essay for global citizen

Essay on Global Citizenship

Students are often asked to write an essay on Global Citizenship in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

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100 Words Essay on Global Citizenship

What is global citizenship.

Global citizenship means seeing yourself as a part of the whole world, not just your country. It’s about caring for people and the planet, no matter where they are. Global citizens work together to solve big problems like poverty and climate change.

Responsibilities of Global Citizens

Being a global citizen means you have duties. You should learn about different cultures, respect the environment, and help others. It’s about making good choices that don’t hurt others around the world.

Benefits of Global Citizenship

When we act as global citizens, we make the world better. We get to understand different people and can work on making peace. It also helps us to solve big problems that affect everyone, like keeping the earth clean and safe.

250 Words Essay on Global Citizenship

Global citizenship is the idea that everyone on our planet is part of a big community. It’s like thinking of the whole world as one big neighborhood. People who believe in global citizenship care about issues that affect everyone, no matter where they live.

Caring for the Earth

Helping each other.

Global citizens also think it’s important to help people in need. This could be by giving money to charities that work all over the world or by learning about different cultures and understanding people who are different from us.

Another big idea in global citizenship is fairness. This means making sure that people everywhere have what they need, like food, water, and a chance to go to school. It’s not fair if some people have too much while others have too little.

Working Together

Finally, global citizenship is about countries and people working together to solve big problems. This can be anything from fighting diseases that spread across countries to making sure everyone has a good place to live.

In short, being a global citizen means caring for our world and the people in it. It’s about learning, sharing, and working together to make the world a better place for everyone.

500 Words Essay on Global Citizenship

Imagine a big school that has students from every part of the world. These students learn together, play together, and help each other. This is a bit like what global citizenship is. Global citizenship means thinking of yourself as a part of one big world community. Instead of just looking after the people in your own town or country, you care about everyone on Earth.

Why is Global Citizenship Important?

Respecting cultures and people.

Global citizens respect and learn about different cultures and people. Every culture has its own special stories, food, and ways of living. When you are a global citizen, you are curious about these differences and you understand that every person is important, no matter where they come from.

Taking Care of the Planet

Our Earth is the only home we have. Global citizens take care of it by doing things like recycling, saving water, and planting trees. We all share the same air, water, and land, so it’s everyone’s job to look after them.

Helping Others

Learning and sharing knowledge.

Being a global citizen also means learning about the world and sharing what you know. You can read books, watch films, or talk to people from different places. Then, you can share what you learn with your friends and family.

Being Active in Your Community

Even though global citizenship is about the whole world, it starts in your own community. You can join groups that clean up parks, help people who are sick, or raise money for good causes. By doing small things where you live, you are being a part of something much bigger.

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Importance of Being a Global Citizen Essay

• To find inspiration for your paper and overcome writer’s block
• As a source of information (ensure proper referencing)
• As a template for you assignment

Introduction

The distinction between globalism and globalization, being a global citizen in the world of advanced technologies, disagreement between theorists about the definition of global citizenship, choosing and explaining two of the six outcomes of global citizenship, describing at least two personal examples, identifying and explaining two specific general education courses.

The relevance of being a global citizen is that through international encounters, people develop a considerable awareness of the problems faced by various parts of the world. In this case, being such a person encourages young individuals to focus more deeply on the effects of their activities and decisions on other areas of the world. Although becoming such a citizen is critical in contemporary society, there is a need to differentiate between globalism and globalization.

Globalization refers to the spread of jobs, information, products, and technology across nations in the world. On the other hand, globalism refers to an ideology regarding the belief that goods, knowledge, and people should cross international borders without restrictions (Reysen & Katzarska-Miller, 2013). Globalization means civilization, where people migrate to any part of the world despite the risks involved. Globalism is an ideology committed to favoring globalization and placing the interests of the world above the interests of individual countries.

Global citizenship is a crucial step that people should take because it has its advantages. In the world of advanced technology, being a global citizen is helpful because it assists in succeeding in meeting individual, professional, and academic goals and objectives. Modern technology helps people to keep in touch or communicate with business partners, family, and friends through text messages and emails (Ahmad, 2013). Through globalization, people can share information from any part of the world. In contemporary society, advanced technology has become the key to communication, enabling people to meet their professional, academic, and individual goals.

Various theorists disagree about the definition of global citizenship because they have divergent meanings. For this reason, some define the concept in their own words, while others believe that it is a concept that has to be taught to people (Reysen & Katzarska-Miller, 2013). In addition, other individuals believe that global citizenship needs people to be isolated from their customs and cultures. Some theorists feel that when a person becomes a global citizen, they will not be considered fully part of one country. Therefore, such people will have challenges living within the social spheres of such an area. After reading the article by Katzarska-Miller and Reysen, I defined global citizenship as becoming exposed and interconnected to international cultures that give people opportunities to develop their identities.

The two of the six outcomes that I choose include social justice and valuing diversity, and they are the most relevant in becoming a global citizen concerning others. When a person embraces such citizenship, one understands that silencing people is not the solution in the community and that they have to be allowed to serve (Arditi, 2004). Therefore, social justice ensures that oppressing others is not the solution and that giving individuals a chance is the best thing. Social justice ensures that human beings do not miss out on growth and development opportunities because of a lack of diversity. Valuing diversity helps one to become such an individual as it assists a person in recognizing the fact that the world has different people. Therefore, global citizenship can relate to individuals from other parts of the globe. Such an interaction could be on academic or business grounds as the world becomes increasingly interconnected.

In my life, I have had to relate with individuals from all corners of the world. Therefore, I view myself as a global citizen because I value and embrace diversity in all my undertakings. For example, my school embraces diversity and inclusion, where students are admitted from different parts of the world. In this case, my school environment has become one of the most significant contributors to my value for diversity over the years (De Soto, 2015). In school, I interact with other students from Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, Canada, and other parts of America other than the United States. I have understood the challenges of interacting with foreigners, such as differentiated business cultures and language barriers. In school and my immediate environment, I have come to appreciate treating other people as the law requires. Therefore, I have come to respect everyone and do not like seeing people being oppressed.

The two general education courses that contributed the most to being a global citizen include Introduction to Literature and Introduction to social responsibility and Ethics. The concept of global citizenship has shaped my identity, and being such a citizen has made me a better person in the community (Arditi, 2004). The literature course has strengthened my ability to learn other people’s cultures, customs, and traditions, which has enabled me to appreciate diversity more. Social responsibility and ethics as a course have helped me to strengthen my ability to determine what is right before taking any action.

In conclusion, global citizenship is a concept that has relevance in contemporary society. In addition, being a citizen enables one to comprehend other relevant concepts, such as globalization and globalism. Being a student allows one to appreciate diversity and inclusivity, pertinent elements of globalization or being a global citizen. For example, studying some courses such as ethics and literature helps one understand and appreciate others.

Ahmad, A. (2013). A global ethics for a globalized world (Links to an external site.). Policy Perspectives, 10(1), 63-77. Web.

Arditi, B. (2004). From globalism to globalization: The Politics of Resistance . New Political Science , 26 (1), 5–22. Web.

De Soto, H. (2015) . Globalization at the Crossroads. [Video]. You Tube. Web.

Reysen, S., & Katzarska-Miller, I. (2013). A model of global citizenship: Antecedents and outcomes. International Journal of Psychology , 48 (5), 858–870.

• “Jihad Versus Mcworld” by Benjamen Barber: Tribalism and Globalism Threat to Democracy
• Concept of the Globalization’ Ideology
• Globalization Theory in Political Economy
• Transportation and Globalization in North America and Europe: Comparison
• Development in a Globalized World
• The Globalized World: Threats and Challenges
• Globalization Debates and Pressures on Companies
• Outsourcing and Globalization in Indian Society
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2023, August 19). Importance of Being a Global Citizen. https://ivypanda.com/essays/importance-of-being-a-global-citizen/

"Importance of Being a Global Citizen." IvyPanda , 19 Aug. 2023, ivypanda.com/essays/importance-of-being-a-global-citizen/.

IvyPanda . (2023) 'Importance of Being a Global Citizen'. 19 August.

IvyPanda . 2023. "Importance of Being a Global Citizen." August 19, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/importance-of-being-a-global-citizen/.

1. IvyPanda . "Importance of Being a Global Citizen." August 19, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/importance-of-being-a-global-citizen/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Importance of Being a Global Citizen." August 19, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/importance-of-being-a-global-citizen/.

• GlobalHigherEd

Global Citizenship – What Are We Talking About and Why Does It Matter?

By  Kris Olds

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Editor's note: This guest entry was written by Madeleine F. Green , a Senior Fellow at NAFSA and the International Association of Universities . It was originally published in NAFSA's newish Trends & Insights series of short online article that are "designed to highlight social, economic, political and higher education system trends affecting international higher education." Our thanks to Madeleine and NAFSA for permission to post her fascinating entry here (which is also available as a PDF via this link) . Kris Olds

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

During the past decade higher education's interest in internationalization has intensified, and the concept of civic education or engagement has broadened from a national focus to a more global one, thus expanding the concept that civic responsibility extends beyond national borders.

As Schattle (2009) points out, the concept of global citizenship is not a new one; it can be traced back to ancient Greece. But the concept and the term seem to have new currency and are now widely used in higher education. Many institutions cite global citizenship in their mission statements and/or as an outcome of liberal education and internationalization efforts. Many have "centers for global citizenship" or programs with this label.

Additionally, national and international organizations and networks have devoted themselves to helping institutions promote global citizenship, although they do not necessarily use that term. For example, the Association of American Colleges and Universities sponsors a series of programs concerned with civic learning , a broad concept that includes several goals for undergraduate education: strengthening U.S. democracy, preparing globally responsible citizenry, developing personal and social responsibility, and promoting global learning and diversity. The Salzburg Seminar's International Study Program provides week-long workshops for faculty to consider the concepts of global citizenship and their integration into undergraduate education. It also provides college students with programs on global issues. The Talloires Network is an international alliance formed in 2005 that includes 202 institutions in 58 countries "devoted to strengthening the civic roles and social responsibilities of higher education." The Talloires declaration refers specifically to "preparing students to contribute positively to local, national, and global communities." Founded in 1985, the oldest of these networks, Campus Compact , retains its predominant, but not exclusive, focus on the United States.

Defining Global Citizenship

A foray into the literature or a look at the many ways colleges and universities talk about global citizenship reveals how broad a concept it is and how different the emphasis can be depending on who uses the term. This essay can only outline a few important elements of global citizenship, but a brief overview of the many meanings should help institutions formulate or clarify their own definition of it, identify those elements that are central to their educational vision, and add other dimensions. The following are among the most salient features of global citizenship (this section draws from a variety of sources but primarily relies on Schattle (2007)).

Global citizenship as a choice and a way of thinking. National citizenship is an accident of birth; global citizenship is different. It is a voluntary association with a concept that signifies "ways of thinking and living within multiple cross-cutting communities—cities, regions, states, nations, and international collectives…" (Schattle 2007, 9). People come to consider themselves as global citizens through different formative life experiences and have different interpretations of what it means to them. The practice of global citizenship is, for many, exercised primarily at home, through engagement in global issues or with different cultures in a local setting. For others, global citizenship means firsthand experience with different countries, peoples, and cultures. For most, there exists a connection between the global and the local. Whatever an individual's particular "take" on global citizenship may be, that person makes a choice in whether or how to practice it.

Global citizenship as self-awareness and awareness of others. As one international educator put it, it is difficult to teach intercultural understanding to students who are unaware they, too, live in a culture that colors their perceptions. Thus, awareness of the world around each student begins with self-awareness. Self-awareness also enables students to identify with the universalities of the human experience, thus increasing their identification with fellow human beings and their sense of responsibility toward them.

Global citizenship as they practice cultural empathy . Cultural empathy or intercultural competence is commonly articulated as a goal of global education, and there is significant literature on these topics. Intercultural competence occupies a central position in higher education's thinking about global citizenship and is seen as an important skill in the workplace. There are more than 30 instruments or inventories to assess intercultural competence. Cultural empathy helps people see questions from multiple perspectives and move deftly among cultures—sometimes navigating their own multiple cultural identities, sometimes moving out to experience unfamiliar cultures.

Global citizenship as the cultivation of principled decisionmaking. Global citizenship entails an awareness of the interdependence of individuals and systems and a sense of responsibility that follows from it. Navigating "the treacherous waters of our epic interdependence (Altinay 2010, 4) requires a set of guiding principles that will shape ethical and fair responses. Although the goal of undergraduate education should not be to impose a "correct" set of answers, critical thinking, cultural empathy, and ethical systems and choices are an essential foundation to principled decisionmaking.

Global citizenship as participation in the social and political life of one's community. There are many different types of communities, from the local to the global, from religious to political groups. Global citizens feel a connection to their communities (however they define them) and translate that sense of connection into participation. Participation can take the form of making responsible personal choices (such as limiting fossil fuel consumption), voting, volunteering, advocacy, and political activism. The issues may include the environment, poverty, trade, health, and human rights. Participation is the action dimension of global citizenship.

Why Does Global Citizenship Matter?

The preceding list could be much longer and more detailed; global citizenship covers a lot of ground. Thus, it is useful to consider the term global citizenship as shorthand for the habits of mind and complex learning associated with global education. The concept is useful and important in several respects.

First, a focus on global citizenship puts the spotlight on why internationalization is central to a quality education and emphasizes that internationalization is a means, not an end. Serious consideration of the goals of internationalization makes student learning the key concern rather than counting inputs.

Second, the benefits of encouraging students to consider their responsibilities to their communities and to the world redound to them, institutions, and society. As Altinay (2010, 1) put it, "a university education which does not provide effective tools and forums for students to think through their responsibilities and rights as one of the several billions on planet Earth, and along the way develop their moral compass, would be a failure." Strengthening institutional commitment to serving society enriches the institution, affirms its relevance and contributions to society, and benefits communities (however expansive the definition) and the lives of their members.

Third, the concept of global citizenship creates conceptual and practical connections rather than cleavages. The commonalities between what happens at home and "over there" become visible. The characteristics that human beings share are balanced against the differences that are so conspicuous. On a practical level, global citizenship provides a concept that can create bridges between the work of internationalization and multicultural education. Although these efforts have different histories and trajectories, they also share important goals of cultural empathy and intercultural competence (Olson et al. 2007).

No concept or term is trouble-free; no idea goes uncontested by some faculty member or group. For better or for worse, global citizenship will undoubtedly provoke disagreements that reflect larger academic and philosophical debates. There is plenty of skepticism about global citizenship. Some object to any concept that suggests a diminished role for the nation and allegiance to it or the ascendancy of global governance systems. The idea of developing students' moral compasses can raise questions about whose values and morals and how institutions undertake this delicate task. Some students will choose not to accept responsibility for the fate of others far away, or may see inequality as an irremediable fact of life. Some faculty will stand by the efficacy and wisdom of the market; others will see redressing inequality as the key issue for the future of humankind. And so on.

Such debates, sometimes civil or acrimonious, are, for better or worse, the stuff of academe. Implementing new ideas—even if they have been around for a very long time as in the case of global citizenship—can be slow and painful. However, if colleges and universities can produce graduates with the knowledge and the disposition to be global citizens, the world would certainly be a better place.

Madeleine F. Green

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Box 1 - Conceptual Divides

What was once simply called “international education” is now a field awash with varied terminology, different conceptual frameworks, goals, and underlying assumptions.*

Although "internationalization" is widely used, many use globalization—with all its different definitions and connotations— in its stead. Rather than take on the job of sorting out the terminology, let me point out two significant conceptual divides in the conversation. Both center on the purpose of internationalization.

In the first divide, we see one face of internationalization as referring to a series of activities closely associated with institutional prestige, profile, and revenue. These activities are generally quantifiable, lend themselves to institutional comparisons and benchmarking, and provide metrics for internationalization performance that resonate with trustees and presidents. Examples include hosting international students, sending students abroad, developing international agreements, and delivering programs abroad.

The other face of internationalization—student learning— is much more difficult to capture and assess, but it provides an important answer to the “so what?” question. Why does internationalization matter? What impact do internationalization activities have on student learning? How do they contribute to preparing students to live and work in a globalized and culturally diverse world?

Different terms with overlapping meanings are used to describe the student learning dimension of internationalization. Global learning, global education, and global competence are familiar terms; they, too, are often used synonymously. The global in all three terms often includes the concepts of international (between and among nations), global (transcending national borders), and intercultural (referring often to cultural differences at home and around the world).

Also prevalent in the student learning discussion is another cluster of terms that focus specifically on deepening students’ understanding of global issues and interdependence, and encouraging them to engage socially and politically to address societal issues. These terms include global citizenship, world citizenship (Nussbaum 1997), civic learning, civic engagement, and global civics (Altinay 2010). These terms, too, share several key concepts, and are often used interchangeably.

The second divide focuses on the divergent, but not incompatible goals of workforce development (developing workers to compete in the global marketplace) or as a means of social development (developing globally competent citizens.) Global competitiveness is primarily associated with mastery of math, science, technology, and occasionally language competence, whereas “global competence” (a broad term, to be sure), puts greater emphasis on intercultural understanding and knowledge of global systems and issues, culture, and language.

As the field grows increasingly complex and the instrumental goals of internationalization become more prominent, it is important that campus discussions and planning efforts sort out their language, underlying concepts, and implied or explicit values. Otherwise, people run the risk of talking past each other and developing strategies that may not match their goals.

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* It is important for U.S. readers to note that the goals of and assumptions about internationalization vary widely around the world. The Third Global Survey of Internationalization conducted by the International Association of Universities found that there are divergent views among institutions in different regions of the risks and benefits of internationalizations. Based on their findings, IAU has launched an initiative to take a fresh look at internationalization from a global perspective .

Altinay, Hakan. "The Case for Global Civics." Global Economy and Development Working Paper 35 , The Brookings Institution, Washington, DC, 2010.

Nussbaum, Martha. 1997. Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education . Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press.

Olson, Christa, Rhodri Evans, and Robert Shoenberg. 2007. At Home in the World: Bridging the Gap Between Internationalization and Multi-Cultural Education . Washington DC: American Council on Education.

Schattle, Hans. 2007. The Practices of Global Citizenship . Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc.

Schattle, Hans. 2009. "Global Citizenship in Theory and Practice." In The Handbook of Practice and Research in Study Abroad: Higher Education and the Quest for Global Citizenship , ed. R. Lewin. New York: Routledge.

DEI Ban Prompts Utah Colleges to Close Cultural Centers, Too

As in Florida, Texas and other states that have passed anti-DEI legislation, Utah’s public institutions are applying

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Article contents

Global citizenship.

• April R. Biccum April R. Biccum School of Politics and International Relations, Australian National University
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190846626.013.556
• Published online: 19 November 2020

The concept of “Global Citizenship” is enjoying increased currency in the public and academic domains. Conventionally associated with cosmopolitan political theory, it has moved into the public domain, marshaled by elite actors, international institutions, policy makers, nongovernmental organizations, and ordinary people. At the same time, scholarship on Global Citizenship has increased in volume in several domains (International Law, Political Theory, Citizenship Studies, Education, and Global Business), with the most substantial growth areas in Education and Political Science, specifically in International Relations and Political Theory. The public use of the concept is significant in light of what many scholars regard as a breakdown and reconfiguration of national citizenship in both theory and practice. The rise in its use is indicative of a more general change in the discourse on citizenship. It has become commonplace to offer globalization as a cause for these changes, citing increases in regular and irregular migration, economic and political dispossession owing to insertion in the global economy, the ceding of sovereignty to global governance, the pressure on policy caused by financial flows, and cross-border information-sharing and political mobilization made possible by information communications technologies (ICTs), insecurities caused by environmental degradation, political fragmentation, and inequality as key drivers of change. Global Citizenship is thus one among a string of adjectives attempting to characterize and conceptualize a transformative connection between globalization, political subjectivity, and affiliation. It is endorsed by elite global actors and the subject of an educational reform movement. Some scholarship observes empirical evidence of Global Citizenship, understood as active, socially and globally responsible political participation which contributes to global democracy, within global institutions, elites, and the marginalized themselves. Arguments for or against a cosmopolitan sensibility in political theory have been superseded by both the technological capability to make global personal legal recognition a possibility, and by the widespread endorsement of Global Citizenship among the Global Education Policy regime. In educational scholarship Global Citizenship is regarded as a form of contemporary political being that needs to be socially engineered to facilitate the spread of global democracy or the emergence of new political arrangements. Its increasing currency among a diverse range of actors has prompted a variety of attempts either to codify or to study the variety of usages in situ. As such the use of Global Citizenship speaks to a central methodological problem in the social sciences: how to fix key conceptual variables when the same concepts are a key aspect of the behavior of the actors being studied? As a concept, Global Citizenship is also intimately associated with other concepts and theoretical traditions, and is among the variety of terms used in recent years to try to reconceptualize changes it the international system. Theoretically it has complex connections to cosmopolitanism, liberalism, and republicanism; empirically it is the object of descriptive and normative scholarship. In the latter domain, two central cleavages repeat: the first is between those who see Global Citizenship as the redress for global injustices and the extension of global democracy, and those who see it as irredeemably capitalist and imperial; the second is between those who see evidence for Global Citizenship in the actions and behavior of a wide range of actors, and those who seek to socially engineer Global Citizenship through educational reform.

• globalization
• global governance
• cosmopolitanism
• citizenship
• global civil society

What is Global Citizenship?

Global Citizenship (hereafter GC) as a concept is enjoying some currency in the public and academic domains. The theory and study of GC has been a growth industry especially in philosophy, international relations, and education, and it has been adopted as a central educational reform under the Sustainable Development Goals and endorsed by major international organizations, think tanks, and the expanded regime of Global Education Policy (Mundy, 2016 ). What is meant by GC varies between political actors and academics. The academic literature on GC divides into two branches. The normative theoretical branch has a number of overlaps and engagements with cosmopolitan, liberal, and republican political theory. The empirical scholarship, meanwhile, observes GC’s existence in individual behavior and the structures of transnational organization; in the case of education, empirical scholarship offers ways and means of producing GC through a reform of pedagogy, curriculum, and educational design. It is commonplace to begin any discussion of GC with an account of cosmopolitan political theory dating back to the ancients. The problem with this account is that these theoretical arguments for and against GC have been superseded both by its increasingly widespread use among political actors and by the technological capability to make it something of an institutional reality. GC is no longer simply a theoretical or philosophical discussion but is increasingly also a diversified field of empirical study. The problem with the study of GC empirically is that it is one of those conceptual variables that cuts across scholarship and public use. It is a concept, according to Reinhart Koselleck’s understanding of that term, in that it is an inherently contestable carrier of signification with multiple meanings (Koselleck, 2002 ).

What is true of GC is equally true of citizenship. Both are used by political actors and institutions, and also by academics, to inform empirical study; they are equally both concepts that inform normative political theory about the ordering foundations of society. They thus straddle the distance near (ordinary usage), distance far (academic and technocratic usage), and the normative theoretical of both political actors and academics (other conceptual variables with a similar bifurcation are democracy and the state) (Ferguson & Mansbach, 2010 ; Mitchell, 1991 ). This entanglement speaks to methodological problems at the heart of all social science endeavor: the use of the same concepts by political actors, institutions, and academics; and the problem of trying to fix those concepts for the purposes of advancing knowledge, or equally, trying to elaborate them philosophically for the purposes of creating social change. In the case of both citizenship and GC, the attempt to use various methodological techniques to fix their meaning and tie them to concrete empirical phenomena (Sartori, 1984 ) is unproductive because all these concepts are quintessential examples of the fact that political actors are themselves also self-conscious conceptualizers. Moreover, the way GC is conceptualized by certain political actors is currently having concrete political outcomes (Biccum, 2018b , 2020 ). Trying to improve its study by using Sartori’s ladder of abstraction to parse it into conceptual precision will not do when conceptualization is itself an integral part of its political impact and institutionalization. Moreover, there is increasing overlap between academic scholarship and the concept’s political operationalization, particularly in education.

Interpretive social science offers a way of grappling with this complexity by recognizing what a concept is (i.e., the function in language that allows for multiplicity of meaning and abstraction) (Koselleck, 2002 ), the ubiquity of the use of concepts for all language users (Geertz, 1973 ), and methodological techniques that are consistent with the properties of language and its study in use (Fairclough, 1989 ; Schaffer, 2016 ). The interpretivist approach is more appropriate for fleshing out the complexity of defining GC by recognizing that the rise in its use both academically and politically is in response to changing circumstances, but also and concurrently that its take up is an attempt to by actors to change political circumstances. The interpretivist approach equips scholars with a sensitivity for assessing how and why GC’s use is significant. GC is one among a variety of adjectival variations on citizenship, but it is one that has taken greater hold than any of its rivals and, depending on who uses it and how, has implications for a shift in identity and allegiance from the national to the global. Therefore, its increased use by elites and operationalization in policy to affect change should be recognized as politically significant. Interpretive social science provides the analytical and methodological tools to ground, locate, and elucidate the various meanings of GC in theory and in practice (Schaffer, 2016 ).

Citizenship, as a concept, is also both a variably applied political institution and a contested theoretical concept. It emerged as a body of study in its own right in the 20th century only to be problematized toward the end of the century with a variety of qualifying adjectives, including postnational citizenship (Rose, 1996 ), the denationalization of citizenship (Soysal, 1994 ), extrastatal citizenship (Lee, 2014 ), cultural citizenship (Richardson, 1998 ), minority citizenship (Yuval-Davis, 1997 ), ecological citizenship (van Steenbergen, 1994 ), cosmopolitan citizenship (Held, 1995 ), consumer citizenship (Stevenson, 1997 ), and mobility citizenship (Urry, 1990 ). The meaning and theorization of citizenship itself in the context of globalization have undergone some considerable contestation. In the late 1990s, sociologist John Urry noted the contradiction that just as everyone is seeking to be a citizen of an existing national society, globalization is changing what it means to be a citizen (Urry, 1999 ). For some theorists of citizenship, it has normative dimensions. Brian Turner in particular made a distinction between a conservative view of citizenship as passive and private, and a more revolutionary idea of citizenship as active and public (Bowden, 2003 ; Turner, 1990 ). For theorists of citizenship it is a mode of political membership that has as a performative nature, even by those who are not officially recognized. Understood this way, it is a quintessentially democratic political subjectivity, where agency is expressed in struggles for rights and inclusion for the benefit of self and others.

Historicized as an actually existing political institution, citizenship can be shown to be a mechanism of differentiation through rights allocation, inclusion, and exclusion that is unavoidably connected to state and imperial violence, interest, and power. For critical scholars, it is gendered, racialized, and colonial and has been a mechanism not for the expansion of civil, political, and social rights (as canonized in Marshall’s 1949 account) but as a means of conferring those rights on the few (Isin & Nyers, 2014b ; Marshall, 1949 ). Editors of the Routledge Handbook of GC Studies survey the various ways in which national citizenship has been conceptualized and how Citizenship Studies must be revised in light of globalization (Isin & Nyers, 2014b ; Lee, 2014 ). A work in “critical Citizenship Studies,” this volume notes that citizenship has been defined as membership, status, practice, or performance, with each definition harboring presumptions about politics and agency. To overcome these shortcomings, the editors offer a minimal definition which contains conceptual complexity. For Isin and Nyers, citizenship is “an institution, mediating rights between the subjects of politics and the polity” (Isin & Nyers, 2014a , p. 1). The word “polity” enables a conceptualization of diverse political entities and overlapping governance configurations. “Rights mediation” recognizes that citizenship is inclusive and exclusive simultaneously and that it is most often expanded through political struggle. Finally, the “Subject” is a way of understanding political behavior on the part of people with no formal institutional recognition. The volume aims to address the fact that Citizenship Studies is globalizing because people around the world are articulating their struggles through the political institution of citizenship, and they see this struggle as the performative dimension or enactment of citizenship in political behavior that makes claims upon states and governing institutions. This is why scholars are engaged in “a competition to invent new names to describe the political subjects that are enacting political agency today. Whether it is the Activist or the Actant, the Militant or the Multitude” (Isin & Nyers, 2014a , p. 5). Contributors to this volume are highly skeptical of the concept of GC, but this is precisely the kind of active enactment of rights and responsibilities that scholars of GC see as evidence of its existence, or endorsement for its contribution to the globalization of democracy. Thus, the emergence of GC is part and parcel of the very contestation over citizenship that contributors to this volume see as evidence for grassroots political agency and democratic political change.

As a concept, GC is often linked with the body of cosmopolitan political thought dating back to antiquity (Heater, 1996 ), but this association needs to be qualified. Its increased usage in the early 21st century among scholars, philosophers, policymakers, global institutions, and educators has been prolific, leading to several attempts in the literature to codify its various meanings (Fanghanel & Cousin, 2012 ; Hicks, 2003 ; Sant, Davies, Pashby, & Shultz, 2018 ), or to study its variation in use empirically (Gaudelli, 2009 ). Some have argued that its conceptual heterogeneity is strategically advantageous for those who are using it in practice, and political actors particularly in education have devoted a substantial amount of time to conceptualizing it for the purposes of its articulation in policy (Biccum, 2018b ; Hartmeyer, 2015 ). In the education space, an agreed-upon meaning organized around attitudes, aptitudes, and behavior is now being utilized by international organizations (specifically the United Nations, United Nations Education Science and Culture Organisation, and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development), which are disseminating their preferred definitions through the expanded global education community via declarations, policy advice, research, information portals, and international conferences. Attempts to codify the different meanings of GC in the academic scholarship have used different metatheoretical concepts to understand the systematic organization of meaning, among them heuristics (Gaudelli, 2009 ), discourse (Karlberg, 2008 ; Parmenter, 2011 ; Schattle, 2015 ; Shukla, 2009 ), ideology (Pais & Costa, 2017 ; Schattle, 2008 ), and typology (Andreotti, 2014 ; Oxley & Morris, 2013 ). For all this definitional and metatheoretical categorization, what cuts across all are the notions that a global citizen is a type of person (endowed with a certain kind of knowledge, values, attitudes, and aptitudes) and that GC is expressed in behavior (always active). Oxley and Morris’s ( 2013 ) codification is often cited in educational scholarship that is working to provide the pedagogical and theoretical foundations for producing Global Citizens (Bosio & Torres, 2019 ) or critically contesting existing practices and theoretical models of GC education in order to make them live up to what both scholarly factions regard as its emancipatory potential (Andreotti, 2014 ).

The various attempts to codify the use of GC in situ tend to make a distinction between hegemonic use and attempts by both scholars and political actors to expand its meaning for political purposes. In this context Oxley and Morris ( 2013 ) make a distinction between “cosmopolitan based” GC Education, which is further nuanced by political, moral, economic, and cultural considerations; and “advocacy based,” which is inflected by social, critical, environmental, and spiritual features. This distinction effectively codifies the differences between official uses of GC by elite actors, and the contestations from critical practitioners and scholars who seek to expand its official meaning (a) to include the grassroots activity of activists; and (b) in educational policy and practice, to include knowledge of global capital and European colonial history, a normative attitude against the inequalities and injustices these have produced, and the aptitude to hold elite actors to account (Andreotti & Souza, 2011 ). Gaudelli ( 2009 ) and Schattle ( 2008 ) based their discursive and ideological codifications on methodologically informed definitions of discourse and ideology and an empirical focus on the use of the concept in multiple sites. Gaudelli identifies five different discursive framings (neoliberal, nationalist, Marxist, world justice and governance, and cosmopolitan), and Schattle ( 2008 ) deploys an ideological analysis to determine whether the discourse of GC in education constitutes a new “globalist” ideology. He finds that in fact it remains inflected by varieties of liberal ideology, even its critical variants, because of its emphasis on human rights, equality, and social justice.

Despite contestations over meaning and use, there are those in the literature who regard GC as the conceptual iteration that underpins a hegemonic ordering of a global governance to further globalize the market by creating market-ready “neoliberal subjectivities” (Chapman, Ruiz-Chapman, & Eglin, 2018 ), or who argue that the proselytizing gesture of its proponents and its rootedness in Western liberal democratic culture make it inescapably imperial (Andreotti & Souza, 2011 ). A common accusation is that GC is an attempt to put a progressive veneer on the global market. In addition, definitions of GC that link it to worldly cosmopolitan values, high-tech skills, and enough cross-cultural knowledge to enable flexibility and adaptability map neatly onto the kinds of subjectivities one will find among the world’s most privileged and highly mobile workers. For critics, there is evidence for this critique in the individualizing and entrepreneurial programs which make elites responsible for limited social change that won’t disrupt market relations. Conversely, the neorepublican and neoliberal response to this critique is that citizenship is inseparable from market-based participation in society because it is the market’s tendency to untether people from social, political, and economic constraints and to diversify the economy that creates free rational agents capable of participating democratically (Lovett & Pettit, 2009 ). From this perspective, chauvinism, discrimination, and communitarianism are bad for global markets, ergo the promotion of the progressive social values of GC is good for the global economy. The critics of GC are quite right in that it is being articulated and reframed to fit the particular ideological commitments of promarket actors in certain sites (Chapman et al., 2018 ; Pais & Costa, 2017 ). However, paying close empirical attention to how conceptualization works, what should be emphasized is that GC’s heterogeneity, fluidity, and contested meaning ensure that it cannot be dismissed as essentially one thing and serving a single purpose (Biccum, 2020 ). Instead, close empirical attention needs to be paid to who is using it, how, and for what purpose.

The Theory of GC

It is commonplace to want to tell the story of GC as the next step in the genealogy of the cosmopolitan tradition. But the picture is more complex than that, because while both cosmopolitanism and GC have close family ties with liberal political theory, it is a mistake to collapse them because there are articulations of liberalism which reject cosmopolitanism, such as the work of John Rawls. Equally, in GC’s associations with antiquity there are concrete connections also with republican political thought (Pagden, 2000 ). In fact, republicanism has equally enjoyed a revival since the 1990s (Costa, 2009 ; Dagger, 2006 ; Lovett & Pettit, 2009 ) and, when examined in detail, the approach to the market found in elite articulations of GC do bear a closer affinity with neorepublicanism than, as critics maintain, neoliberalism (Biccum, 2020 ). The work of Luis Cabrera argues for maintaining a distinction between cosmopolitanism and GC while understanding their connections (Cabrera, 2008 ). Succinct political theories of GC have emerged (Carter, 2001 ; Dower, 2000 ; Tully, 2014 ), some of which try to counter this tradition and some of which marshal GC as a suitable replacement for aggressive American militarism (Arneil, 2007 ; Hunter, 1992 ), arguing that it will allow the United States to pass an “Augustan Threshold.” However articulated theoretically, GC is intimately tied up with questions of human nature, political subjectivity, and appropriate political arrangements, such as polis, state, republic, global governance, world state or empire, with a characteristic omission of political arrangements deemed less formal or “modern.”

The commonplace narrative that places GC within the history of the repetitive revival of cosmopolitan thought is best expressed by April Carter ( 2001 ) and Derek Heater ( 1996 ), whose histories observe a cycle of periodic revival in which the structural contradictions of imperial formations follow a pattern of critique and externalization. Heater begins with Aristotle’s view of the polis as a form of political organization that is congruent with the nature of man. 1 This is an intellectual gesture that naturalizes the polis, making it an expression of the final and perfect condition of human development, and provides legitimacy for its transplantation elsewhere (similar to Hegel’s view of the state). These ideas were put under sustained pressure from circumstances that bear a remarkable similarity to patterns coded by contemporary scholars as “globalization,” including territorial expansion, extensions of governance, migration, and the privatization of the military. Cosmopolitan ideas, Heater argues, arise out of the failure of the polis to live up to claims that it is the expression of human nature. This led to the exploration of two other ideas: the true nature of human beings should be sought either in solitary individualism, or in the essential oneness of the human race. These were first articulated by figures who were critical of existing political arrangements such as Diogenes, Cicero, and Zeno. According to Heater, the periodic revival of cosmopolitan ideas since ancient times is caused by a sense of external threat, whether it be war or environmental catastrophe. Each articulation differs in emphasis over the role of the state, the role of the individual, the role of global institutions, and the desirability of a world state. Similarly, historian Anthony Pagden offers a genealogy of cosmopolitan thought which sees it as indelibly rooted in imperial structures but finds its culmination in the global republicanism of Immanuel Kant, in which Pagden finds there are also critiques of imperialism (Pagden, 2000 ). Thus, an analytical distinction must be maintained between concrete political projects for the realization of global democracy or a world state, and cosmopolitan political philosophy, although they certainly intersect. So, for example, the early cosmopolitans did not devise plans for constitutions and governance, and early- 20th-century advocates for a world state (such as H. G. Wells) were not philosophers (Heater, 1996 ). The International Relations (IR) scholarship which sees the eventuation of a world state deriving from structural conditions is not necessarily engaging normatively with the concept of GC (Ruggie, 2002 ; Wendt, 2003 ), and some scholarship on GC sees its democratic potential in the fact that it is a set of citizen claims, attitudes, and behaviors in the absence of a world state (Dower, 2000 ; Dower & Williams, 2002 ; Falk, 2002 ).

Understanding GC as the culmination in the genealogy of cosmopolitan thought also conflicts with the cosmopolitan revival in IR, although these scholars repeat the formulation described by Heater: namely, the contradictions of globalization demonstrate the flaws in the Hegelian understanding that the nation state is the perfect reflection of human rationality and the only political arrangement that will enable the full flowering of human development. The turn to cosmopolitanism in IR is also occasioned by the end of the Cold War and the disillusionment with Marx in the context of a recognition of diverse identities and non-class-based modes of social, political, and economic exclusion and the new social movements that sprang up as a redress. The cosmopolitan vision for the extension of democracy through reformed institutions is articulated by Richard Linklater ( 1998 ), Daniele Archibugi ( 1993 ), and David Held ( 1995 ) as a redress for these structural conditions. The sovereign state cannot continue to claim to be the only relevant moral community when the opportunities and incidences of transnational harm rise alongside increasing interdependence (Doyle, 2007 ). Similar to their ancient counterparts, Linklater, Archibugi, and Held offer cosmopolitan democracy as both a critique of the Hegelian theory of the state as the highest expression human rationality and a method of expanding democracy transnationally. Both Archibugi and Linklater offer the possibility of direct citizen participation in global institutions as the mechanism that would make for a robust global democracy. Global or world citizenship is implicated in this project, but these scholars do not offer a political theory of GC as such.

The cosmopolitan revival in political theory does, however, theorize GC as a way of reconfiguring ethical foundations of the individual connection to state and world (Appiah, 2007 ; Nussbaum, 1996 ; Parekh, 2003 ). The cosmopolitanism of these scholars is organized around the premise that, in the context of “complex interdependence,” individuals in advanced economies have ethical obligations to the rest of the human race which can override their obligations to fellow citizens. Contained within many arguments in favor of GC is a latent criticism of the nation state and transnational capital. For Thomas Pogge ( 1992 ) this amounts to recognition of the insertion of the citizens of advanced economies into global value and production chains; for Bhiku Parekh this amounts to recognition of the political and economic debt gained through European colonization, and he calls for a globally oriented national citizenship (Parekh, 2003 ). 2

The central cleavage is the relevance and role of the state. Critics of GC argue that GC’s rootless sense of obligation from nowhere undermines Aristotelian notions of civic virtue, and that the nation state is the only community where active citizenship can be practiced (Carter, 2001 ; Miller, 1999 ; Walzer, 1994 ). Others offer GC as a way of being that does not devalue, erode, or supersede the nation state. Nigel Dower, for example, argued in 2000 that a world state is not needed for GC (Dower, 2000 ). Here he is responding to critics who argued at the time that GC cannot exist, because of a lack of common identity and institutions. Some scholars offer “rooted cosmopolitanism” as an affinity to the global that is grounded in individual biography and location (Kymlicka & Walker, 2012 ). Similarly, Martha Nussbaum sparked a debate among prominent political, social, legal, and literary theorists over the competing merits of national versus cosmopolitan affinity, and offered concentric circles of affinity from the individual to the global because the state as nothing more than a “morally arbitrary boundary” (Nussbaum, 1996 , p. 14). Nussbaum later revised this position to articulate a “globally sensitive patriotism,” arguing that the sentiments that underpin patriotism can be used to rescue the concept from its chauvinistic variants, allowing it then to play a role in creating a “decent world culture” (Nussbaum, 2008 , p. 81). But for most of these scholars the state is the starting point for either advocacy or critique of GC.

There are other scholars in the analytic tradition attaching to GC a notion of cosmopolitan right, meaning the restriction of individual freedom so that it harmonizes with the freedom of everyone else. For Luis Cabrera ( 2008 ) this is an important step toward developing an overarching conception of cosmopolitanism, one that details appropriate courses of action and reform in relation to individuals and institutions in the current global system. The collapsing of GC and cosmopolitanism as synonymous is for Cabrera a mistake. There are clear differences between them, as well as different conceptual inflections within them. Within cosmopolitanism, Cabrera details the institutional cosmopolitanism of Archibugi and Linklater, which is concerned with the creation of a comprehensive network of global governing institutions to achieve just global distributive outcomes; and moral cosmopolitanism, which as we see in Appiah, Pogge, and Parekh is concerned not with institution-building but with assessing the justice of institutions according to how individuals fare in relation to them. Cabrera’s claim is that individual cosmopolitanism should be understood as GC. GC for Cabrera is a moral orientation toward and a claim to membership of the whole of the human community and a theory of citizenship that is fundamentally concerned with appropriate individual action. In other words, Cabrera is offering a theoretical framework for the operationalization of GC which offers guidelines of “right action” for the global human community. “Right action” can be objectively known for Cabrera following the analytical tradition and particularly the liberal thought of John Rawls. On the question of the world state Cabrera equivocates. He argues that GC is the ethical orientation guiding individual action in a global human community and not preparation for a world state, but he nevertheless advocates for a world state because of the biases against cosmopolitan distributive justice inherent in the sovereign state system. For Cabrera GC identifies the very specific duties incumbent on all humankind to promote the creation of an actual global political community up to and including the creation of a world state.

The question of empire is conspicuously absent among these scholars, while other scholars fully implicate Western imperial history in their account of GC. James Tully ( 2014 ) is the only political theorist of GC to pay close attention the role of European empire in constructing, globalizing, and making modular civil citizenship. With a focus on language and meaning as the sites of political contestation, Tully sees GC as articulating a locus of struggle, noting that because of empire, most of the enduring struggles in the history of politics have taken place in and over the language of citizenship and the activities and institutions into which it is woven. GC for Tully is neither fixed nor determinable, as it is for Cabrera; it contains no calculus or universal rule for its application in particular cases. Rather it is a conjunction of “global” and “citizenship” that can be regarded as the linguistic artifact of the innovative tendency of citizens and noncitizens to contest and create something new in the practice of citizenship. Basing his account of “public philosophy” on a philosophy of language drawn from Wittgenstein, Skinner, and Foucault, in which language is constitutive of human social and political relations, Tully regards freedom and democracy as practiced through language. Language is inseparable from cognition, and in practices of meaning-making human beings continually (re)negotiate their circumstances, and in so doing have the capacity to change the language, and in changing the language, change the game. Tully offers a political theory of GC that builds on the open-endedness indicated by Linklater and Falk, and sees in the multitudinous expressions of transnational political activism the possibility of different, more democratic political arrangements. This is consistent with decolonial scholarship in IR, postcolonial scholarship in education, and critical scholarship on sustainability, which argue that the modernistic, dualist language of science is part of the problem in that it hinders the ability of scholars and citizens to conceptualize life differently. To change social reality, they argue, we have to change our language (Shallcross & Robinson, 2006 ), and for many critical scholars GC is part of this conceptual shift.

The Study of GC

Research on the practice of GC can be roughly divided between the normative theoretical and the phenomenological empirical and contains a tension between GC as actually existing and needing to be produced. Scholarship has expanded substantially since the 1990s and moved away from an association with cosmopolitanism toward a direct engagement with GC as a concept and field of study in its own right. Contributions to the field have appeared in Media and Cultural Studies (Khatib, 2003 ; Nash, 2009 ), International Law (Hunter, 1992 ; Torre, 2005 ), Psychology (Reysen & Hackett, 2017 ; Reysen & Katzarska-Miller, 2013 ), and Citizenship Studies (Arneil, 2007 ; Bowden, 2003 ; Soguk, 2014 ), but the bulk of the scholarship appears in International Relations (IR) (residing in roughly the subfields of Globalization, Global Governance, Social Movements, and Global Civil Society) and in educational scholarship (residing in pedagogical scholarship but also emerging interdisciplinary fields where educational scholarship is overlapping with International Political Economy, IR, and International Political Sociology) (Armstrong, 2006 ; Ball, 2012 ; Dale, 2000 ; Desforges, 2004 ). Methodologically, most of the scholarship has been qualitative and interpretive or critical, with a handful of quantitative approaches just emerging in Psychology seeking to measure global citizen attributes, and one study providing a quantitative aggregate account of the appearance of “GC” in textbooks (Buckner & Russell, 2013 ; Katzarska-Miller & Reysen, 2018 ; Reysen & Katzarska-Miller, 2013 ). Debates across much of the scholarship follow an optimistic–pessimistic or normative–critical dichotomy.

Sociological scholarship on globalization going back to the 1990s describes a growing global awareness that can be causally attributed to information communications technologies (ICTs). ICTs play a central role in all accounts of “observable” GC, even if operating in the background as the necessary sufficient conditions for transnational cooperation and mobilization. This sociological approach sees in the massification of communications technology a distribution of symbolic resources that inform how people see themselves and their knowledge of others in time and space. This is in keeping with 20th-century scholarship in the fields of nationalism, communication, and the histories of knowledge which have posited the constitutive nature of communications technology and identity (Anderson, 1983 ; Foucault, 1982 , 2000 ; Lule, 2015 ; Martin, Manns, & Bowe, 2004 ; Norris, 2009 ). For Urry, Pippa Norris, and others, just as national broadcasting can be causally credited with the development of national citizenship, so can ICTs be credited with the rise in global affinities, cosmopolitan worldviews, and self-identification as a global citizen. In addition to transforming the possibilities for transnational interaction, mobilization, and governance and the market across terrestrial space, ICTs enable visibility, the spread of knowledge and shared experiences, the perception of threat, and a sense of the world as a whole. For this approach there is a historical connection between ICTs and democracy dating back to the social upheaval in Europe that went with the introduction of the printing press. When ICTs are global, they enable more political transparency through the identification and exposing of wrongdoing. Harmful backstage behavior can be revealed, put on display, and represented over and over again. This has been done to states and corporations over their environmental and human-rights transgressions and has fuelled the activities of new social movements. Such revelations contribute to the knowledge base of those claiming to be global citizens, and of those being so characterized in the scholarship.

Communications technology is one of the structural factors making it possible to uncouple citizenship from the territorial state. Advances in ICTs have also created the technical capacity to make GC an institutional reality. The volume Debating Transformations of National Citizenship devotes a section to debating the possibilities inherent in blockchain technology to confer a grant of citizenship to all humanity through a universal digital identity. Blockchain technology provides the technological capability, international law provides the global juridical framework (Article 25(1) of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), according to which every citizen should have the right to participate in the conduct of public affairs), and the Sustainable Development Goals articulate a political will and policy framework (goal 16.9 aims to provide a legal identity for all, including birth registration by 2030 ). For optimists, blockchain technology would provide universal recognition of personhood; enhance individual freedom by allowing people to create self-sovereign identities with control over their personal data; mitigate against the increased politicization of citizenship; and could have the benefit of protecting human rights and stateless persons, assisting in the fight against human trafficking, and even mitigate the tendency of states to monetize naturalization (De Filippi, 2018 ). In addition, it contains the possibility for emancipatory movements to mobilize across territorial borders. The creation of multiple cloud communities would allow for experimentation with democratic utopias and would enable a direct global democracy by creating the possibility of a one-person-one-vote participation in global governance (Orgad, 2018 ). By extending decision-making power to individuals and communities that are currently excluded, it contains the potential for the realization of cosmopolitan democracy as envisaged by Linklater and Archibugi. For pessimists, this would require a globalization of communications technology that is not environmentally sustainable and would centralize power in the hands of states and corporations.

Moving beyond technological determinism, a common refrain in the study of GC is that it is organically expressed, manifested and spread by the globalizing of civil society and transnational advocacy networks (TANs) (Armstrong, 2006 ; Carter, 2001 ; Desforges, 2004 ; Meutzelfeldt & Smith, 2002 ). Here, the attribute of causality is not necessarily with the individual, but with the variety of political arrangements that have emerged to address transnational issues. According to April Carter, “amnesty as an organisation can be seen as a collective global citizen” (Carter, 2001 , p. 83). While not all the groups that fall within the designation Global Civil Society (GCS) can be associated with GC, it is the groups which are engaged in political lobbying, policy work, volunteering, campaigning, fundraising, and protest on social justice issues to do with poverty, inequality, and human rights that are regarded as sites for the study of GC because they are ostensibly motivated by identification with the whole of humanity, cosmopolitan values, a concern about injustice, a willingness to act collaboratively and cooperatively. Moreover, their activities are undergirded by and contribute to the operationalization of a universal system of human rights. They assist local populations in making claims against state governments and they make claims against global institutions for redress of problems. Participants in these networks are transnationally mobile through associations which facilitate the production of knowledge, the formation of “epistemic communities,” and consensus therefore around the policy response to the transnational issues around which they are organized (Haas, 1989 , 1992 ).

A circular logic is at play here. Activists who care about social justice issues comprise the personnel of groups which create networks for the purposes of making change. These networks in turn are new forms of association wherein participation engenders the sorts of values and attributes which can be assigned to the global citizen (Pallas, 2012 ). This logic of learning through participation is a common refrain across political theory, constructivist IR, social movements, and education scholarship (Finnemore, 1993 ). These developments in transnational collective action underpin the claim that changing patterns of global governance create new consequences for citizenship. Much of the scholarship regards this as a democratic trend because many of the groups which inhabit these networks are (semi)autonomous from states and governance structures; use knowledge gathered from grassroots and professional experience to highlight global issues to shape public opinion in such a way as to put pressure on states and corporations responsible for abuses; or push global public policy around health, education, and development in the direction of a more equitable distribution and access and inclusion. Even when the policy preferences of TANs make it onto the global agenda (such as happened with educational access and inclusion and GC education via the Sustainable Development Goals), these groups can continue to apply pressure by also monitoring the operation of UN agencies or national compliance with particular international agreements: the Global Education Monitoring Reports and a special issue of Global Policy (volume 10, supplement 1, September 2019 ) are good examples of this. TANs are regarded as strengthening international society and linkages between states (mitigating the structural condition of anarchy initially posed by IR). For scholars, these spaces of activity embody GC by promoting a world order based not on state interests but on human rights, and acting as a vehicle for strengthening the legitimacy of global institutions and international law (Jelin, 2010 ; Shallcross & Robinson, 2006 ). The interaction they create between the bottom-up and top-down in an expanded architecture of global governance divided by policy specialism is evidence of Alexander Wendt’s claim that a world state is inevitable (Wendt, 2003 ).

However, civil-society groups and TANs are not the only nonstate actors laying claim to the label “global citizen.” Corporations and their representative organizations (e.g., the World Economic Forum) are also adopting the label, and the literature on Global Corporate Citizenship cites the same set of circumstances regarding the pressure that globalization has put upon state capacity. In the circumstance of a “global regulatory deficit” that has been created by financing conditions that required the shrinkage of the state, corporations have a choice between exploiting that deficit for gain, or exhibiting “enlightened self-interest” by recognizing that they have social responsibilities as well as rights. Corporations act as global citizens, according to this literature, by assuming responsibilities of a state, such as the provision of public-health programs, education, and protection of human rights through working conditions while operating in countries with repressive regimes. Global corporate citizens engage in self-regulation to ensure the peace and stability required for continued realization of profits (Henderson, 2000 ; Schwab, 2008 ; Sherer & Palazzo, 2008 ). Considering that much of the activism of social movements against neoliberal globalization has been directed against corporations and the global institutions promoting their preferred policy agendas, this raises a question in need of further exploration. How can the site of the trouble provide ostensibly the solution? Should observers be relieved by the corporate recognition of social justice issues when economic nationalism is on the rise, or should it be regarded as an instrumental attempt at co-opting?

Here lies a central cleavage animating both the endorsement and the critiques of GC. Does capitalism underwrite democracy through economic growth, or does it erode democracy by facilitating monopolies which put power and wealth in the hands of a few? For many commentators, the expanded networks of global governance are not democratic, because they are inhabited by powerful actors with asymmetric bargaining power and the ability to ensure that whatever compromises are made do not trouble the logic of the existing system (El Bouhali, 2015 ; Caballero, 2019 ). The spaces inhabited by global citizens are not in fact spaces of negotiation open to all, and particularly as they are formalized and professionalized, they create an elite (Pallas, 2012 ) of what are effectively bureaucratic functionaries of global governance. Moreover, these elites are primarily from the Global North and are criticized for pursuing an elite-led advanced economy agenda for the international system. Structural imbalances are often cited between Southern and Northern participants because participation requires resources and this creates a Western bias (Gaventa & Tandon, 2010 ). Rather than seeing these actors as representing and advocating on behalf of voiceless constituents, Pallas ( 2012 ) sees a moral hazard and a lack of accountability in “global citizens” who propose policy solutions for which they may not bear the costs by intervening in problems that do not affect them directly. Participants may mistake as “global connectedness” what is in effect identity-sharing among elites. In addition, it is the institutional structure and the funding models of GCS, which have long been subjects of critique, that limit the ability of these groups to entreat the public to behave as global citizens (Desforges, 2004 ).

Richard Falk’s 1993 essay “The Making of Global Citizenship” describes the global citizen as “a type of global reformer: an individual who intellectually perceives a better way of organizing the political life of the planet” (Falk, 1993 , p. 41). This brings us to the assumption of causality which individualizes the emergence of GC in a quintessentially modern gesture which sees GC born of individuals who think critically and do not accept the organization of political life as they find it, but instead ask foundational questions and engage in utopian visions. Falk describes GC as “thinking, feeling and acting for the sake of the human species” (Falk, 1993 , p. 20). GC is thus an orientation toward the collective which begins in the individual with a specific kind of attitude, aptitude, and knowledge. Something peculiar is happening with the consolidation of GC discourse and scholarship. With its uniform emphasis on activism, the global-citizen discourse, whether it occurs in international organisations, corporations, global civil society, individuals or scholarship, has the effect of normalizing and shifting the normative orientation around political activism. This is a significant development given the context of the proliferation of political activisms since the 1960s and the wide variety of political mobilizations occurring on both the right and left of the spectrum in the 21st century . Moreover, the global-citizen discourse has the effect of legitimating the transnational agendas of certain activists (Pallas, 2012 ), and has resulted in a significant normative shift within global institutions in favor of the issues first brought to attention by antiglobalization activists of the 1980s and 1990s. This could be regarded with considerable skepticism as a form of co-opting, or with some relief as a welcome salve to chauvinisms of all varieties. Under the rubric of “GC,” the notion that globalizing capital might have any causal connection to political instability, environmental and health catastrophes, and growing inequality is seldom entertained, even as GC’s insertion into the Sustainable Development Goals sees the production of global citizens as the solution to global problems through the production of global “change makers.” Either way, there is a marked tension between two areas of scholarship in education and political science, where one sees in transnational advocacy the existence of global citizens, and the other sees in the globalization of education policy a strategy for their production.

The conceptualization of GC informs how it is studied. Optimistic scholarship observes what it considers to be organic expressions of GC in social movements, transnational advocacy networks, global governance, and among elite actors. Pessimistic scholarship observes the promotion of GC by elites and through private and governance institutions as a hegemonic strategy to contain and displace social movements; to institutionalize an epistemic paradigm which forecloses on critical thinking and non-Western, particularly indigenous knowledges; and to create a political subject which is amenable to globalizing capital (Bowden, 2003 ; Chapman, 2018 ). Across all this scholarship there are differing accounts of causality which traverse assumptions around human agency, social structure, technological change, and social engineering (Wendt, 1987 ). Technological determinant accounts attribute change to communications technology, top-down accounts attribute change to institutions and governance, and bottom-up accounts attribute change to individual and group agency. The latter two are complicated by the now very large field of GC Education, which has emerged from a combination of elite-led and social movement approaches to education in the 20th century . What is common to all is a characterization of GC as a change in the political subject. Despite the variety in conceptualization and definition of GC, the active, collective, and public element is consistent throughout. Across all the scholarship and debate there appear to be two central issues which require more systematic engagement. The first is the assumption that all forms of political activism are politically “progressive” (that is, in favor of human rights, political freedom, democracy, and equality); and the second is the assumption that GC is inherently neoliberal and therefore also inherently imperial.

A continuing blind spot in much of this scholarship is the concurrent rise of the right-wing political mobilization in various locations. This issue is debated in a volume in dialogue with Tully’s essay “On Global Citizenship” (Tully, 2014 ), and forms a substantive limitation in Tully’s account. Tully is overly optimistic that all forms of nonviolent contestation of civil citizenship are aimed at democracy, freedom, human rights, peace, and equality. He does not consider that alongside more “progressive” globally networked forms of activism are equally regressive forms of negotiation for more conservative and chauvinistic aims, sometimes enacted through violent means (Comas, Shrivastava, & Martin, 2015 ). Duncan Bell makes this criticism as well as raising the question of subject formation, which Tully leaves unaddressed (Bell, 2014 ). This is a notable absence in a time when the social engineering of GC is an active multilateral project. Part of this multilateral project is also an attempt to recapture youth mobilization away from the mobilizing tactics of various far-right or terrorist groups (Bersaglio et al., 2015 ; OECD, 2018 ; Sukarieh & Tannock, 2018 ). In the production of the “global citizen,” then, is also a contestation over what counts as politics, and Tully and other global citizen optimists fail to account for the potential weaponization of the political orientation and allegiance of young people.

Equally, Tully’s engagement in favor of GC is in tension with critical scholarship which sees in GC the continuance of an imperial project. Tully’s understanding of empire is reduced to Western European empire (as is it for most scholars critical of the Western tradition, including both postcolonial and decolonial). This is both one-sided and ahistorical and fails to consider the world historical development of empires in the plural and the fact that what Europe colonized at its periphery was, in many cases, other empires (Burbank & Cooper, 2010 ). There is a growing body of scholarship in International Relations (IR) which attempts to grapple in various ways, some more successful than others, with the peculiar absence of the history of empire from the discipline (Barkawi, 2010 ; Blanken, 2012 ; Colas, 2010 ; Dillon Savage, 2010 ; Go, 2011 ; Nexon & Wright, 2007 ; Spruyt, 2016 ); a growing body of scholarship which is calling for disciplinary decolonization (Abdi et al., 2015 ; Apffel-Marglin, 2004 ; Go, 2013 ; Gutierrez et al., 2010 ; Hudson, 2016 ; Taylor, 2012 ); and a growing body of historical scholarship which takes a comparative approach both to empires and to their role in constructing the international system (Burbank & Cooper, 2010 ; Darwin, 2007 ; Alcock et. al., 2001 ). The problem with the GC-is-imperial critique is that it has been made without a systematic engagement with the theoretical and methodological problem that empire poses for the social sciences. Equally, scholarship within IR that has begun to broach this question has done so without contending seriously with what postcolonial scholarship has done to further such an endeavor, or with how the reintroduction of empire poses serious problems for the very foundations of the discipline of political science (Biccum, 2018a ; Barkawi, 2010 ; Barkawi & Laffey, 2002 ; Mitchell, 1991 ). The recognition of empire and state co-constitution, which is made legible by the scholars who (in both history and historical IR) have begun to make empire an inescapable foundation of inquiry, necessitates a denaturalization of the state. Once the nation state is properly historically contextualized as embedded in imperial politics, the cosmopolitan debate over whether individual allegiance and identity is owed to state or humanity becomes remarkably hollow.

But equally, the state is as much a conceptual variable as GC, and a common critique of the methodological nationalism of much Western political thought and of the social sciences is that it has contributed to a normalization and naturalization of the state which is not consistent with the historical facts of the international system (Ferguson & Mansbach, 2010 ; Mitchell, 1991 ). Once this foundational problem that empire poses for how the social sciences have traditionally understood the state is properly engaged, scholars who value democracy, human rights, and justice have no choice but to normatively endorse GC, or perhaps, following Vandana Shiva, Earth Democracy (Shiva, 2005 ). In addition, scholars need to be careful about continuing to brandish critiques of GC under the rubric of “neoliberalism” in an age of hegemonic decline (Biccum, 2020 ). If GC is indeed imperial, this claim must be made with a very robust understanding of what is meant by empire, which is among many other things, after all, also a concept (Biccum, 2018a ). Scholarship on GC needs to continue, as it has begun to do, to empirically map its usage, operationalization, and institutionalization, with a particular focus on how concepts do political work. The field, practice, and use of the concept is growing. Future scholarship should be paying close empirical attention to how, by whom, and to what purposes it is being used while engaging robustly with questions of norms, methods, and the politics of knowledge. Scholars across the different fields and different normative, theoretical, and empirical divides need to begin to speak to one another. Most importantly, scholars need to keep as the focal point of their inquiry how the concept of GC itself raises important foundational questions about how we should live.

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1. Derek Heater acknowledges that similar themes advocating world community and government can be found in the Indian, Chinese, and Japanese intellectual traditions (Heater, 1996 ).

2. This view has been problematized by scholarship occurring at the same time which examines the ways in which globalization has changed the state through the very same transnational governance structures that contemporary scholarship regards as empirical evidence for the existence of GC. For an account of globalization and the state see Clark ( 1999 ).

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The Traits of a Global Citizen

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Published: Jan 30, 2024

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Table of contents

Introduction, body paragraph 1: open-mindedness and cultural awareness, body paragraph 2: empathy and compassion, body paragraph 3: environmental consciousness and sustainability, body paragraph 4: active civic engagement.

• "The Importance of Global Citizenship." UNESCO, http://www.unesco.org/education/tlsf/mods/theme_c/mod16.html
• "Traits of a Global Citizen." World Economic Forum, https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/08/global-citizen-traits/
• "Understanding Global Citizenship." United Nations, https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/blog/2019/08/understanding-global-citizenship/

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Global Citizenship

Global citizenship is the umbrella term for social, political, environmental, and economic actions of globally minded individuals and communities on a worldwide scale. The term can refer to the belief that individuals are members of multiple, diverse, local and non-local networks rather than single actors affecting isolated societies. Promoting global citizenship in sustainable development will allow individuals to embrace their social responsibility to act for the benefit of all societies, not just their own.

The concept of global citizenship is embedded in the Sustainable Development Goals though SDG 4: Insuring Inclusive and Quality Education for All and Promote Life Long Learning, which includes global citizenship as one of its targets. By 2030, the international community has agreed to ensure that all learners acquire the knowledge and skills needed to promote sustainable development, including global citizenship. Universities have a responsibility to promote global citizenship by teaching their students that they are members of a large global community and can use their skills and education to contribute to that community.

About the Hub:   Ana G. Méndez University (UAGM)  is a private non-profit higher education institution founded over seven decades ago in Puerto Rico. UAGM provides quality education and promotes research with a vision of innovation and entrepreneurship. Through its three main campuses (Gurabo, Cupey, and Carolina) and eight off-campus centers located around the island, UAGM offers a variety of academic programs in different modalities and excellent services designed to fulfill the needs and expectations of a diverse student population.  UAGM is the global center of UNAI to promote the exchange of knowledge and information regarding global citizenship. Its activities in this theme solidify its commitment to the development of global citizens by ensuring that its graduates are fully prepared to assume leadership roles and present solutions to humanity's challenges and needs.

Ana G. Mendez University

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What you need to know about global citizenship education

For centuries, common aspirations for mutual respect, peace, and understanding were reflected in traditional concepts across cultures and civilizations – from 'ubuntu' (I am because of who we all are) in African philosophy to 'sumak kawsay' (harmony within communities, ourselves and nature) in Quechua. Although the term "global citizenship education" (GCED) was only coined in 2011, the values it represents have been central to UNESCO's mission since its founding in 1947.

By building peace through education and reminding humanity of our common ties, UNESCO has long championed the ideas now formalized as GCED. As our world grows increasingly interdependent, GCED is more vital than ever for international solidarity and inspiring learners of all ages to positively contribute to their local and global communities. But what exactly does global citizenship education entail, why it matters today, and how UNESCO is driving this movement?

What’s the idea behind global citizenship?

Unlike citizenship – special rights, privileges and responsibilities related to "belonging" to a particular nation/state, the global citizenship concept is based on the idea we are connected not just with one country but with a broader global community. So, by positively contributing to it, we can also influence change on regional, national and local levels. Global citizens don't have a special passport or official title, nor do they need to travel to other countries or speak different languages to become one. It's more about the mindset and actual actions that a person takes daily. A global citizen understands how the world works, values differences in people, and works with others to find solutions to challenges too big for any one nation.

Citizenship and global citizenship do not exclude each other. Instead, these two concepts are mutually reinforcing. 

What is global citizenship education about?

Economically, environmentally, socially and politically, we are linked to other people on the planet as never before. With the transformations that the world has gone through in the past decades – expansion of digital technology, international travel and migration, economic crises, conflicts, and environmental degradation – how we work, teach and learn has to change, too. UNESCO promotes global citizenship education to help learners understand the world around them and work together to fix the big problems that affect everyone, no matter where they're from.

GCED is about teaching and learning to become these global citizens who live together peacefully on one planet. What does it entail?

Adjusting curricula and content of the lessons to provide knowledge about the world and the interconnected nature of contemporary challenges and threats. Among other things, a deep understanding of human rights, geography, the environment, systems of inequalities, and historical events that underpinned current developments;

Nurturing cognitive, social and other skills to put the knowledge into practice and make it relevant to learners' realities. For example, thinking critically and asking questions about what's equitable and just, taking and understanding other perspectives and opinions, resolving conflicts constructively, working in teams, and interacting with people of different backgrounds, origins, cultures and perspectives; 

Instilling values that reflect the vision of the world and provide purpose, such as respect for diversity, empathy, open-mindedness, justice and fairness for everyone;

Adopting behaviours to act on their values and beliefs: participating actively in the society to solve global, national and local challenges and strive for the collective good.

What UNESCO does in global citizenship education

UNESCO works with countries to improve and rewire their education systems so that they support creativity, innovation and commitment to peace, human rights and sustainable development. 

• Provides a big-picture vision  for an education that learners of all ages need to survive and thrive in the 21 st  century. Adopted in 2023, the UNESCO Recommendation on Education for Peace and Human Rights, International Understanding, Cooperation, Fundamental Freedoms, Global Citizenship and Sustainable Development is a global standard-setting instrument that lays out how education should be used to bring about lasting peace and foster human development.  

Supports  the development of curricula and learning materials on global citizenship themes tailored for diverse cultural contexts. Among many examples are the  general guidance document on teaching and learning objectives of global citizenship education  or recommendations on integrating social and emotional learning principles (SEL) in the education process.

Studies the positive impact of learning across subjects and  builds linkages between sectors and spheres . One of the key focus areas is the Framework on Culture and Arts Education , in which UNESCO highlights the positive impact learning of the arts and through the arts has on academic performance, acquisition of different skills and greater well-being, as well as broadening of the horizons. 

Collaborates with partners  across UNESCO programmes and the broader UN system to address contemporary threats to human rights and peace and  infuse the principles  of understanding, non-discrimination and respect for human dignity in education. Among others, UNESCO leads the global education efforts to counter hate speech online and offline, address antisemitism , fight racism , prevent violent extremism , enable cultural dialogue , educate about human rights violations and violent pasts.

Monitors  how the core values of global citizenship education are reflected in and supported by education policy and the curriculum to deliver it effectively. For example, by collecting global data on this indicator every four years through a survey questionnaire designed for the Recommendation.

Promotes international collaboration  in education through  UNITWIN/UNESCO Chairs , and  UNESCO Associated Schools Network , connecting over 12,000 educational institutions worldwide.

Why does UNESCO prioritize global citizenship education?

Quality education is among 17 Sustainable Development Goals put forth by the United Nations, where GCED is mentioned as one of the topic areas that countries must promote. While leading the global efforts to achieve this goal, UNESCO sees education as the main driver of human development that can accelerate progress in bringing about social justice, gender equality, inclusion, and other Goals. 

UNESCO believes that only an education that provides a global outlook with a deep appreciation of local perspectives can address the cross-cutting challenges of today and tomorrow. This vision is reaffirmed in the Incheon Declaration made in 2015 at the World Education Forum and further reflected in UNESCO's Futures of Education report.

Based on the evidence that UNESCO has accumulated on GCED impact, learners who benefit from such education from early stages become less prone to conflicts and are more open to resolving them peacefully while respecting each other's differences. It has also proven successful in post-conflict transformation. For example, discussing the root causes of human rights violations that occurred in the past helps to detect alarming tendencies and avoid them in the future. 

How is GCED implemented?

GCED is not a single subject with a set curriculum but rather a framework, a prism through which education is seen. It can be delivered as an integral part of existing subjects – from geography to social studies – or independently. UNESCO supports the dissemination of GCED on different levels and in multiple areas of life beyond the classroom.

On a policy level:  Governments can develop national strategies and frameworks that recognize the importance of understanding local issues from a broader global perspective and prioritize education programmes that reflect this vision. 

In the classroom:  Teachers can incorporate content and materials that build awareness of global issues and intercultural understanding. For instance, in Geography, pupils can learn about climate change and the distribution of resources. In Social Sciences, they find out how environmental degradation impacts children's rights worldwide. In Science, they discover how trees soak up carbon from the atmosphere through photosynthesis and can help tackle climate change. Teachers can also assign students a group project where they will have to devise a campaign to address climate change in their local community.

Out of school:  Museums and cultural institutions can design exhibits and educational materials that inspire global citizenship. Exchange programs allow young people to broaden their horizons by visiting other communities and countries.

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The Role of Global Citizens in Today’s World

Development Education and Social Justice

Abstract: There are a lot of things that one can feel positive about in regard to how far we have come ethically as a global society.  However, we are still plagued by the existence of many social issues that pierce the veil of our wellbeing.  Poverty, hunger, inequality and political instability, being but a few.  This requires us to work towards appreciating the role that we can play to improve this reality for ourselves, and our global community.  This article highlights the necessity of conceptualising our global society in communal terms that bind us to our global counterparts, and invokes us into action to address the causes of social injustice, locally and globally.  It makes the case for appealing to the common humanity that we all share in regard to approaching some of the world’s most pressing issues.  The piece also emphasises the importance of the ‘system of self’ in regard to amending the wider, societal systems that may facilitate a lot of the aforementioned social challenges.  Lastly, it addresses the importance of challenging ideologies of illiberalism in the overall attempt to enhance society, particularly in the context of regressive elements that are willing to add the vulnerable to their ranks.

Key words : Global Citizenship; Activism; Social Change; Common Humanity; Equality.

Introduction

‘You’re living at... a time of revolution, a time when there’s got to be a change.  People in power have misused it, and now there has to be a change and a better world has to be built’ (cited in Ambar, 2012: 36).  This is a quote from a speech delivered by human rights activist Malcolm X during an Oxford Union debate in 1964.  Today, I would contend, the urgency and desire in his words still resonate with great precision, but in a way that is distinct to ways of old.  In recent years, the concept of social justice has suddenly crept into popular culture, and in natural tandem with this phenomenon, there has been an increase in concern for issues pertaining to inequality and the mistreatment of humans across the globe.  Testament to this are the mass protests that have occurred in recent years, which have openly repudiated social wrongs and promoted the virtuous assignment of ensuring the wellbeing of humans throughout the world- and the wellbeing of the globe itself.  

This spirit of protest is, of course, not unique to contemporary times.  Lest we forget the great public demonstrations that have spanned the lineage of human history which have produced ground-breaking societal developments.  However, what sets today’s moral climate apart is the widespread, cultural adherence to ideals of fairness and equality; this adherence, is closer to being the norm, than an anomaly.  It is now generally seen as desirable to be committed to - or for better or worse, to look like you are committed to - carrying society forward in the voyage towards unflinching justice.  This cultural reality can greatly be attributed to the incremental, painstaking development of the collective, human conscience throughout history.  As Dr Martin Luther King Jr put it, the ‘arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice’ (Knight, 2021: 15).  I solemnly believe it can also be attributed to the impetus that is found in the activism of many of today’s young people.  This impetus has enabled a significant number of today’s youth, and wider society, to recognise their role as global citizens, and play their part in positively bringing the global village forward, ethically.  

I vividly remember moments in my upbringing as a black immigrant in Ireland where my mother, and many other members within the African community, would provide me with stark warnings of how racism will try to greatly shape how I navigate my life in Ireland, and how I had to tirelessly work to resist it in the pursuit of my goals.  To add to this matter, I was born to a Pan-Africanist mother who was adept with the history of racism and colonialism that had scourged her motherland, and with love and grace - but also a very sceptical eye - cautiously observed her surroundings as an immigrant within Ireland to ensure her son’s experiences were as free from bigotry as they could be.  Upon becoming fully integrated into Irish society, which I know proudly call my own, both my mother and I have observed a change in cultural attitudes towards the issue of racism and bigotry amongst Ireland’s citizens, particularly Irish, young people.  There seems to be a greater sense of intolerance towards racism in the ether, and at best, more people feel the need to actionably confront it.  Needless to say, there is still some way to go, but promising developments have been made up to this point and this certainly provides hope for the future.

I am the Politics Coordinator of Black and Irish; an organisation that aims to build an inclusive, equal Ireland and promote the integration of the Black and Mixed-Race community into wider, Irish society.  Through my role at Black and Irish, and my experiences more broadly as a youth activist, I have had the opportunity to see young people of all backgrounds work to combat racial discrimination in a way that would have been considered unimaginable for my mother and her migrant peers when she first arrived in Ireland.  This speaks to an admirable fervour amongst many young people to visualise themselves as global citizens and to act accordingly.  This fervour, however, is not limited to youth, as there are many other progressive-thinking people, of all ages, who share it in today’s age.  The task for these people is to extrapolate the burning passion they feel for fairness and equality across our communities, and the global society at large.

The nature of global citizenship

Within the nucleus of recognising one’s role as a global citizen, is the realisation of our deep, symbiotic connection with all humans within the global family.  This is an epiphany that sees us viewing the problems of our neighbours, as problems of our own.  The wars ravaging nations, which are cutting life short before it has the chance to blossom, are not only wars within those nations but wars within the human house that we must all attempt to quench.  Poverty mercilessly keeps a significant number of the fruits within the basket of existence from many of our global counterparts, and impedes upon the buoyancy of our own existence.  Racism is a social ailment that strips societal groups of their dignity and blindly downplays the value that they possess.  As the former Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius once stated in regard to this human connection, ‘we are made for cooperation, like feet, like hands, like eyelids, like the rows of the upper and lower teeth’ (Aurelius, 2020: 15).  We, as human beings, are truly bound to one another, and the job of the global citizen is to recognise this, find their place in today’s world, and see where they can use their unique abilities to improve it for those who are less fortunate. 

The issues that plague our civilisation such as hunger, disease and political instability, present a bitter-sweet panorama for the archetypal global citizen.  On the one hand, there is a barely tolerable bitterness because of the fact that earnestly confronting the demoralising social challenges which a considerable amount of the world’s population faces is very difficult to process and digest mentally.  ‘Change’ is the mantra of the global citizen, and is uttered in activist corners so frequently that it has in itself become an emblem.  However, acknowledging a bulk of the major issues that the world confronts at once, can lead to exhaustion and deceptively tempt us into dwarfing our capacity to ‘change’, which can result in melancholy and at times, self-defeating nihilism.  Conversely, within this same context, there is also a mouth-watering sweetness.  The sweetness rests in the great opportunity that the world places at our feet to actionably challenge social issues, and contribute to the advancement of our communal surroundings.  There is no golden bullet when it comes to solving these issues.  Within the issues - and their solution - is a complex web of political, economic, anthropological and various other factors.  What is most important, is fully enabling the ethos of our common humanity to shine through when thinking of societal problems and allowing it to act as a bedrock, upon which we play whatever part we can in improving our worldly community. 

The power within the ‘system of self’

Although it is important for us to continually work to progressively impact the social systems around us, it is necessary to note that an unmitigated, singular focus on the wider ‘systems’ can sometimes lead to mental fatigue, and a sense of defeatism.  The young person who may want to live more sustainably might ask, ‘what is the point when corporations continue to seamlessly emit environmentally eroding emissions into the ecosystem?’  The potential vegan who believes in the ethics of preserving the life of animals might question the existence of veganism, as ‘someone, somewhere is going to eat meat anyway’.  That person who might want to cease spending their money at a store which exploits those who compose its products, may wonder what impact their cessation will have, when all of their neighbours purchase from that store, completely unbothered.  Although there is a deep truth embedded in these scenarios, we must never forget the deeper value that rests in the task of reforming the system of self.  

Few, if any, human-made systems can truly outweigh the power of a network containing individuals who have been ‘spiritually reformed’- in other words, people who work to reform themselves, and organise to take social action.  For it is individuals who manufacture the systems, and those same individuals, with the conscience and moral vigour they develop from self-reformation, can amend those systems.  This is proven by the extensive voyage of the ‘moral arc’, that Dr King referred to, throughout history.  It has mercilessly journeyed right through the institution of slavery in many parts of the world, has crushed the wall of legalised discrimination and repression in its stride, and left behind remnants of its progression upon the contemporary ocean, which we all enjoy today such as a better standard of living relative to our historical compatriots, and a relatively freer, and a more fruitful society than any other time in history (Easterlin, 2000).  These developments emerged through toil and struggle, which was led by ‘spiritually reformed’ individuals, who took action to reform the motif of the very systems that initially barred these developments.  Hence, focusing on the more immediate task of improving ourselves incrementally and acting in accordance with the aspirations we have for our local community, and the global community, is the sufficient starting point in embracing our role as global citizens.  It does not mean we forget the systemic challenges that are before us.  Nor does it mean that we neglect whatever role we feel we have to play in addressing those systemic challenges.  But trying to be the change we wish to see in the world is both accessible and powerful, no matter how big or small one feels their contribution is.  

Solidarity and a shared humanity

The key element of being an effective global citizen is appreciating our place, and the place of others, in the interwoven yarn of kinship, that encompasses all people.  It is done by seeing right through the superficial elements that distract us from our shared essence.  This essence transcends the superficial, and resides in each and every one of us.  Charles Darwin, the founding father of the theory of evolution by natural selection, famously stated in his landmark text On the Origin of Species , ‘from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been and are being evolved’ (Darwin, 1909: 429).  Here, Darwin is referring to the simple beginnings of life on earth, and how the process of evolution developed various life forms which branch away from the same starting point.  This wonderful quote allegorically points to the scientific articulation of the all-encompassing link we share with all humans, and life forms, on the planet. 

This axiom, of us all being cut from the same cloth, challenges any attempt to fundamentally distinguish ourselves from those around us, and implicitly calls on us to extend our solidarity to others and do as much as we can to uplift those around us.  Behaviour which alienates, ostracises or isolates groups of people is an undesirable deviation from the truth of our commonality.  The Irish parliamentarian and activist, Daniel O’Connell, who was referred to as ‘The Liberator’ due to his contributions to the cause of Catholic Emancipation, spoke avidly against American slavery.  O’Connell once said about visiting the United States, ‘so long as it is tarnished by slavery, I will never pollute my foot by treading on its shores’ (cited in Geoghegan, 2010: 9).  O’Connell clearly understood that the oppression of any man or woman, was also an indirect manifestation of oppression against him and he continually acted to rectify the presence of oppression within the domestic shores of Ireland, as well as beyond.   This is the philosophy of the global citizen, and the bar that we must constantly attempt to reach in our efforts to fulfil that philosophy.

Education as a means to kick-start global citizenship

The vital prescription that follows the philosophy of global citizenship is the advancement of education.  The absorbing, immediate concerns that every day people regularly face, primarily as a result of the nature of our socio-political structure, can oftentimes distract us from the fact that we are living in a global village that we all have a stake in.  As a result, a lack of knowledge on the bond that we share with our global compatriots, and of the role we can play to better our immediate and global surroundings is created - or maintained - and this can open doors to unhelpful ways of thinking.  Regressive political populism feeds on the lack of awareness its victims have of their connection with those around them.  This is exemplified by the anti-immigrant, racialised rhetoric that is oft laden in the political arena.  It is not surprising that there is a correlation between this type of rhetoric and underprivileged areas where adequate education is not always a guarantee, and where the demands of our socio-political environment uniquely places added hardship upon people. (Mondon, 2017).  

A possible remedy to this issue rests in reimagining how we facilitate education, with regard to our social and civic responsibilities.  Formal education, for example, could offer insights on the common humanity we share with those around us, and the work we can do to impact members of our community in positive ways.  This would enable us to transcend superficial differences among ourselves and lead to social cohesion and progressive social change.  This is especially true in Ireland, particularly in the context of racial discrimination and migration, as Irish history is inundated by the tragic experience of colonial racism and periods of mass migration.  Education based on this historical backdrop could emphatically highlight the rubric of brotherhood that encapsulates those within Ireland, those who aim to find a home in Ireland, and those beyond our shores.  This is a hidden potential within the sphere of policy and education that has not yet been adequately explored, and I hope will be tapped into at some point in the near future.

Racism and white supremacy

There is somewhat of an introspective challenge that arises for the global citizen, which certainly needs addressing.  When striving to better the society within which one resides, it is not unusual for some to see as enemies those who stand in the way of progressive activism.  However, as difficult as it can be, it is important to place those who arise to promote regressive ideals that may not be on the side of social progress within the context of the common humanity that we all share.  Dr Martin Luther King Jr regularly cited the bible to proclaim that ‘we are all one in the eyes of God’ and that the racism promoted by white supremacists was not a blemish of King’s, or black America’s, but a deep spiritual blemish within the white supremacist, as the white supremacist intellectually departs from the oneness that they and their black and minority ethnic brethren belong to (King Jr, 2010).  This departure from the reality of our interconnectedness, creates vulnerability.  The bigot who believes it is a strength to reside in their morally bankrupt ideological framework is actually fundamentally weak.  In fact, they are victims.  Victims of a poisonous wave that carries them from the reality of their own soul to a plastic, precarious place that is not durable enough to hold its own against the tide of reality.  

One of the fundamental differences between those who have been allotted an unfortunate deck of cards by society, and those who promote an ideology that paradoxically denies the humanity of others, whilst trying to validate their own, is that the former are obviously vulnerable and deserve assistance, whilst the latter are also vulnerable, but do not realise that they are vulnerable.  This means, that as far as is practicable, and where it is appropriate, it is important for the global citizen to also lend a hand to those who have been victimised by undesirable ideologies, and help them to kick-start their own spiritual reformation.  This is certainly not possible in all scenarios, and impossible utopianism is destined to be crushed by the toughness of reality.  But there are committed elements of illiberalism within society that would gladly recruit those who are vulnerable, therefore, the extension of the ideal of brotherhood should not fall short at reaching the oblivious victim where possible, as this too inevitably leads to a positive change for the global community.  

To be a global citizen, is to care.  It is to empathise.  It requires an honest acknowledgement of the complex mixture of privileges and disadvantages with which you personally juggle, and that which your neighbour juggles; and calls on you to see how you can work cohesively with your neighbour to offset the existing disadvantages and to establish more indicators of happiness, for yourself and everyone within the global neighbourhood.  It involves an appreciation for the transcendental cloak of our common humanity that encapsulates all human beings.  Partaking in the instrumental voyage of the ‘moral arc’ is never easy, and I certainly cannot lay claim to an indestructible obedience to the ways that I have advocated in this article.  But we as humans have come an incredible distance as it is, so there is no reason, especially considering how far we have come, why we cannot strongly continue our voyage into a better future.

Ambar, S M (2012) ‘Malcolm X at the Oxford Union’, Race & Class , Vol. 53, No. 4, pp.24-38.

Aurelius, M (2020) Meditations: The Philosophy Classic , New York: John Wiley & Sons.

Darwin, C (2021) [1909] The Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection, Phoenmixx Classics Ebooks.

Easterlin, R A (2000) ‘The worldwide standard of living since 1800’, Journal of Economic Perspectives , Vol. 14, No. 1, pp. 7-26.

Geoghegan, P (2010) ‘18th-19th - Century History’, History Ireland , Vol. 18 (Sep/Oct), No. 5.

King Jr, M L (2010) Where do we go from here: Chaos or Community? , Boston, MA: Beacon Press.

Knight, J (2021) ‘The Moral Universe Won’t Budge Unless We Move It’, The Learning Professional , Vol. 42, No. 3, pp. 15-16.

Mondon, A (2017) ‘Limiting democratic horizons to a nationalist reaction: populism, the radical right and the working class’, Javnost-The Public , Vol. 24, No. 4, pp.355-374.

Eric Ehigie is studying Law and Business at NUI Galway.  He is the Political Coordinator at Black and Irish which is an NGO that advocates for the integration of the black and mixed-race Irish community into wider Irish society.  He is a community activist and the host of the ‘Engaging with Eric’ podcast.  

How to become a better global citizen

We all want to make the world a better place for ourselves and future generations. a happier, healthier and equal world is a good thing for all. plus, the benefits of doing good things speak for themselves..

According to studies, doing good for others can improve life satisfaction , happiness levels and mental and physical health. One study found that adults who volunteered about four hours a week significantly decreased their chances of developing high blood pressure.

So, how can we extend this feel good factor on a global scale? How can we become a better global citizen?

A global citizen is someone who has an awareness of the world and how human actions can impact on it.

They’re curious about the environment, nature, human cultures, geology and economics, and how they all connect with each other. They also have a desire to positively contribute to communities to improve life for others.

What is a global citizen?

A global citizen is respectful of cultural diversity and human rights. They’re empathetic to causes and suffering around the world and feel responsible for their impact on it and making change.

They see themselves as a citizen of the world, rather than a single country. They desire equality for all and consciously make fair choices and decisions. Read on to learn about the steps you can take to become a better global citizen.

Make greener choices

Recycling, reducing waste, energy saving, and water conservation all lessen the impact on the environment.

Save energy by turning off lights, unplugging appliances when not in use and buying appliances and lights with good energy ratings and efficiency.

Conserve water by installing a rainwater tank, water efficient shower heads and appliances.

Reduce waste by using reusable containers, water and coffee cups. Avoid using plastic bags, straws and disposable items. Upcycle where possible or buy second hand and create a compost heap for scraps.

Learn a new language

Being able to speak another language is useful and rewarding in so many ways. But, when it comes to becoming a better global citizen, it’s one of the best.

Learning a new language means that you gain an appreciation and insight into other cultures that you may previously not have had. You become more aware of culture differences, why they exist and the importance of respecting them.

According to researchers , Hanh Thi Nguyen and Guy Kellogg, when students learn another language, they develop new ways of understanding culture and ways of thinking and behaving.

Students can critically think about stereotypes of different cultures related to food, appearance and conversation styles.

Start learning a new language

Get the language skills, cultural understanding and confidence to open up your world with Berlitz.

Volunteer to help out a local charity or one that works with overseas organisations. If you’re keen to take it a step further, hop on a plane and spend some time volunteering overseas.

Seeing first-hand how your voluntary efforts are making a difference to others is a great feeling, as is connecting with those you’re helping. It’s also a good way of educating yourself on the issues that other countries may be facing.

Organisations such as GVI and Projects Abroad organize volunteer projects in countries such as Africa, Latin America, Asia, Europe and Australasia. Volunteers have the opportunity to help out in conservation, education, and community projects.

Travel as much as possible

Travelling is one of the best ways to explore the globe, understand and experience different cultures and country challenges first hand, as well as meet new friends.

Gaining a global perspective can help us reflect and appreciate what we have, and increased empathy for others is a key characteristic in becoming a better global citizen.

Before travelling, think about what you’re really passionate about doing or discovering. Think local cuisine, local temples or going off the beaten track. Research if you can and connect with locals who can help.

Sharing a common passion is a good way to see commonalities from a new viewpoint.

Education is key

Educating yourself about what’s going on in the world is a great way to become a better global citizen. With a multitude of sources available at our fingertips, learning is only ever a click away.

Learn about different cultures online. Read blogs and news sites about different country’s politics, current affairs and cultures, and research local cultural community events or celebrations which you can attend.

You could also use social media and communication to connect and develop friendships with people all over the world, so why not go ahead and give it a go?

Discover how we can help you make the connections that open the world to possibilities.

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Home / Essay Samples / Environment / Ecology / Global Citizen

Global Citizen Essay Examples

The role of a good citizen: nurturing a strong and responsible society.

Being a good citizen is more than just following laws and paying taxes. It's about actively contributing to the betterment of society and taking on responsibilities that go beyond individual interests. In this essay, we'll explore the multifaceted role of a good citizen, discussing how...

Importance of Becoming a Global Citizen

When we hear globalization and globalism we tend to think that they have the same meaning and are similar. Globalization and globalism are actually two separate things and have two separate meetings. Throughout this paper it is going to discuss the distinctive differences between globalization...

The Meaning of Being a Global Citizen

As communication across cultures gets easier our world gets smaller helping us bridge the gap between us and our fellow nations. There is no shame in being proud of where you’re from but recently it seems people do so at the expenses of a marginalized...

The Portrait of an Active Global Citizen: Jane Goodall

Active global citizen is a term that is used to refer to an individual that portrays unique characteristics and actions, where they care for and influence members of a community and take interest in local and global issues. Having a maintained, organized, and functioning society...

The Power of Global Citizenship

According to Hugh Evans “A global citizen is someone who self-identifies first and foremost not as a member of a state, tribe or nation, but instead as members of the human race”, this quotation speaks about the essence of being part of an emerging world...

To Be a Thomasian Global Citizen

Each one of us may have a different perception of what it means to be a Thomasian Global Citizen. For me, it is being aware of our surroundings and taking an active part to be make our world a better place to live in for...

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