How can liberal democracy best be realized in a world fraught with conflicting forms of identity politics and intensifying conflicts over culture? This text aims to bring clarity to the contemporary debate over this question. Maintaining that cultures are themselves torn by conflicts about their own boundaries, Seyla Benhabib challenges the assumption shared by many theorists and activists that cultures are clearly defined wholes. She argues that much debate - including that of "strong" multiculturalism, which sees cultures as distinct pieces of a mosaic - is dominated by this faulty belief, one with grave consequences for how we think injustices among groups should be redressed and human diversity achieved. Benhabib presents an alternative approach, developing an understanding of cultures as continually creating, re-creating and renegotiating the imagined boundaries between "us" and "them." ;Drawing on contemporary cultural politics from Western Europe, Canada and the United States, Benhabib develops a double-track model of deliberative democracy that permits maximum cultural contestation within the official public sphere as well as in and through social movements and the instituti