract” underlying modern conceptions of citizenship, they acknowledge this limitation: “The agora, where humans and DAs can engage in a politics of embodied experiment, and response is only one part of the picture, and doesn’t displace politics at other scales and complexities within larger democratic systems.” The question remains, then, how to uphold the norm of equality across these different political scales? Could citizenship theory provide an answer?
Multilevel citizenship provides indeed an answer for democracy among humans. Local, regional and national governments get their mandates from distinct electorates that are included in an overall structure of nested citizenship. Multilevel citizenship upholds the norm of equal political power at all levels, not only at the smallest scale of local citizenship. If non-human animals can only participate in a meaningful way in still smaller scale agoras, they will not be included and treated as equal citizens in the other and more powerful arenas of human politics that ultimately must also adopt the laws that determine the autonomy, rights and obligations of interspecies agoras. For that reason, the same asymmetry that I find in interspecies diplomacy will also prevail in domestic politics: non-human animals can hardly become equal citizens of democratic states.
Sharing Territory With Liminal Animals
This leaves the question of what kind of equality can be aspired for in relations between humans and liminal animals (LAs), who are attracted to human habitats but keep apart from humans and do not want to become members of their societies. The notion of a commons shared by humans, DAs and LAs is among the most innovative and exciting ideas in Donaldson and Kymlicka’s book. The commons is a territory in which different animal species must find arrangements for sharing resources and pursuing their distinct ways of life. Since there is no assumption that all individual inhabitants form a society, there is also no need for equal membership. In Donaldson and Kymlicka’s terminology, the commons is a place-based polity that differs from the membership-based polities of WA communities, human states or interspecies agoras. The inhabitants of the commons relate to each other as denizens, not citizens. Denizens enjoy the protection of a government that they are not involved in authorising. They have important rights and duties, but these are generally assigned to them by political institutions that do not claim to represent their collective will, since there is no collective to which a common will could be attributed.
This seems to me a very promising and plausible model of interspecies relations that does not raise expectations of political equality that cannot be easily fulfilled in the sphere of human politics. Note, however, that denizenship for humans has come to be regarded as a problematic status in liberal democracies if it does not include a pathway to citizenship (Walzer 1983, Carens 2013). In the context of human democracies, place-based polities must not be separated from society-based ones. A shared citizenship remains the indispensable political glue that cannot be replaced by merely denizenship. Multiculturalism has been (wrongly, but politically very effectively) accused of promoting parallel societies sharing only a territory. Even in the case of indigenous peoples with claims to territorial self-government and a history of forced inclusion, while renunciation of federal citizenship may be a justifiable expression of claims for decolonial reparations (Kane and Lenard 2025), withholding full citizenship in the larger state or depriving them of this status would be a terrible injustice
The commons is therefore not sufficient for human societies that need to collectively govern themselves in a territory. It is a specific model tailored for multispecies conviviality and, therefore, appropriate for relations between categories of animals that ought to respect each other as sentient individuals and political beings but cannot relate to each other as political equals involved in collective decisions.
Conclusions: Two Questions of Politics
As Donaldson and Kymlicka’s book explains lucidly, political relations between humans and non-human animals differ in the arena of relations between polities with claims to territorial sovereignty, in the agora, where humans and DAs jointly govern their shared lives, and in the commons, where different species share a territory without forming social bonds.
What I have argued in this response is that recognising animals as individuals worthy of respect and concern and thus potentially our moral equals, does not easily translate into the more demanding political equality underpinning citizenship. Citizenship entails a relation of equality among individuals in domestic politics and among states in the international arena as the sources of legitimate laws and political decisions.
This is admittedly a lofty normative conception of politics. Paola Cavalieri proposes a quite different one in her response. Given the extent of human violence against animals, we should be less concerned with politics as collective self-government and more with the politics of resistance and rebellion. Instead of attempting to include animals into the arena, the agora and the commons, humans should be supporting their struggles for life and liberty. That is an understandable reaction, but I think, ultimately, an unproductive one. Given the enormous powers that humans wield over animals, short of a total collapse of human institutions or humans engineering their own extinction, improving the welfare and autonomy of animals can only be achieved through building democratic majority support for radically changing human relations to animals. A vision that imagines how human and non-human animals can sort out their shared lives on Planet Earth through politics instead of violence is more likely to achieve such support than resistance that pitches animal interests against those of humans.
Donaldson and Kymlicka cite Bernard Williams’ insight that “the ‘first question of politics’ is whether disagreements within a society are resolved through peaceful cooperation, or instead through violence.” That is indeed the first question. Whether disagreements can be resolved in a way that everybody is treated as a political equal in finding collective answers is perhaps the second question of human politics. It remains an important and open one also for interspecies politics.