Keywords

Introduction

In recent years, “global citizenship education” (GCE) research has made a place for itself in educational research. In 2018, the British Journal of Educational Studies released a special issue on GCE, and Ian Davies et al. (2018) edited The Palgrave Handbook of Global Citizenship and Education. This field of research is very diverse. Rather than being a unified conversation centered on key concepts and research questions, GCE research is best conceived as a loose space bringing together a range of research traditions, approaches, and interests having in common the use of the term “global citizenship.” In the introduction to the aforementioned special issue on GCE in the British Journal of Educational Studies, Yemini et al. (2018) classified the main strands of research as “GCE skills and pedagogies,” “cosmopolitanism,” “educational for sustainable development,” and “multiculturalism and internationalization.” Throughout the field, the dispersion of meanings associated with “global citizenship” is a standout feature.

This chapter argues that a rigorous definition of citizenship is a prerequisite to the progressive development of our scientific understanding of GCE. The chapter offers a sociologically constructed definition of citizenship and draws the implications of this approach for GCE research. It then illustrates how this definition can be applied to specific frameworks or models of GCE and concludes by emphasizing specific points of analysis that a sociologically informed model of GCE can focus on, starting with the state as the framework for citizenship.

Delineating the “Global Citizen” in GCE

In GCE research, the use of the term “global citizenship” suffers from substantial terminological imprecision. Surveying the field a few years ago, Oxley and Morris (2013, p. 302) concluded that “both GC and GCE are used ambiguously and understood differently both within and across contexts.” This lack of clarity and precision in the use of “global citizenship” does not facilitate the consolidation of GCE as an integrated research space. Dill (2018, p. 559) recently reiterated this verdict, arguing that the core concept of GCE has become “a site for contested and confused dissonance.”

Other authors have explored the notions often associated with (and not always distinguished from) global citizenship. For Dvir et al. (2018, p. 458), “‘international mindedness,’ ‘intercultural competences,’ ‘global consciousness,’ etc.” come close to the meaning of global citizenship. In the field, cosmopolitanism is often used as a synonym to global citizenship (Bowden 2003), even though it has been found that in various contexts, dispositions and values are typically considered as cosmopolitan function as cultural capital rather than as citizenship attributes (e.g., Friedman 2017; Weenink 2008). In the same vein, the OECD explicitly associates global citizenship with global mindedness (OECD 2018b).

Variation in the lexicon associated with GCE is also evident among teachers, students, and families. Goren and Yemini (2016) report cases of school teachers in Israel considering that GCE means providing students with “global competencies,” while Yemini (2018, p. 283) finds that GCE is taken to mean “the integration of multicultural, multilingual, and global dimensions into education” in a London school. Western expatriates enrolling their children in local schools in Hong Kong have been found to rely on “an imaginary of what it means to be a ‘global citizen’” (Groves and O’Connor 2017, p. 2), in which global citizenship largely operates as a metaphorical signifier. Meanwhile, Rapoport (2010, p. 186) found that teachers in Indiana, USA, believe in the need to “infuse global dimensions into all aspects of citizenship education” despite being unclear about the meaning of global citizenship.

What emerges from this brief overview is that a range of terms is used to describe ideas, practices, values, feelings, and dispositions that are somewhat related but not identical. This implies that researchers may use the same term to refer to different things, complicating the work of accumulation of scientific findings on the “global upscaling” of citizenship education. The potentially adverse implications of the lack of clear engagement with the concept of global citizenship have been noted by Goren and Yemini (2017, p. 180) in their systematic review of empirical GCE research, warning that without “specific definitions and taxonomies, the term GCE could become simply a token term, arbitrarily chosen from a list of similar generic terms (i.e., cosmopolitanism, global mindedness, global consciousness, transnationalism, global competencies, global education etc.).” Semantic arbitrariness is particularly troublesome when it has to do with a – and perhaps the – foundational concept of a field of research, making terminological clarity in the use of “global citizenship” that much more essential.

In an attempt to bring order to the field and clarify the meaning of global citizenship, Oxley and Morris (2013) built a typology of theories of global citizenship in GCE research based on an extensive review of GCE publications. They distinguished between the cosmopolitan types of definition of global citizenship, encompassing political, moral, economic, and cultural models, from the advocacy types, bringing together the social, critical, environmental, and spiritual conceptions. But while this categorization can be useful to map the field, it remains descriptive and provides little guidance for assessing the respective merits of different definitions and engaging in the labor of conceptual elaboration. Nevertheless, this extensive typology suggests that improved clarity in the use of the concept of global citizenship may be an important avenue to improve GCE research. A useful starting point for doing so may be to reconsider the concept of “citizenship.”

Reshaping the Structure of GCE Research

To bring some order to the conceptualization of GCE and thus facilitate both research and educational practices, a return to the core concept of citizenship is essential to the development of a rigorous use of “global citizenship.” The simultaneously political and analytical uses to which the concept of citizenship has been put partly explain its contested meaning. Yet, from a sociological point of view, the use of the term should be informed by social reality and citizenship as it has actually existed historically. From this perspective, citizenship can be understood as “membership of a particular kind of political community – one in which those who enjoy a certain status are entitled to participate on an equal basis with their fellow citizens in making the collective decisions that regulate social life” (Bellamy 2008, p. 1). This specific political status is the core of citizenship, which cannot be conceived without consideration of the associated political structures, political opportunities, and political power relations that make citizenship a reality and define the regime of inclusion into and exclusion from the citizen body. Moreover, in modern times, citizenship is simultaneously a political and legal status, suggesting the need to reflect on the relationship between nation-state citizenship and global citizenship.

As a specific form of citizenship, global citizenship too gains from being conceived as a political (and legal) status. GCE, in turn, can thus be defined as education for global citizenship (either toward its advent, if global citizenship does not yet exist, or toward its fuller realization if global citizenship is already partially accomplished). However, what could help researchers determine whether specific educational practices promote global citizenship? Here, social scientists’ reflections can help.

Citizenship as a political status has not been a continuous and ever expanding reality since its birth in Ancient Athens. It has receded in certain places and times and re-emerged in others. In Western Europe in the Middle Ages, for instance, as new political forms and social relationships developed, “citizenship was temporarily almost lost as a political concept” (Heater 1990, p. 20), even though reflections on political organization and membership certainly did not disappear. Citizenship appears to have been a reality primarily when and where states have existed, may they be city states, nation-states, or other realizations of the state. This has led a number of social scientists to define citizenship as a relationship between social agents and a state (Bourdieu 2014; Tilly 1996, 1997). Accordingly, global citizenship equally benefits from being conceived as a relationship, a link between social agents and a state, although the latter may not necessarily be a nation-state (e.g., a hypothetical “global state”). GCE research, if it is committed to being rigorous in its use of the term “global citizenship,” can draw important implications from such a definition for the analysis of GCE in schools and other educational spaces.

What are the essential features of this specific political relationship that characterizes “citizenship”? What kind of social agent-state relationship is distinctive of citizenship? The four components generally mentioned are membership, rights, duties, and specific forms of political participation (O’Bryne 2003; Wiesner et al. 2018). Membership refers to the criteria determining who belongs and who does not belong to the community; rights to what the state owes its citizens; duties to what citizens owe the state; and political participation to the modalities of citizens’ legitimate political expression. Researchers are, therefore, best equipped to analyze GCE based on a rigorous concept of global citizenship when they consider the following four key research questions:

  1. 1.

    How does education for global citizenship approach the question and modalities of membership to a global political community of citizens?

  2. 2.

    How is the topic of the rights of global citizens addressed in global citizenship education?

  3. 3.

    How is the theme of global citizens’ duties considered in learning for global citizenship?

  4. 4.

    What place and role are given to the forms of legitimate global political expression in the learning experiences aimed at developing global citizenship?

According to the definition of global citizenship presented above, these four research questions could play a key role in structuring the field of GCE research (as opposed to being addressed more or less tangentially depending on the definition of global citizenship at hand). In addition to bringing order and clarity to the field, two other benefits could emerge from this clarification of “global citizenship.” The first would be the possibility to articulate more clearly the relationships that exist or could exist between GCE and other forms of education, such as education for multiculturalism, multilingual education, education for “global mindedness,” education for “global competency,” and “sustainability education.” In what ways (if any) are these other forms of education contributing to GCE? To what extent does GCE contribute to these other educational agendas?

The second would be the opportunity to elaborate a rich discussion between GCE and research into other forms of citizenship education. For instance, what are the common points and differences between GCE and the citizenship education experiences of expatriates, refugees, or asylum seekers living outside of their country of citizenship? What tensions and common points can be found in nation-state citizenship education and GCE? What is the distribution of forms or types of citizenship education across various educational spaces (e.g., nation-state schools, “international” schools, community education, vocational education, university education, etc.)? What can GCE research learn from supranational citizenship education research, such as research on European citizenship education? Can GCE gain insight from the experiences of students who underwent citizenship education in schools in more than one country? As this list of question suggests, elaborating GCE research on a rigorous definition of global citizenship has the potential to vastly enrich the agenda of the field in at least three ways: by offering new lenses for exploring GCE, by proposing original and often unexplored research areas, and by fostering the ability to establish a meaningful dialogue between GCE research and adjacent fields.

To illustrate how this conception of GCE can be applied to specific approaches to GCE, the following section reviews three prominent international and nongovernmental policies, programs, and curricula dedicated to GCE: the PISA Global Competence Framework by the OECD, the UNESCO GCE agenda, and Oxfam’s Education for Global Citizenship.

Examples of International and Nongovernmental GCE Models and Frameworks

Influential international and nongovernmental organizations have invested the space of GCE. A number of them have developed their own models and frameworks for GCE, often expecting or enjoining state school systems to implement some or all of their agendas. In this section, the potential benefits of adopting the sociopolitical approach to global citizenship outlined above are illustrated with the case of three important programs: the UNESCO, OECD, and Oxfam GCE frameworks.

UNESCO

In 2014, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) released a blueprint for GCE entitled Preparing learners for the challenges of the 21st century. In this document, UNESCO (2014, p. 10) argues that, beyond disagreements, GCE ought to be about “how to promote universality (e.g., common and collective identity, interest, participation, duty), while respecting singularity (e.g., individual rights, self-improvement).” At first sight, this model seems to pay attention to the questions of rights, duties, and participation, i.e., three of the key four components of citizenship. Only the question of political membership is not explicitly raised. However, looking at the UNESCO blueprint more closely, these different building blocks of citizenship are seldom articulated at the global level, so much so that it is hard to see what makes UNESCO’s definition of citizenship distinctively “global” and how this differs from what the authors consider simply as good and virtuous “globally aware” citizenship.

Part of the challenge is that the document generally does not engage with the political and legal aspects that would underpin global rights, duties, membership, and participation. In fact, UNESCO (2014, p. 14) argues that “there is a common understanding that global citizenship does not imply a legal status” and, instead, “refers more to a sense of belonging to a broader community and common humanity, promoting a ‘global gaze’ that links the local to the global and the national to the international.” This view is at odds with the fact that modern citizenship is precisely a legal-political category (Bellamy 2008). While the preferred politico-legal structures to underpin the status of “global citizen” are national to some and supranational to others, GCE cannot ignore the legal and political facets of citizenship. UNESCO (2015b, p. 66) claims that the role and place of the state in the constitution of citizenship is “being increasingly challenged by the emergence of transnational forms of citizenship,” but this largely ignores the relational nature of citizenship. While citizenship can certainly exist beyond the nation-state, the realization of global citizenship is likely to depend on the emergence of a global state, understood as a global monopoly holder of “the legitimate use of physical and symbolic violence over a definite territory and over the totality of the corresponding population” (Bourdieu et al. 1994, p. 3), a status that no supranational or international institution can assume to date.

The UNESCO (2014) version of GCE is driven by the goal to foster competencies in learners (i.e., an attitude of tolerance, an understanding of alterity, knowledge of “global issues,” and cognitive and social skills) as opposed to reflection on the political, legal, and social conditions of possibility of the conduct and attitudes that UNESCO expects to see in global citizens. The stated objective of their model of GCE is in line with their expressed desire to progress toward “a global common good” (UNESCO 2015b), but the educational means imagined to accomplish this outcome are not well aligned with the objectives.

At a more practical level, the UNESCO GCE framework is operationalized into specific topics and learning objectives in a related document listing different domains of learning (cognitive, socio-emotional, and behavioral), key learning outcomes, key learner attributes, topics, and learning objectives by age or level of education (UNESCO 2015a). This operationalized framework comes closer to critical elements of GCE listed above. In terms of knowledge, the UNESCO brand of GCE wishes to enable learners to “develop an understanding of global governance structures, rights and responsibilities” (UNESCO 2015a, p. 16), albeit as they currently exist as opposed to how they would have to be to make global citizenship a reality. Interestingly, the nine key topics include “local, national and global systems and structures,” “different communities people belong to and how these are connected,” and “actions that can be taken individually and collectively,” which have the potential to build clear bridges toward some of the four constitutive elements of citizens. Yet, while critical reflection on the reality of nation-state citizenship around the world and the way power and political structures and systems shape the supranational relationships between nation-state citizens is addressed, consideration of the possibilities and modalities of membership to a global political community of citizens remains feeble. In other words, while this curriculum has the potential to raise learners’ awareness of the gap existing between the current international order and the realization of global citizenship, the opportunities given to students to imagine the change required to enable global citizenship are limited.

OECD

In line with its interest in shaping education policy and practice across the world and as part of its Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD 2018b) recently released its Preparing our Youth for an Inclusive and Sustainable World GCE agenda. This document proposes a “PISA Global Competence Framework” and is associated with a “PISA Global Competence Questionnaire” (OECD 2018a) constructed to evaluate the extent to which GCE is implemented and successful in countries participating in PISA.

Inspired by the Delors report (1996, p. 15), in which it was claimed that “people need gradually to become world citizens without losing their roots and while continuing to play an active part in the life of their nation and their local community,” the PISA Global Competence Framework wishes to “prepare young people to become global citizens” without relinquishing their existing nation-state citizen status (OECD 2018b, p. 6). Here, the global community of citizens is imagined as coexisting with the global order of nation-states. This raises the important question of the hypothetical relationships that could emerge between the institution of nation-state citizenship and the institution of global citizenship.

As with UNESCO, the OECD considers “global competence” as the cornerstone of global citizenship. The four dimensions of global competence include (1) learners’ capacity to examine issues of “local, global and cultural significance,” (2) their ability to consider “different perspectives and world views,” (3) their ability to interact with different people, and (4) their capacity to take action toward “sustainable development and collective well-being” (OECD 2018b, pp. 7–8). Here, too, it is the individual learner equipped with specific knowledge, skills, attitudes, and dispositions who makes global citizenship a reality, irrespective of the political and social structures that are required for citizenship to manifest itself. Unlike the UNESCO brand of global citizenship, however, the OECD pays little attention to the existing polities of the world. The fact that the current global order is an international order is largely absent from the OECD model of GCE, and so are reflections on global citizen membership, rights, and duties. At the same time, reflections on political participation for global citizens are also largely unexplored. From the point of view of a rigorous conception of global citizenship, the OECD framework is thus significantly frailer than the UNESCO model.

The PISA 2018 Global Competence Questionnaire confirms the shortfalls of the corresponding framework. In the questionnaire, the “global” is defined in cultural, linguistic, ethical, and economic terms but almost never politically. The nation-state polities that organize the world – let alone the idea of a global state – are mostly ignored in what the OECD deems essential for global competence and, ultimately, global citizenship. The focus on “global issues” is prominent, but the reason for making these global issues a core feature of GCE remains unclear once the politico-legal nature of global citizenship is considered.

Oxfam

The Oxfam charity has proposed its own model of GCE in Education for Global Citizenship (Oxfam 2015). Designed as a guide for schools, it lists a set of attributes that define the global citizen. As with the previously reviewed frameworks, Oxfam’s identifies a range of skills, attitudes, dispositions, knowledge, and values that make up a global citizen, and as with the OECD framework, Oxfam seldom focusses on existing nation-states and nation-state citizenship.

To implement its conception of GCE, Oxfam (2015, p. 8) proposes a curriculum structured around 21 key elements (7 in each of the categories of “knowledge and understanding,” “skills” and “values and attitudes”) including “globalisation and interdependence,” “human rights” and “power and governance.” The hypothetical rights of global citizens are conceived in terms of human rights (as opposed to state-bound rights), while global citizens’ imagined duties are articulated in moral or ethical (as opposed to legal and political) terms. Here, the rights of global citizens are conceived as being immanent in their humanity (as opposed to being determined by global citizens’ membership to a specific global political community), while citizens’ duties are also divorced from a specific global political framework. As with the OECD framework, the specificity of what political participation could mean in the context of global citizenship (as opposed to nation-state citizens acting “globally” or responding to “global issues”) remains unclear, but the dimension of global citizenship most conspicuously absent from Oxfam’s model is the question of global polity membership based on political equality and structured around a citizen-state relationship.

Oxfam comes closer to the UNESCO model than the OECD in the extent of attention paid to the political sphere. For instance, its curriculum expects students to “learn about power and governance, and analyze the causes and consequences of unequal power relations” (Oxfam 2015, p. 12). Yet, this learning outcome is not contextualized as part of the existing international order, and the political conditions of possibility for realizing global citizenship are under-examined. In other words, consideration of the forms of political expression of power relations and the political means by which legitimate political action is and can be exerted at the supranational scale is too scarce. Even though the document describes a detailed curriculum with specific indicators for each learning outcome across year levels, nation-states are only mentioned twice, when stating that learners should understand “state obligations on human rights” and “how unequal power relations between nation states affect global issues” (Oxfam 2015, p. 17). The need for reflection on nation-states’ possible relationships with a global polity that would make global citizenship a reality is never explicitly mentioned.

General Remarks

As the section above shows, a clear definition of global citizenship based on the four key components listed above enables researchers to identify the strengths and shortfalls of various models of GCE. Importantly, these four essential questions for GCE are also applicable to educational practice in schools, higher education, and other educational spaces. In the same way, these questions can assist researchers in revealing the gaps or divergences that may exist between prescriptive frameworks or models of GCE (as embodied in curricula or examination structures) and GCE as it is effectively practiced in the spaces governed by such frameworks and models.

What trends are discernible across the three international or nongovernmental GCE framework briefly analyzed above? While the focus on curriculum and the organization of learning is central for Oxfam and UNESCO, and while the OECD instead places a clear emphasis on assessment and evaluation through its PISA evaluation regime, common points exist across all three frameworks. First, all three have the explicit desire to promote the advent of global citizenship through education, and all three expect nation-state school systems to be the main vehicles through which GCE is to occur. Second, the major political transformations required to make global citizenship a reality enshrined in political and legal institutions are largely absent from these frameworks, as is the reflection on the different global political structures required to enable global citizenship. These frameworks thus provide limited structured opportunities for learners to reflect on the gap that exists between the current global state of affairs and the global state of affairs required for global citizenship to exist de jure. Third, and relatedly, it is clear that out of the four key elements of citizenship described earlier, consideration of the contours and conditions of membership to (and exclusion from) a global polity of citizens is the most common missing link.

Lack of attention to the conditions for becoming a member of the global community of citizens is a major limitation of the three models examined in this chapter. Again, this appears to be based on a rather naïve conception of global citizenship as a universally inclusive political group. Social scientists examining the empirical reality of citizenship, however, have been at pain to emphasize that citizenship is necessarily an exclusionary political category. Bellamy (2008, p. 12), for instance, insists that citizenship involves “membership of an exclusive club,” and Balibar (2004, p. 76) concurs that “every institution of citizenship involves the institutionalization of exclusions, following different historical modalities.” If history is to be trusted, a global polity of citizens would not erase the exclusionary nature of citizenship, for belonging is, in itself, a principle of discrimination between those who do and those who do not belong (Lordon 2015, p. 276). Yet, consideration of the modalities of global exclusion that would be necessarily associated with global citizenship (i.e., who is refused the status of global citizen, and what relationships does that imply between those who are global citizens and those who are not?) is nowhere to be found in the models reviewed here. This suggests that such frameworks for global citizenship rely on an idealized view of citizenship rather than one grounded in historical reality.

Among the four defining features of citizenship, Oxfam, UNESCO, and the OECD focus primarily on citizen rights and duties. While the question of political participation is frequently discussed, there remains a clear deficit of attention to the specific political spaces or arenas in which global citizenship is to be performed. Here, Bourdieu’s (2014, pp. 355, 357) reflections on the emergence of parliaments in constituting nation-state citizenship are relevant:

Alongside the appearance of a juridical space as a set of citizens bound by rights and duties towards the state and towards one another, you have to take into account the appearance of parliament as site of an organized consensus, or rather, the site of a regulated dissension. […] The state as juridical space and parliament, are in a sense the foundation of citizenship. To have the citizen in the modern sense of the term, you need to have these two things that are in no way automatic.

What are the implications of this argument for the question of the political participation of global citizens? Would a global parliament be a requirement for the emergence of global citizenship? Whether the answer is yes or no, these are important areas to consider in frameworks and practices of global citizenship education.

Finally, while all three frameworks consider that global citizenship can and should coexist with nation-state citizenship, critical scrutiny of this assumption and its implications are largely absent. How is national citizenship to coexist with global citizenship? History suggests that non-nation-state citizenship receded and eventually disappeared as nation-state citizenship became a dominant political organizer. Indeed, the increasingly dominant role of nation-states in the global (i.e., international) order since the French Revolution has been matched by a parallel decline of other forms of citizenship (i.e., guilds, cities, and local communities) (Prak 2018). If this is to be trusted, reflecting on what the advent of global citizenship would or could imply for nation-state citizenship is primordial in GCE.

The Scope of Global Citizenship

Since insight from historical and sociological analysis is important for understanding the empirical reality of citizenship, it is also a precondition for imagining global citizenship. This is important not only in identifying the defining features of citizenship and the rise and decline of different forms of citizenship or for examining the relationships that develop as various forms of citizenship coexist. It is also essential for perceiving the changing scope of citizenship, in particular as regards rights and duties, and feeding off this reflection to ponder the idea of global citizenship.

The nature and extent of the rights and duties associated with present-day citizenship in different nation-states is a relevant starting point for educating toward global citizenship. It can facilitate reflection on the duties and rights that could link the global citizens with their (global) political community. These issues probe at the core of the meaning of global citizenship. In current societies, the most common duties of citizens include conscription, participation, and taxation (Isin and Nyers 2014), while since the publication of Marshall’s (1950) typology, citizen rights have typically been characterized as political rights, civil rights, and social rights. The social rights, civil rights, and political rights of global citizens and their enforcement by a legitimate political authority are central themes of reflection for GCE. Similarly, the global duties of taxation, participation, and conscription for global citizens, and the question of who would ensure these demands made on global citizens are met, are just as essential.

Historical variation in the scope of rights and duties of citizenship can be an important source of knowledge and imagination for GCE. At the same time, the social sciences can also contribute to explaining how the perimeter of rights and duties associated with citizenship changes. Instead of the moral and ethical conception of duties (and rights) often seen in models of GCE, they suggest that it is political struggle that primarily determines the contours of citizens’ rights and duties. Tilly (1997, p. 600), for instance, explains that “military service, eligibility for public office, voting rights, payment of taxes, public education, access to public services, and protection of rent-producing advantages – all frequent items in contracts of citizenship – have engaged serious struggle for centuries.” Isin and Nyers (2014, p. 2) add that “the combination of rights and duties is always an outcome of social struggles that finds expression in political and legal institutions,” emphasizing the connection between (global) citizenship and (global) institutions. There is little doubt that the topic of political struggle – including the very struggle for establishing a global polity of citizens – would benefit from being at the forefront of educational models and practices for global citizenship. This would enable learners to reflect not only on the gap existing between nation-state citizenship and global citizenship but also on the path that could lead from one to the other.

Conclusion

This chapter has explored a possible way out of the terminological confusions and ambiguities in GCE research. Its starting point has been the fact that, although they do not mean the same thing, concepts such as “global education, cosmopolitanism, cosmopolitan and world citizenship, transnational citizenship, global mindedness, and others are intertwined within the discourse of GCE and often used as synonyms” (Goren and Yemini 2017, p. 181). This chapter has argued that precision in the use of key concepts (e.g., global citizenship, cosmopolitanism, global mindedness, etc.) is crucial to enable researchers to engage in a rigorous conversation about GCE and related forms of education and learn from one another’s findings. If the idea of “global citizenship” is different from “globally minded” citizenship, as Bowden (2003) points out, how can the field of GCE research be built on solid and specific foundations? From a theoretical perspective, paying greater attention to “global citizenship” as a concept provides one way of doing so.

The definition of global citizenship presented in this chapter outlines four key ingredients of citizenship and argues that, although it may be unlike its nation-state counterparts, a global state is a required condition for global citizenship. Accordingly, I argue that a good GCE model should help learners consider four key questions:

  1. 1.

    What would be the modalities of inclusion into and exclusion from a global polity of citizens?

  2. 2.

    What rights are to be associated with global citizenship?

  3. 3.

    What responsibilities are to come with global citizenship?

  4. 4.

    What forms and spaces of legitimate political participation could structure global citizenship?

This set of questions has been put to the test by taking the example of three prominent international and nongovernmental models of GCE, suggesting that participation and, above all, rights and duties are more often considered than the question of membership. The validity of this provisional finding would certainly gain from being challenged, qualified and/or confirmed based on empirical research on other conceptions and practices of GCE. This could assist researchers interested in GCE in forming a comprehensive yet context-sensitive view of the strengths and limitations of GCE as currently conceived and practiced across contexts. At the same time, the limitations of the conception of global rights and global duties found in these three frameworks have been revealed, highlighting their lack of political foundations and the overall inattention to the question of a “global state” associated with global citizenship. This also suggests that important global citizenship themes may be largely unexplored in current GCE.

This chapter has understandably left many important questions for GCE research unexplored, including those aiming to explain the kinds of GCE existing in frameworks, curricula, and classrooms. In a relevant inquiry, Peterson et al. (2018, p. 10) revealed the existence, in countries like Australia and New Zealand, of a gap between policy rhetoric and curricula in GCE partly caused by the desire of “preparing students for economic life.” This disconnect is also manifested in the selective interest displayed toward the various components of global citizenship, and it is reasonable to hypothesize that this may be an element of explanation for the kinds of models of global citizenship embodied in the three frameworks analyzed in this chapter. In particular, it is plausible that the specific demands of preparation for economic life placed on schooling and educational institutions more broadly contribute to explaining the relative erasure of core GCE themes, starting with the role of political struggle in the making of (global) citizenship and the conceptualization of citizenship as relationship between a group of social agents and a state. A major implication of this state of affairs is that it is likely to provide few opportunities for learners to imagine the realization of global citizenship and the path that could lead to such a transformation of the global order.