Reviews The Global Commonwealth of Citizens: Toward Cosmopolitan Democracy, Daniele Archibugi (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2008), 320 pp., $30 cloth. In The Global Commonwealth of Citizens, Daniele Archibugi distills two decades of thought on the justification and possibil- ities for democratic rule above the state. The author is a research director at the Italian National Research Council who also teaches at Birkbeck College, University of London. His erudition and command of the salient literature are evident throughout this work, and he moves with ease through a range of debates about suprastate account- ability, while engaging convincingly with numerous possible critiques of cosmopoli- tan democracy. Archibugi and David Held form the core of a group of political theorists and international relations scholars who began exploring possibilities for global democracy in the heady days immediately after the end of the cold war. In Global Common- wealth, Archibugi clearly stakes out his own ground, placing less emphasis than does Held on distributive or ‘‘social’’ aspects of cosmopolitan democracy and more on pragmatic, incremental reforms of current international organizations. He also argues that even authoritarian states should be seen as legitimate participants in the institutions of a global democracy, with the understand- ing that such participation will tend to have a democratizing effect on them. Archibugi understands cosmopolitan democracy as a middle path between some purely confederal arrangement where states are the exclusive actors and individual rights and duties are limited by state membership, and a federal world government marked by uniform global law and some trans- fer of sovereignty from the state to the global level. States would retain considerable authority within cosmopolitan democracy, and the competencies of any fully global governing institutions would be relatively narrow. Archibugi offers a somewhat minimalist conception of democracy that he believes can be applied in the near term to the global system, including existing inter- national organizations. At its heart are three guiding principles: nonviolence, pop- ular control, and political equality. At the domestic level, nonviolence refers to peace- ful succession of leadership, but also to peaceful coexistence among political par- ties or factions in diverse societies. Pop- ular control refers not only to narrowly aggregative voting mechanisms but to a broader conception of public scrutiny, oper- ating alongside institutional transparency. Political equality is understood straight- forwardly as equal participation rights for individuals. Ethics & International Affairs, 24, no. 1 (2010), pp. 105 – 114.  2010 Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs 105