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The concept of membership appears regularly in discussions of citizenship, and for this reason is indisputably a keyword in political theory, but membership remains sorely under-theorized. For related reasons, this concept likewise arises in work on borders, migration, and mobilities, more generally. Sometimes used interchangeably with citizenship or belonging -but also sometimes used in a discrepant manner to signal something more than the conventionally state-centric instantiations of these affiliated terms, including market-based practices that allow (or deny) access to employment, services, benefits, and other goods -membership is plainly a keyword that is overdue to receive more critical reflection and theoretical elaboration.Political theory has not neglected membership entirely. To take perhaps one of the most prominent exceptions, Michael Walzer has famously argued, "The primary good that we distribute to one another is membership in some human community" (1983:31). As a communitarian, Walzer contends that "community itself is a good … conceivably the most important good -that gets distributed. But it is a good that can only be distributed by taking people in … they must be physically admitted" (29). Likening countries that are "affluent and free" to elite universities, Walzer argues that membership is primarily a matter of deciding on an admission policy: "as citizens of such a country, we have to decide … What are the appropriate criteria for distributing membership?" He continues: "We who are already members do the choosing, in accordance with our own understanding of what membership means in our community and of what sort of community we want to have" (32). From this perspective, of