To understand the meaning of love today it is not enough to understand the meaning of love today. We must also understand how the self, frontiers, the world and love all interlock. (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2014: 183)

In the context of a post-9/11 world, where Western discourses and politics are often defined by an intolerance of cultural otherness and an emphasis on the power of borders, cosmopolitanism has been intensely discussed as a multilayered philosophical, moral and social perspective mainly concerned with such issues as transnational mobility, hospitality, multiculturalism and global justice. These dimensions and concerns suggest a broad definition of cosmopolitanism as ‘a condition of openness to the world’, which entails ‘self and societal transformation in light of the encounter with the Other’ (Delanty 2012: 336). From a primarily cultural perspective, cosmopolitanism emerges as a new kind of identity, as well as ‘a new kind of everyday space–time experience and of human sociability’, defined by a significant loosening of national identifications and a genuine and positive engagement with otherness and difference (Beck 2002: 30).

In an attempt to redefine the mostly theoretical dimension of the contemporary debate on cosmopolitanism within the social sciences, some recent critical trends have moved in the direction of material analyses of the concept by highlighting the ways in which cosmopolitanism is performed in people's everyday lives. In contrast to universal and abstract formulations of cosmopolitanism, a number of critics have called for particularised accounts of ‘actually existing cosmopolitanism’ (Robbins 1998): in other words, for definitions of cosmopolitanisms that are historically situated, geographically grounded and embedded in material everyday practices (Skrbiš and Woodward 2013; Nava 2007; Appiah 2006). In a similar vein, Ulrich Beck and Nathan Sznaider (2016) have also argued for a critical need to pay more systematic attention to the cosmopolitan condition of real people. Seen in this light, cosmopolitanism cannot just be interpreted as a cultural and political disposition but must also be viewed as a physical orientation to the world (Molz 2006), as an active engagement in opening up to the ‘world of the other’ and the ‘allure of difference’ (Nava 2007: 19).