world citizen essay

World Citizen Essay Contest

The goal of the World Citizen Essay Contest is to promote discussion among students, teachers, families, and community members about the ways that individuals can effect positive change in the global community.

Congratulations to the Winners of the 2020 World Citizen Essay Contest!

Essay Prompt : Gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls is targeted by United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) #5. If you were hired by the United Nations to lead a project addressing gender equality by empowering women and girls, what would you do? Where would you work and why? Finally, what specific steps would you take to achieve your goal?

The 2020 Winning Essays:

The World Citizen Essay Contest is Sponsored by the Expedia Group

The Center for Global Studies is a sponsor and partner of World Affairs Council Global Classroom Programs.

Previous Essay Contests 

2019 world citizen essay contest.

Essay Prompt : According to the World Health Organization , climate change is expected to cause approximately 250,000 additional deaths per year between 2030 and 2050 due to increased malnutrition, malaria, diarrhea, and heat stress. Climate change can also have a negative impact on global health due to lack of clean air, safe drinking water, adequate food, and secure housing. If you had the opportunity to address the impact of climate change on global health, WHERE would you go, WHAT issue or concern would you try to solve and WHY , and WHAT steps would you take to bring about a sustainable solution?

The winning essays are below:

2018 World Citizen Essay Contest

The 2018 World Citizen Essay Contest challenged students to engage with the U.N. Sustainable Development goals, and find ways to address one of the goals in a sustainable manner.

Essay Prompt : You have recently received a grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to “ take action ” toward achieving  ONE  of the 17 Global Goals (SDGs). In 1,000 words or less, explain  why  you chose this goal,  what  region (local or global context) of the world you would work to address it (and  why ), and what  steps  or  actions  you would take to make it sustainable.

On May 10th winning students were celebrated at a public awards ceremony with keynote speaker Dennis Macray, COO of Theo Chocolate, and moderator Carol Welch, Director of Strategy, Planning and Management at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The winning essays are below:

2017 World Citizen Essay Contest

The United Nations has declared 2017 as the International Year of Sustainable Tourism for Development . Now is your chance to engage as a Sustainable Traveler…

You have won an all-expenses-paid trip to the destination of your choice. In 1,000 words or less, describe where you will go (and why), and explain what steps you will take to make sure that your travels are truly sustainable.

Congratulations to our 18th Annual World Citizen Essay Contest winners!

Students were celebrated at a public awards ceremony on May 2nd with keynote speaker Katherine Cheng, head of the global corporate citizenship and community relations for Expedia, Inc.

Read the winning World Citizen Essays:

Rebekah Huber,  Paving the Road for Sustainable Tourism in Lombok

Katie Kotler,  Exploring Guatemala: An Example of Sustainable Travel in Central America

Cameron Trichel,  A Vacation for the Earth

2016 World Citizen Essay Contest

In the 2015-2016 school year, the World Affairs Council partnered with Water1st International; our prompt asked students to think critically and be engaged as global citizens by addressing one of the most critical issues of our time: The worldwide water crisis.

Congratulations to our 17th Annual World Citizen Essay Contest winners!

The student winners were celebrated at a public awards ceremony on May 5th, with keynote speaker and former CEO of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Jeff Raikes, and featuring the founder of Water1st International Marla Smith-Nilson.

CLICK HERE  to watch Jeff Raikes’ keynote at our Essay Contest Awards Ceremony

CLICK HERE to watch the Q & A with Jeff Raikes and Marla Smith-Nilson

Read the winning essays:

Matthew Tran,  Modernizing and Providing the Toilet: Achieving Global Health One Flush at a Time

Maya Sharma,  Strategies and Solutions to Solve the Global Water Crisis

Sydney Whipple,  Death by Water in Bangladesh

2015 World Citizen Essay Contest The student winners were celebrated at a public awards ceremony on May 26th with keynote speaker Margaret Larson of KING 5 News. Check out video from the event   here . Congratulations to our Winners

Washington State students in grades 3 through 12 were invited to think like a foreign news correspondent with the following essay prompt:

In our increasingly interconnected world, it is important to be informed of issues and events around the globe in order to better understand and engage with the people around us. If you were a foreign news correspondent, where would you like to be assigned? What story would you cover and how would you gather the necessary information? Why do you think this is an important story to tell? Read the winning essays:

Zara Rupp,  The Water Crisis

Ruby Whorton,  Disappearance to ISIS

Katie Wade,  The Effects of Boycotting Chocolate: Good or Bad for Child Laborers in Cote d’Ivoire?

2014 World Citizen Essay Contest

On June 5th, Rick Steves joined the World Affairs Council and essay contest winners to speak on the value of thoughtful travel and present students with their certificates and prizes.

Congratulations to our winners:

Read about the way these students are thinking about the world beyond our borders! Find the winning essays below:

Daaniya Iyaz,  Peering Across the Partition

Anirudh Prakash,  Piracy: A Conspiracy to Shun Ancient Growth

Aryeh Tenbroek,  Freedom for Tibet

Washington State students in grades 3-12 were asked to respond to the following prompt:

If you traveled with the same goal, where would you go and why?  What would you hope to learn? How  will traveling to this place and meeting its residents broaden your perspectives – why is this important?  Through his book, TV and radio shows, guided tours, and public speaking engagements, Rick Steves h a s  introduced Americans to many parts of the world. His recent book, Travel as a Political Act, suggests th a t travel may be important for reasons that go beyond a dream vacation. Rick Steves has traveled to Iran, Israel,  and Palestine among other places, with the goal of making connections with and understanding the concern s  of the people who live there.

We received nearly 450 essays this year! Thank you to everyone who participated. And thank you to our volunteer judges!

2013 World Citizen Essay Contest

We celebrated our winners at a special event at the Seattle Asian Art Museum with Nancy Pearl on May 30th. At the ceremony, the winners received their cash prizes, a certificate, and a copy of Nancy Pearl’s book, Book Crush.

Congratulations to our 2013 World Citizen Essay Contest Winners:

2012 Games Without Borders Youth Challenge 

Congratulations to the winners of our First Annual  Games Without Borders Youth Challenge !

In lieu of the World Citizen Essay Contest, Global Classroom encouraged students to apply their knowledge of and passion for gaming while learning about world issues. Since fun, educational games about global topics are hard to find, GC gave Puget Sound students a new challenge: create a game that young people would love to play and that would raise awareness about a global topic or issue.

The winners were:

Middle School Division:

Children of Change  by  McKenna Sevruk  (7th grade, Tahoma Middle School)Middle School Division:

Micro Loan Adventures  by  Luke Johnson, Christo Pamboukas, Joey Peterson,  and  Reed Stever (7th grade, Tahoma Middle School)

High School Division: 

Animal rescue: The Video Game  by  Kaylene Stocking  and  Sarah Yerrace  (9th grade, Timbercrest Junior High)

Let’s Trade!   by  Alina Amkhavong, Hannah Madani, Cristina Martinez , and  Sahar Mohammad (10th grade, Kent-Meridian High School)

  Syria at Risk   by  Sopheaktra Danh  and  Melody Northcutt  (12th grade, Aviation High School)

Congratulations to our 2011 World Citizen Essay Contest Winners!

On the occasion of the  60th anniversary of the World Affairs Council  and the upcoming 50th anniversary of the Seattle World’s Fair, the World Affairs Council embarked on a two-year partnership with the Seattle Center Foundation.

The question for the 2011 World Citizen Essay Contest was: “Looking back over the last sixty years, please identify a Puget Sound-based innovation that has left its mark around the world. Explain why and how this innovation had an impact beyond the United States. (This impact can be related to the arts, sports, music, popular culture, technology, civic action, global health, education, manufacturing, etc.)”

Thank you to all of the students who submitted essays and to the outstanding judges who volunteered their time to read them all!

Our special congratulations to the following students who were the top finalists in each category. Click on the links below to read excerpts from our winning essays.

On June 23rd, 2011 World Citizen Essay Contest winners were interviewed about global innovation on Public Exposure SCAN-TV. Watch the 30 minute interview  here .

12th Annual World Citizen Essay Contest (2010)

The question for the 2010 World Citizen Essay Contest was:

“Despite the ever increasing importance of understanding the histories, governments, and cultures, of people from all over the world, many news organizations in recent years have had to cut their foreign correspondent staff. If you were a journalist on an international assignment, where would you like to go, what issue would you cover, and why? “

Thank you to the 390 students who submitted essays and the 78 judges who spent time reading them all. Essay Contest winners were being honored at a Global Classroom Celebration on May 17th, 2010.

Our special congratulations to the following students, top finalists in each category.

1 1th Annual World Citizen Essay Contest (2009)

The question for the 2009 World Citizen Essay Contest was:

“Imagine that you are Hillary Rodham Clinton, the new U.S. Secretary of State and head of the U.S. Department of State, which has a mission to create a more secure, democratic, and prosperous world for the benefit of the American people and the international community. Describe one international issue you think is important today. Why do you think this issue is important to both the U.S. and the world? Considering the mission of the U.S. Department of State, what would you do about this issue?”

Thank you to the 215 students who submitted essays and the 78 judges who spent time reading them all. Essay Contest winners were being honored at a Global Classroom Celebration on May 27th, 2009.

10th Annual World Citizen Essay Contest (2008)

The question from the 2008 World Citizen Essay Contest was:

“In April, His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama (1989 Nobel Prize winner for Peace) will journey to Seattle to discuss and celebrate compassion in action with Seattle-area youth, educators, and policy makers. Definition: ‘Compassionate acts are generally considered those which take into account the suffering of others and attempt to alleviate that suffering as if it were one’s own.’ (From Wikipedia – as cited by the organization Seeds of Compassion) A) Considering the definition above, identify an individual who has been moved by compassion to take action on a problem. Describe his or her work. How did he or she demonstrate compassion? B) Now, imagine yourself as an adult. Following in this individual’s footsteps, what international issue would you want to tackle? Why is this issue important? What steps might you take to resolve the issue? Why does this issue awaken compassion in you?”

Thank you to the over 200 students who submitted essays and the 33 judges who spent time reading them all. Essay contest winners were honored at a special reception and award ceremony on June 17, 2008.

The World Affairs Council's Email List

Event announcements, hosting opportunities, and teacher resources

• Tools and Resources
• Customer Services
• Conflict Studies
• Development
• Environment
• Foreign Policy
• Human Rights
• International Law
• Organization
• International Relations Theory
• Political Communication
• Political Economy
• Political Geography
• Political Sociology
• Politics and Sexuality and Gender
• Qualitative Political Methodology
• Quantitative Political Methodology
• Security Studies
• Share This Facebook LinkedIn Twitter

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.

• Abdi, A. A. , Shultz, L. , Pillay, T. (Eds.). (2015). Decolonising global citizenship education . Rotterdam, Boston, Taipei: Sense Publishers.
• Alcock, S. E. , D’altroy, T. , Morrison, D. , Sinopoli, C.M. (Eds.). (2001). Empires; perspectives from archaeology and history . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Anderson, B. (1983). Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism . London, UK: Verso.
• Andreotti, V. , & Souza, L. M. (Eds.), (2011). Post-colonial perspectives on Global Citizenship Education . New York, NY, Routledge.
• Andreotti, V. (2014). Soft versus critical GC education. In S. McCloskey (Ed.), Development education in policy and practice (pp. 21–31). London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.
• Apffel-Marglin, F. , & Marglin, S. A. (Eds.), (2004). Decolonising Knowledge: From Development to Dialogue. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press.
• Appiah, K. A. (2007). Global Citizenship. Fordham Law Review , 75 (5), 2375–2392.
• Archibugi, D. (1993). The reform of the UN and cosmopolitan democracy: A critical review. Journal of Peace Research , 30 (3), 301–315.
• Armstrong, C. (2006). Global civil society and the question of GC. Voluntas , 17 , 349–357.
• Arneil, B. (2007). Global Citizenship and empire. Citizenship Studies , 11 (3), 301–328.
• Ball, S. J. (2012). Global Education Inc.: New policy networks and the neo-liberal imaginary . New York, NY: Routledge.
• Barkawi, T. , & Laffey, M. (2002). "Retrieving the Imperial: Empire and International Relations." Millenium - Journal of International Studies , 31 (1), 109–127.
• Barkawi, T. (2010). Empire and order in international relations and security studies. Oxford Research Encyclopedia of International Studies . USA: International Studies Association and Oxford University Press.
• Bell, D. (2014). To act otherwise: Agonistic republicanism and GC. In J. Tully (Ed.), On global citizenship: James Tully in dialogue (pp. 181–205). London, UK: Bloomsbury.
• Biccum, A. (2018a). What is an empire? Assessing the postcolonial contribution to the American empire debate. Interventions: Journal of Post-Colonial Studies , 20 (5), 697–716.
• Biccum, A. (2018b). Editorial: Global Citizenship and the politics of conceptualisation. International Journal of Development Education and Global Learning , 10 (2), 119–124.
• Biccum, A. (2020). Global Citizenship and neo-republicanism? Problematising the “neoliberal subjectivities” critique. In P. Eglin , T. Ruiz-Chapman , & D. D. Chapman (Eds.), Going global? Critical studies on GC (pp. 129–152). London, NY: Routledge.
• Bersaglio, B. , Ennis, C. , Kepe, T. (2015). Youth under construction: The United Nations’ representations of youth in the global conversation on the post-2015 development agenda. Canadian Journal of Development Studies , 36 (1), 57–71.
• Blanken, L. J. (2012). Rational empires: Institutional incentives and imperial expansion . Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press.
• Bosio, E. , & Torres, C. A. (2019). Global citizenship education: An educational theory of the common good? A conversation with Carlos Alberto Torres. Policy Futures in Education , 17 (6), 745–760.
• El Bouhali, C. (2015). The OECD neoliberal governance: Policies of international testing and their impact on global education systems. In A. A. Abdi , L. Shultz , & T. Pillay (Eds.), Decolonising global citizenship education (pp. 119–130). Rotterdam, The Netherlands: Sense.
• Bowden, B. (2003). The perils of Global Citizenship. Citizenship Studies , 7 (3), 349–362.
• Buckner, E. , & Russell, S. G. (2013). Portraying the global: Cross-national trends in textbooks’ portrayal of globalization and Global Citizenship. International Studies Quarterly , 57 , 738–750.
• Burbank, J. , & Cooper, F. (2010). Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference . Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.
• Caballero, P. (2019). The SDGs: Changing how development is understood. Global Policy , 10 (1), 138–140.
• Cabrera, L. (2008). Global citizenship as the completion of cosmopolitanism. Journal of International Political Theory , 4 (1), 84–104.
• Carter, A. (2001). The political theory of Global Citizenship . London, UK: Verso.
• Chapman, D. D. , Ruiz-Chapman, T. , & Eglin, P. (2018). Global Citizenship267 as neoliberal propaganda: A political economic and postcolonial critique. Alternate Routes , 29 , 142–166.
• Clark, I. (1999). Globalisation and international relations theory . Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
• Colas, A. (2010). The international political sociology of Empire. Oxford Research Encyclopedia International Studies . USA: International Studies Association and Oxford University Press.
• Comas, J. , Shrivastava, P. , & Martin, E. (2015). Terrorism as formal organization, network, and social movement. Journal of Management Inquiry , 24 (1), 47–60.
• Costa, V. (2009). Neo-republicanism, freedom as non-domination and civizen virtue. Politics, Philosophy and Economics , 8 (4), 401–419.
• Dagger, R. (2006). Neo-republicanism and the civic economy. Politics, Philosophy and Economics , 5 (2), 151–173.
• Dale, R. (2000). "Globalisation and Education: demonstrating a 'common world educational culture' or locating a 'globally structured educational agenda'?" Educational Theory , 50 (4), 427–448.
• Darwin, J. (2007). * After Tamerlane: The global history of empire since 1405 . London: Allen Lane.
• De Filippi, P. (2018). Citizenship in the era of blockchain-based virtual nations. In R. Baubock (Ed.), Debating transformations of national citizenship (pp. 267–278). Cham, Switzerland: Springer.
• Desforges, L. (2004). The formation of Global Citizenship: International non-governmental organisations in Britain. Political Geography , 23 (5), 549–569.
• Dillon Savage, J. (2010). The stability and breakdown of empire: European informal empire in China, the Ottoman Empire and Egypt. European Journal of International Relations , 17 (2), 161–185.
• Dower, N. (2000). The idea of Global Citizenship—A sympathetic assessment. Global Society , 14 (4), 553–567.
• Dower, N. , & Williams, J. (Eds.). (2002). Global Citizenship: A critical introduction . New York, NY: Routledge.
• Doyle, M. (2007). The liberal peace, democratic accountability and the challenge of globalisation. In D. Held & A. McGrew (Eds.), Globalisation theory: Approaches and controversies (pp. 190–206). Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
• Falk, R. (1993). The making of Global Citizenship. In J. Brecher , J. B. Childs , & J. Cutler (Eds.), Global visions: Beyond the new world order (pp. 39–50). Boston, MA: South End Press.
• Falk, R. (2002). An emergent matrix of citizenship: Complex, uneven, fluid. In N. Dower & J. Williams (Eds.), Global Citizenship: A critical reader (pp. 15–29). London, UK: Routledge.
• Fairclough, N. (1989). Language and power . London: Longman.
• Fanghanel, J. , & Cousin, G. (2012). “Worldly” pedagogy: A way of conceptualising teaching towards Global Citizenship. Teaching in Higher Education , 17 (1), 39–50.
• Finnemore, M. (1993). International organisations as teachers of norms: The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation and science policy. International Organisation , 47 (4), 565–597.
• Foucault, M. (1982). The subject and power. Critical Inquiry , 8 (4), 777–795.
• Foucault, M. (2000). The archaeology of knowledge and the discourse on language . New York, NY: Vintage Books.
• The original edition was published in French by Gallimard in 1969. The first English translation appeared in 1972.
• Ferguson, Y. H. , & Mansbach, R. W. (2010). The sociology of the state: The state as conceptual variable. In Oxford research encyclopedia of internatioanl studies . USA: International Studies Association and Oxford University Press.
• Gaventa, J. , & Tandon, R. (Eds.). (2010). Globalising citizens: New dynamics of inclusion and exclusion . Claiming Citizenship. London: Zed Books.
• Gaudelli, W. (2009). Heuristics of Global Citizenship discourses towards curriculum enhancement. Journal of Curriculum Theorising , 25 (1), 68–85.
• Geertz, C. (1973). The interpretation of cultures . New York: Basic Books.
• Go, J. (2011). Patterns of empire: The British and American Empires, 1688 to the present . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Go, J. (2013). Decolonising Bourdieu: Colonial and postcolonial theory in Bourdieu's early work. Sociological Theory , 31 (1), 49–74.
• Gutierrez, R. , Encarnacion, M.B. , Costa, S. (Eds.). (2010). Decolonising European sociology: Transdisciplinary approaches . Farnham, England: Ashgate.
• Haas, P. M. (1989). Do regime matter? Epistemic communities and mediterranean pollution control. International Organisation , 43 (3), 377–403.
• Haas, P. M. (1992). Epistemic communities and international policy coordination. International Organisation , 46 (1), 1–35.
• Hartmeyer, H. (2015). The state of global education in Europe: A GENE report . Dublin, Ireland: European Union.
• Heater, D. (1996). World citizenship and government: Cosmopolitan ideas in the history of Western political thought . Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan Press.
• Held, D. (1995). Democracy and the global order . Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
• Henderson, H. (2000). Transnational corporations and Global Citizenship. American Behavioural Scientist , 43 (8), 1231–1261.
• Hicks, D. (2003). Thirty years of global education: A reminder of key principles and precedents. Educational Review , 55 (3), 265–275.
• Hudson, H. (2016). Decolonising gender and peacebuilding: Feminist frontiers and border thinking in Africa. Peacebuilding , 4 (2), 194–209.
• Hunter, D. B. (1992). Toward Global Citizenship in international environmental law. Willamette Law Review , 28 (3), 547–564.
• Isin, E. F. , & Nyers, P. (2014a). Introduction: Globalising citizenship studies. In E. F. Isin & P. Nyers (Eds.), Routledge handbook of Global Citizenship studies (pp. 1–11). London, UK: Routledge.
• Isin, E. F. , & Nyers, P. (Eds.). (2014b). Routledge handbook of Global Citizenship studies . London, UK: Routledge.
• Jelin, E. (2010). Towards a global environmental citizenship. Citizenship Studies , 4 (1), 47–63.
• Karlberg, M. (2008). Discourse, identity and Global Citizenship. Peace Review: A Journal of Social Justice , 20 (3), 310–320.
• Katzarska-Miller, I. , & Reysen, S. (2018). The psychology of Global Citizenship: A review of theory and research . Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.
• Khatib, L. (2003). Communicating Islamic fundamentalism as Global Citizenship. Journal of Communication Inquiry , 27 (4), 389–409.
• Koselleck, R. (2002). The practice of conceptual history: Timing history, spacing concepts . Stanford, California: Standford University Press.
• Kymlicka, W. , & Walker, K. (Eds.). (2012). Rooted cosmopolitanism: Canada and the world . Vancouver, BC: UBC Press.
• Lee, C. (2014). Decolonising Global Citizenship. In E. F. Isin & P. Nyers (Eds.), Routledge handbook of GC studies (pp. 75–85). London, UK: Routledge.
• Linklater, A. (1998). Cosmopolitan citizenship. Citizenship Studies , 2 (1), 23–41.
• Lovett, F. , & Pettit, P. (2009). Neorepublicanism: A normative and institutional research program. The Annual Review of Political Science , 12 , 11–29.
• Lule, J. (2015). Globalisation and media: Global village of Babel . London, UK: Rowman & Littlefield.
• Marshall, T. H. (1949). In T. B. Bottomore (Ed.), Citizenship and social class . Pluto Perspectives. London, UK: Pluto Press.
• Martin, K. , Manns, H. , & Bowe, H. (2004). Communication across cultures: Mutual understanding in a global world . Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
• Meutzelfeldt, M. , & Smith, G. (2002). Civil society and global governance: The possibilities for Global Citizenship. Citizenship Studies , 6 (1), 55–75.
• Miller, D. (1999). Bounded citizenship. In K. Hutchings & R. Dannreuther (Eds.), Cosmopolitan citizenship (pp. 60–82). Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan.
• Mitchell, T. (1991). The limits of the state: Beyond statist approaches and their critics. The American Political Science Review , 85 (1), 77–96.
• Mundy, K. , Green, A. , Lingard, B. , Verger, A. (Eds.). (2016). The handbook of global education policy . West Sussex: Wiley Blackwell.
• Nash, K. (2009). Global citizens as show business: The cultural politics of make poverty history. Media, Culture and Society , 30 (2), 167–181.
• Nexon, D. H. , & Wright, T. (2007). What's at stake in the American Empire debate. American Political Science Review , 101 (2), 253–271.
• Norris, P. (2009). Cosmopolitan communications: Cultural diversity in a globalised world . Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
• Nussbaum, M. (1996). Patriotism and cosmopolitanism. In M. Nussbaum & J. Cohen (Eds.), For love of country (pp. 3–20). Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
• Nussbaum, M. (2008). Toward a globally sensitive patriotism. Daedalus , 137 (3), 78–93.
• OECD . (2018). Preparing our youth for an inclusive and sustainable world: The OECD PISA global competence framework. Paris: OECD Directorate for Education and Skills.
• Orgad, L. (2018). Cloud communities: The dawn of Global Citizenship? In R. Baubock (Ed.), Debating transformations of national citizenship (pp. 251-26). Cham, Switzerland: Springer.
• Oxley, L. , & Morris, P. (2013). GC: A typology for distinguishing its multiple conceptions. British Journal of Education Studies , 61 (3), 301–325.
• Pagden, A. (2000). Stoicism, cosmopolitanism and the legacy of European imperialism. Constellations , 7 (1), 3–22.
• Pallas, C. L. (2012). Identity, individualism and activism beyond the state: Examining the impacts of Global Citienship. Global Society , 26 (2), 169–189.
• Pais, A. , & Costa, M. (2017). An ideology critique of Global Citizenship education. Critical Studies in Education , 61 (1), 1–16.
• Pallas, C. L. (2012). Identity, individualism and activism beyond the state: Examining the impacts of global citizenship. Global Society , 26 (2), 169–189.
• Parekh, B. (2003). Cosmopolitanism and Global Citizenship. Review of International Studies , 29 , 3–17.
• Parmenter, L. (2011). Power and place in the discourse of Global Citizenship education. Globalisation, Societies and Education , 9 (3–4), 367–380.
• Pogge, T. (1992). Cosmopolitanism and sovereignty. Ethics , 103 (1), 48–75.
• Reysen, S. , & Hackett, J. (2017). Activism as a pathway to Global Citizenship. The Social Science Journal , 54 , 132–138.
• Reysen, S. , & Katzarska-Miller, I. (2013). A model of Global Citizenship: Antecedents and outcomes. International Journal of Psychology , 48 (5), 858–870.
• Richardson, D. (1998). Sexuality and citizenship. Sociology , 32 , 83–100.
• Rose, N. (1996). Refiguring the territory of government. Economy and Society , 25 , 227–256.
• Ruggie, J. (2002). Constructing the world polity: Essays on international institutionalisation . London, UK: Routledge.
• Sant, E. , Davies, I. , Pashby, K. , & Shultz, L. (2018). Global Citizenship education: A critical introduction to key concepts and debates . London, UK: Bloomsbury.
• Sartori, G. (Ed.). (1984). Social science concepts: A systematic analysis . Beverly Hills, CA: SAGE.
• Schaffer, F. C. (2016). Elucidating social science concepts: An interpretivist guide . London & New York: Routledge.
• Schattle, H. (2008). Education for Global Citizenship: Illustrations of ideological pluralism and adaptation. Journal of Political Ideologies , 13 (1), 73–94.
• Schattle, H. (2015). Global Citizenship as a national discourse: The evolution of segye shimin in South Korean public discourse. Citizenship Studies , 19 (1), 53–68.
• Schwab, K. (2008). Global corporate citizenship: Working with governments and civil society. Council on Foreign Relations , 87 (1), 107–118.
• Shallcross, T. , & Robinson, J. (Eds.). (2006). Global Citizenship and environmental justice . Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Rodopi.
• Sherer, A. G. , & Palazzo, G. (Eds.). (2008). Handbook of research on global corporate citizenship . Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar.
• Shiva, V. (2005). Earth democracy: Justice sustainability and peace . London: Zed Books.
• Shukla, N. (2009). Power, discourse and learning Global Citizenship: A case study of international NGOs and a grassroots movement in the Narmada Valley, India. Education, Citizenship and Social Justice , 4 (2), 133–147.
• Soguk, N. (2014). Global Citizenship in an insurrectional era. In E. F. Isin & P. Nyers (Eds.), Routledge handbook of GC studies (pp. 49–61). London, UK: Routledge.
• Soysal, Y. (1994). Limits of citizenship: Migrants and postnational membership in Europe . Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
• Spruyt, H. (2016). Empires, past and present: The relevance of empire as an analytic concept . N. Parker. New York: Routledge.
• Stevenson, N. (1997). Globalisation, national cultures and cultural citizenship. The Sociological Quarterly , 38 , 41–66.
• Sukarieh, M. , & Tannock, S. (2018). The global securitisation of youth. Third World Quarterly , 39 (5), 854–870.
• Taylor, L. (2012). Decolonising international relations: Perspectives from Latin America. International Studies Review , 14 (3), 386–400.
• Torre, M. la. (2005). Global Citizenship? Political rights under imperial conditions. Ratio Juris , 18 (2), 236–257.
• Tully, J. (2014). On Global Citizenship: James Tully in dialogue . Critical Powers. London, UK: Bloomsbury.
• Turner, B. S. (1990). Outline of a theory of citizenship. Sociology , 24 (2), 189–217.
• Urry, J. (1990). The tourist gaze . London, UK: SAGE.
• Urry, J. (1999). Globalisation and citizenship. Journal of World Systems Research , 5 (2), 311–324.
• van Steenbergen, B. (1994). Towards a global ecological citizenship. In B. van Steenbergen (Ed.), The condition of citizenship (pp. 141–152). London, UK: SAGE.
• Walzer, M. (1994). Thick and thin: Moral arguments at home and abroad . London, UK: University of Notre Dame Press.
• Wendt, A. (1987). The agent-structure problem in international relations theory. International Organisation , 41 (3), 335–370.
• Wendt, A. (2003). Why a world state is inevitable. European Journal of International Relations , 9 (4), 491–542.
• Yuval-Davis, N. (1997, Month). National spaces and collective identities: Border, boundaries, citizenship and gender relations . Inaugural lecture delivered at the University of Greenwich, London, UK.

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 ).

Related Articles

• Global Distributive Justice
• Cooperative Learning in International Relations
• Global Democracy
• Globalization and Globality
• Globalization and Human Rights
• Globalization through Feminist Lenses
• The International Political Sociology of Empire

Printed from Oxford Research Encyclopedias, International Studies. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a single article for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice).

date: 26 May 2024

• Cookie Policy
• Privacy Policy
• Legal Notice
• Accessibility
• [66.249.64.20|81.177.180.204]
• 81.177.180.204

Character limit 500 /500

2021 World Citizen Essay Contest Award Ceremony

May 13, 2021

Tuesday, May 25th, 2021 | 6:00-7:30PM PST

The World Affairs Council’s Global Classroom is thrilled to host the  2021 World Citizen Essay Contest (WCEC) Awards Ceremony   to honor this year’s nine essay contest winners, whose insight and inspiration illustrated just how important it is to ensure that youth have a seat at the table when working to tackle some of the world’s most pressing issues.

Each spring, the World Affairs Council hosts the WCEC for third through twelfth graders. The goal of the contest is to promote discussion among students, teachers, families, and community members about the ways that individuals can effect positive change in the global community. The contest lends the opportunity for students to engage in conversations about critical world issues with their peers, teachers, and families and allows them to gain confidence in expressing their thoughts in writing by submitting their work to a panel of community judges from both the business and education communities. Many teachers use the WCEC as a way to engage their students in real life global issues.

Read about the 2021 essay prompt.

The Center for Global Studies is a sponsor and partner of World Affairs Council Global Classroom Programs.  ​

This is a  FREE  event open to the community. The evening will begin with a conversation on “ Engaging Students in Global Education During the Pandemic ,” with keynote speaker  Akash Patel , followed by the announcement of the 2021 World Citizen Essay Contest winners, honorable mentions, and additional awardees. Please join us as we honor and uplift our youth.

NOTE:  The Zoom link for the event will be sent out the day before the event. Sometimes our emails get sent to the SPAM inbox by mistake, so please check there if you have not received the link to your inbox. Please reach out to  [email protected]  if you still haven’t received the link for the event.

Click here to learn more and register!

Center for global studies staff.

Director, Center for Global Studies

Managing Director, Center for Global Studies

International Studies Program Coordinator

Geography & Global Studies Librarian

Center for Global Studies, The Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies, University of Washington, Box 353650, Seattle, WA 98195-3650

Room 301A Thomson Hall | Phone: (206) 685-2354 | Fax: (206) 685-0668 | Email: [email protected]

The Jackson School is a proud member of the Association of Professional Schools of International Affairs .

© 2024 Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies, University of Washington | Seattle, WA

• Current Edition
• About Kosmos
• Submit a Work
• Join | Donate
• Full Archive
• Your cart is currently empty.
• Journal Articles

What Does it Mean to be a Global Citizen?

By Ron Israel and the Global Citizen’s Initiative

UPDATED 10/9/18

There is an emerging world community to which we all belong!

The growing interconnectedness among people, countries, and economies means that there is a global dimension to who we are. The most positive way of responding to this is by pursuing a path of global citizenship. Global citizens see ourselves as part of an emerging world community, and are committed to helping build this community’s values and practices.

Here are 10 Steps that you can take if you are interested in becoming a global citizen.

Step 1.  RECOGNIZE THE GLOBAL PART OF WHO YOU ARE:  All of our lives have become globalized; whether through the Internet, the way in which we’re impacted by the global economy; our desire to provide humanitarian assistance to disaster victims in countries other than our own; or even in our love of world art, music, food, and travel. We all have a part of us that is global. Examine your own life, recognize its global dimension, and reflect on how that affects your view of the world.

Step 2.  EXPAND YOUR DEFINITION OF COMMUNITY:  Because of the many ways in which countries and people are now so interconnected, we all are now part of an emerging world community. This doesn’t mean that we have to give up being a member of other communities, e.g., our town, our country, our ethnicity. It means that we have another community—the world community—to which we now belong. Find ways to celebrate your connection to this community.

Step 3.  DISCOVER THE VALUES OF THE WORLD COMMUNITY:  Every community needs to have values, and the world community is no exception to this rule. The values of the world community reflect the moral ideals that most of us believe in as the basis for human existence; for example human rights, religious pluralism, participatory governance, protection of the environment, poverty reduction, sustainable economic growth, elimination of weapons of mass destruction, prevention and cessation of conflict between countries, humanitarian assistance, and the preservation of the world’s cultural diversity. Take stock of your belief in these values. Are you aware of ways in which the world as a whole is trying to live by them?

Step 5.  ENGAGE WITH THE ORGANIZATIONS THAT ARE TRYING TO GOVERN THE WORLD:   As a global citizen you should try and build awareness about the different organizations, which are making the policies shaping our world community. These organizations include international agencies, like the United Nations and the International Monetary Fund, legal tribunals like the World Court and the International Criminal Court, international professional associations like the The International Federation of Accountants or the International Civil Aviation Organization, and transnational corporations like Starbucks, Hindustan Lever, and Smith/Kline/Glaxo. Try to learn about and engage with these organizations and make sure that they are operating in accordance with the values we perceive to be important.

Step 6.  PARTICIPATE IN AN ADVOCACY EFFORT FOR GLOBAL CHANGE:   Sign petitions, join demonstrations, contribute funds, and explore other ways of advocating for global change. As global citizens we need to join together to express the fact that people across the planet share common views when it comes to basic values such as human rights, environmental protection, and the banning of weapons of mass destruction. The Global Citizens’ Initiative (TGCI) is an organization that provides information and opportunities for global citizens to join together and advocate for change.

Step 7.  HELP ENSURE YOUR COUNTRY’S FOREIGN POLICY PROMOTES GLOBAL VALUES:   Global citizens also are citizens of the countries in which they were born and live. As such we have the ability to influence the positions that our countries take on global issues. We need to help ensure that our country’s foreign policy supports the building of equitable global solutions to world problems; solutions that work for all countries. So let your government know how you feel by supporting leaders who want their countries to become engaged with the world, not isolated from it.

Step 8.  PARTICIPATE IN ORGANIZATIONS WORKING TO BUILD WORLD COMMUNITY:   There are all sorts of organizations making important contributions to our emerging world community—NGOs, global action networks, international professional associations, transnational corporations, and others. They work on a range of issues related to the values of our world community—ranging from human rights to world arts and culture. Pick one, any one that relates to an issue in which you are interested, and get involved.

Step 9.  NURTURE A LIFESTYLE THAT SUPPORTS SUSTAINABLE GLOBAL DEVELOPMENT:   The environmental movement has taught us a great deal about how everyday lifestyles and behaviors can have an impact on the quality of life on our planet. The types of transportation we use, how we heat or cool our homes, the types of clothes we wear and the food we eat all affect our quality of life. As global citizens we need to adopt environmentally responsible behaviors in the ways we live.

Step 10.  SUPPORT WORLD ART, MUSIC, AND CULTURE:   Being a global citizen is also a celebration of  the many different arts and cultures of our people. Take time to learn the ways in which different cultures give expression to the human spirit.

Visit Kosmos www.kosmosjournal.org to stay connected to the Global Citizens movement.

At The Global Citizens’ Initiative we say that a “global citizen is someone who identifies with being part of an emerging world community and whose actions contribute to building this community’s values and practices.”

To test the validity of this definition we examine its basic assumptions: (a) that there is such a thing as an emerging world community with which people can identify; and (b) that such a community has a nascent set of values and practices.

Historically, human beings have always formed communities based on shared identity. Such identity gets forged in response to a variety of human needs— economic, political, religious and social. As group identities grow stronger, those who hold them organize into communities, articulate their shared values, and build governance structures to support their beliefs.

Today, the forces of global engagement are helping some people identify as global citizens who have a sense of belonging to a world community. This growing global identity in large part is made possible by the forces of modern information, communications and transportation technologies.  In increasing ways these technologies are strengthening our ability to connect to the rest of the world—through the Internet; through participation in the global economy; through the ways in which world-wide environmental factors play havoc with our lives; through the empathy we feel when we see pictures of humanitarian disasters in other countries; or through the ease with which we can travel and visit other parts of the world.

Those of us who see ourselves as global citizens are not abandoning other identities, such as  allegiances to our countries,  ethnicities and political beliefs. These traditional identities give meaning to our lives and will continue to help shape who we are. However, as a result of living in a globalized world, we understand that we have an added layer of  responsibility; we also are responsible for being members of a world-wide community of people who share the same global identity that we have.

We may not yet be fully awakened to this new layer of responsibility, but it is there waiting to be grasped. The major challengethat we face in the new millennium is to embrace our global way of being and build a sustainable values-based world community.

What might our community’s values be? They are the values that world leaders have been advocating for the past 70 years and include human rights, environmental protection, religious pluralism, gender equity, sustainable worldwide economic growth, poverty alleviation, prevention of conflicts between countries, elimination of weapons of mass destruction, humanitarian assistance and preservation of cultural diversity.

Since World War II, efforts have been undertaken to develop global policies and institutional structures that can support these enduring values. These efforts have been made by international organizations, sovereign states, transnational corporations, international professional associations and others. They have resulted in a growing body of international agreements, treaties, legal statutes and technical standards.

Yet despite these efforts we have a long way to go before there is a global policy and institutional infrastructure that can support the emerging world community and the values it stands for. There are significant gaps of policy in many domains, large questions about how to get countries and organizations to comply with existing policy frameworks, issues of accountability and transparency and, most important of all from a global citizenship perspective, an absence of mechanisms that enable greater citizen participation in the institutions of global governance.

The Global Citizens’ Initiative sees the need for a cadre of citizen leaders who can play activist roles in efforts to build our emerging world community. Such global citizenship activism can take many forms, including advocating, at the local and global level for policy and programmatic solutions that address global problems; participating in the decision-making processes of global governance organizations; adopting and promoting changes in behavior that help protect the earth’s environment; contributing to world-wide humanitarian relief efforts; and organizing events that celebrate the diversity in world music and art, culture and spiritual traditions.

Most of us on the path to global citizenship are still somewhere at the beginning of our journey. Our eyes have been opened and our consciousness raised. Instinctively, we feel a connection with others around the world yet we lack the adequate tools, resources, and support to act on our vision. Our ways of thinking and being are still colored by the trapping of old allegiances and ways of seeing things that no longer are as valid as they used to be. There is a longing to pull back the veil that keeps us from more clearly seeing the world as a whole and finding more sustainable ways of connecting with those who share our common humanity.

55 Comments

The author, Ronald Israel, points to the crucially needed and important trend toward global citizenship, which he says: “… can take many forms”.

At the collective, conceptual, world-view, systemic, structural, institutional levels, I  believe that our individual beliefs, values, efforts and actions are synergistic, summating, can are making a real difference.

We can and are affecting change.  A book by Edmund J Bourne entitled: “Global Shift – How a New Worldview is Transforming Humanity” is illustrative. Bourne describes how at the paradigm, world-view level, we are changing things now. Our daily communications and actions are summating, making a difference, and moving the planet community toward a tipping point of potentially massive, positive, transformative change.

There exists a steadily growing consensus that a global SHIFT is now occurring. In the midst of crises and insecurity, we can cultivate the reality awareness that everything is interconnected, that synchronicities in our creative, conscious universe operate symbolically (not only causally), and that in a larger Kosmos-logical context, each of us participates in moving it all toward an integral global tipping point shift in paradigmatic perceptions, core values and aligned actions. Such vision and future is up to us – our being and doing. 

We are relational beings living together in the same global, planetary household. Everything is cocreated. We can nurture conditions for positive transformation. May each of us, individually and together, continue to mold our world into the shape of love, peace, compassion, inclusiveness, sharing, cooperation, equity and justice — a place wherein the essential needs of all are met and the essential rights of all are defended.

Thank you so much, Ron, for this comment. I had not heard of Edmund Bourne’s book on the Global Shift. I will look into this right away. Hope you are taking the Survey which is the beginning of a Kosmos effort to start to connect our various projects for greater impact. Nancy

Thank you, Nancy, for keeping this important article on the Kosmos site.

And thank you, Ron, for your clear synopsis of Edmund Bourne’s book. I just looked it up online and ordered it. For those of us working towards positive, transformational change, this book looks like a keeper.

Analesa Berg

Global Citizenship is one of the focuses of KOSMOS – and I know it is for you too. Thanks for the comment. Nancy

[…] Isreal, R. (2012). What Does It Mean To Be A Global Citizen. Kosmos. Retrieved from  http://www.kosmosjournal.org/article/what-does-it-mean-to-be-a-global-citizen/ […]

[…] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kgEoG04IcOc  In this video a student discusses the benefits that he has experienced by playing online games. These include learning communication, co-operation and socialisation skills, as well as developing strategy skills and perseverance. It is not just playing, but creating games online will all help to develope these skills. If a student had learnt these skills through traditional teaching methods would they not be considered valuable? They are just as valuable when taught through gaming, and will be better received and remembered , as this is a form of education that appeals to students. […]

[…] http://www.kosmosjournal.org/article/what-does-it-mean-to-be-a-global-citizen/ […]

[…] Reference: Israel, R. C. (2012). What Does it Mean to be a Global Citizen? , from http://www.kosmosjournal.org/article/what-does-it-mean-to-be-a-global-citizen/ […]

[…] to implementing plans that benefit the community, by building positive practices and values (Israel, 2012). For my learning activity this week I researched an emerging world community known as “The Earth […]

[…] Israel, R. C. (2012). What Does it Mean to be a Global Citizen? Kosmos Journal. Retrieved from http://www.kosmosjournal.org/article/what-does-it-mean-to-be-a-global-citizen/ […]

[…] Israel, R C. (2012). What does it mean to be a global citizen? Retrieved from http://www.kosmosjournal.org/article/what-does-it-mean-to-be-a-global-citizen/ […]

The call to global citizenship is one that should be met with resounding response from individuals, corporate bodies, religious as well as cultural organisations. Infact government of countries should incorporate it in their educational curriculum.it is only when it becomes a collective concern that the world at large ll be a beta place for all humans and non humans

I think it is a great idea but also a dangerous idea for bad people to join and not be able to stop the bad people that are hurting the good citizens.

We are fully dedicated to the task of establishing Borderless Global Democracy on this ailing planet.

[…] ⁶ http://www.kosmosjournal.org/article/what-does-it-mean-to-be-a-global-citizen/ […]

I would be most gratified if we could work together for the good of the planet.

I miss the term “social entrepreneurs” in your list of forms of embodiment of Global Citizenship. And it resonates in your “yet WE lack the adequate tools, resources, and support to act on our vision”. I do not like this and I do not identify with this we. My WE is youth leaders and adult social entrepreneurs with enormously successful transformational, people/powered solutions. Ashoka alone has 3,000, then there are EcoTippingPoints.org and Skoll collections, and countless others. Most of all the teens, 250,000 from 10,000 united at WeDays, and many more powerful teenage changemakers united on the Youth-LeadeR.org platform. What I feel when reading such statements in one of the “best” publications, by some of the “best considered” thinkers and visionaries, I feel a VAST AND DRAMATIC disconnect between the more academic philosophical age 50/60+ community and the thriving, tangible change driving communities at above mentioned communities, with transformational events all over the planet, incl even the obsolete World Economic Forum… to a point that their statements are out of synch with relevant reality that they become irrelevant and outdated. Since the world has evolved to a state where “visionary thinkers” are at the same time “sensational do’ers” and leaders empowering others to be leaders of transformation.

I know that this is something that is still urgently needed and not present in (quoting Harry Potter) the muggle mainstream, – which is why I have founded Youth-LeadeR as a platform connecting hundreds of changemakers’ media, methods and “live” services to the education system in 18 languages… so I share the call for a need – BUT the BRIGHTEST, LOOKED UPON consultants should at least know of it.

I urge you, for the same of all species (YET) alive today and future generations (if they are to be) to study the bright new world of youth leadership, social entrepreneurship and virtually unlimited support networks and action opportunities for each and everyone accessible via the http://www.youth/leader.org menu.

Eric Schneider Images & Voices of Hope IVOH Award 2012 UNESCO Round Table for the Implementation of the UNITED NATIONS Decade of Education for Sustainable Development

Eric, you are so right. Kosmos has been publishing the work of social entrepreneurs since 2001 – at the margins and now coming closer to the mainstream. We were so happy to catch up with you recently and to see the broad expansion of your work with youth entrepreneurs. We published an article about it with some of your brightest youth social entrepreneurs which got a lot of attention from our readers. Although many of us work and identify globally I do not see a Global Citizens Movement that has been successful as yet. Do you? We have been involved in several attempts – with CIVICUS, DEEEP, Tellus Institute, but none has gotten off the ground. My vision is a world where there are no borders between us and we move from a world identified by nations to one of the whole world working together for all. Our whole political system is based on nations today – competing for the world’s resources. We fight wars with our neighbors rather than understanding them. There is so much work ahead of us. I am so happy we have reconnected and can learn about how youth is embracing the new vision and acting on it.

[…] issues so that global citizens can better affect change and understand the world around them. A new marketplace has been created where entrepreneurs can make the money a fortune 500 company make… Economical changes need to accommodate these kinds of businesses. Our governments also need to make […]

[…] Israel, R. (2014). What Does it Mean to be a Global Citizen? | Kosmos Journal.Kosmosjournal.org. Retrieved from http://www.kosmosjournal.org/article/what-does-it-mean-to-be-a-global-citizen/ […]

[…] It is full of a plethora of different people, places and things. Taking the time and effort to learn about how culture (and history) in general might affect someone’s behaviors, values and … reveals a lot about why people do the things they do, the way they do […]

Dear Ronald:

I am writing you regarding Simona Paravani–Mellinghoff’s book “The Kids’ Pocket Guide to the World” that has already been published in U.K. and Slovenia and distributed in Europe and North America.

The Kids’ Pocket Guide to the World is a book for children (8-12) and adults, which states and develops the concept of a globalized world as an ocean of opportunity, through five stories taking place in each of the five continents, and how much important is to rely in seven billion people’s ideas and dreams to overcome the challenges that the world faces.

This book takes the reader on a unique journey across the globe: from the open spaces of the rural Kenya to Nairobi’s high-tech sporting grounds; from a stadium-hospital in Los Angeles to the green pastures of New Zealand; from old Europe with its sleepy palaces to the buzzing streets of Beijing.

The book received excellent feedback from educators and parents and has been adopted as supplementary textbook of school programs in several schools, primary and secondary, in England and Slovenia, and in United States soon.

In addition, this project is linked to charity programs with various NGOs. One of these is MyBnk in London, an award winning charity institution in U.K. that teaches to young people how to manage their money and how to build their own business.

On November 13th 2015, Simona was invited to present her book at UNCA – United Nations Correspondents Associations – at the United Nations in New York, to recognize Simona’s work and involvement in educational and charitable programs in many parts of the world.

Finally, I would like to briefly introduce the author, Simona Paravani–Mellinghoff, first Italian under 40 years to be nominated Financial News Rising Star in 2009 and 2010. She combines a full time job in the financial services to various activities in support of NGOs. In 2003, she published her first novel, Parentesi Cubana, and she manages a website for Italian professionals living abroad, Cervelli in Fuga.

This book is inspired to the many young women Simona has met in her travels, all great examples of how passion and dreams can change many lives and the world around us!

Waiting for your reply, I send you my most cordial greetings.

Gianfrancesco Mottola

Thanks for the work you do to the world

Thank you Hana. We really appreciate hearing from our community and those that are touched by the Kosmos message.

lets go raptors

THANK YOU for this Kosmos Journal article about a Global Citizen’s Movement.

Ever since we saw photos of ourselves looking back at Planet Earth from the moon, we “knew”, in a deep place of our being that, we are one, that

We are “A FAMILY OF ALL BEINGS”.

A “citizen of the world” is not someone solely well-traveled; it is someone well-visioned, who has trekked from “me” to “we”, from ethnocentricity to world-centricity, who sees self as member of a family beyond borders and boundaries of race, religion, class, gender, and geography. A world citizen carries a passport stamped with individual and universal fingerprints of inclusive love, regard, belonging and active caring for our commons and “all our relations” (“Matakuye Oyasin”). The citizen of the world passport is carried in one’s heart, soul and spirit – it transforms barriers into bridges. ~ ron bell

—————-

“A human being is part of a whole, called by us the Universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest — a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.” ~ Albert Einstein

—————–

Thank you good luck

THANK YOU for this thoughtful Kosmos Journal article about a Global Citizen’s Movement.

I think we are certainly a l o n g way from actually and practically manifesting its vision (and that of the Earth Charter), but I take heart in an awareness that at the level of paradigmatic consciousness, our world view is in process of changing.

Ever since we saw photos of ourselves looking back at Planet Earth from the moon, we “knew”, in a deep place of our being that, humanity (across arbritary borders) is one, that

We are “A FAMILY OF ALL BEINGS”, interrelated, connected in one relational web of Life.

A “citizen of the world” is not someone just well-traveled; it is someone well-visioned, who has trekked from “me” to “we”, from ethnocentricity to world-centricity, who sees self as member of a family beyond borders and boundaries of race, religion, class, gender, and geography. A world citizen carries a passport stamped with individual and universal fingerprints of inclusive love, regard, belonging and active caring for our commons and “all our relations” (“Matakuye Oyasin”). The citizen of the world passport is carried in one’s heart, soul and spirit – it transforms barriers into bridges. ~ ron bell

Thank you, Ron, for taking the time to add these words of wisdom to the theme of Global Citizenship.

I very much share the sentiments expressed, but under the definition given ‘global citizenship’ remains merely aspirational rather than actual. To become actual, citizenship at any level depends on whether we have a legally binding right to vote. No vote, no citizenship! At the global level, the only initiative that comes close to providing this seems to be the Simultaneous Policy (Simpol) campaign through which citizens in all democratic countries can use their national right to vote to encourage their politicians towards supporting and cooperatively implementing Simpol’s global justice agenda. As a result of this new voting power, politicians in a number of countries already support the campaign.

I have lived my life travelling around the world, ingesting and inhaling cultures and traditions, poverty and wealth. Diseases, you name it. I salute you Mr. Israel. For your global concern.

I’m signing up for any newsletter or blog you may be offering. Thank you. ~Susan Goodhue~

Hi. This may sound simplistic but i would like some guide lines for being a responsible world citizen. For example my son told me in the market not to buy alaskan salmon because ” it has probabley not been caught responsibley”.. I want an i phone and could afford one but the plight of the chinese workers really bothers me…. ? We are so interconnected i feel a responsibility towards all people and do not want to contribute or condone exploitative practices. I need some guide lines. I cannot research every company’s practice? Please help – as a westoner i am at the front of the train and want to be a resonsible citizen ….? How

Hi Bernadette, you might enjoy this: http://www.kosmosjournal.org/article/engaged-ecology-seven-practices-to-restore-our-harmony-with-nature/

the litle have read in this article is a soul touching article to me. the ideology of global citizen can help to solve the problem of nigeria government in solving attitude of corruption in the governance of the country by selfish government official. Nigeria problem is a global government that needs global solution. Nigerians have enduring the situation of hardship since independence, there will come a time that aggressive reaction will come from the people of the country. which may become global concern. can’t we prevent the aggressive reaction from occurring. this is my comment.

That is beautiful and gives hope to this world to help display integrity, morals and values!

I am a Global Citizen I am not a Minority.

You need to get to the point more, not talk about other things first, but good info.

It is Utopia to think of Global citezenship. A world parliament, a single world currency. A world President.Humans have to evolve to think on those terms. Poverty can easily be wiped out. A world religion, which should advocate a single . Religion– A way of Life founded by all Citizens of the World. We are all living on a ” small piece of Rock — called Earth

I agree with this program. Need to know how to join and volunteer.

Please contact http://www.theglobalcitizensinitiative.org for further information.

The idea of global citizenship is a welcome development. The bulk of the work is to be done in Africa, Asian and South America. Basically in countries where the economy is weak and democratic governance is not at the required standard. In these countries, the global citizenship education should be taken to the people through all available mean.Social ,economic and political barriers should be envisaged.

Wow kind lots of information and important part to learn many things.

Hi i am doing a school essay on refugees and global citizenship? Any advice you could give me?

International Rescue Committee is a reliable organization doing great work with refugees. They gave me a grant to work with traumatic stress in the Balkans after the war. The UN also has a trustworthy program. Good luck on the essay, Megan. Nancy Roof

A very concise article. You have opened some more eyes in this matter. We have dealt with a similar article, which also focuses on this topic ( http://incitizen.com/ ). Thank you for your work!

This page is no longer working. We had to change it here: http://myworldwideinvestment.com/

hi, i need to prepare an argumentative essay about global citizenship. Any advice? and what is the exact name of this article other than its title?

Rosaline – This is the exact title of the article, published in Kosmos Journal spring/summer 2012. There are more articles on global citizenship at our website: http://www.kosmosjournal.org . Thank you for your interest.

Very interesting that the 10 steps are in pink. As far as I can discern the values of plural religiosity and gender equity totally exclude the pure Christian values of a mono-theism and heterosexual marriage between one man and one woman for life. So one can be a global citizen as long as one denounces Christianity. In my opinion, anyone who subscribes to the values of the global citizen and calls him/herself a Christian needs to reexamine their theology.

Israeli lawyer Moshe Strugano (Attorney – Moshe Strugano and Co Law firm) says, an expert in the “formation of offshore companies” says,this is great post. You have explained everything here.

Add comment Cancel reply

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

CAPTCHA Code *

Yes, I’d like to join for free to receive the new  Kosmos Journal  and access to the full archive.

Staff and Advisors

The Four Freedoms  

Introduction, the four freedoms and artificial intelligence, the rights of all beings, conversations, ‘the grab’ | conspiring to control the world’s food and water, with four freedoms, four responsibilities, the promise of liberty and the pain of separation, philanthropy as a territory of transition, fear, freedom and the queer world of quantum mechanics, a participant critique of the french mutual aid network, solaris, spotlight on hanne strong, origin | from “the story of gaia”, why beauty matters, mixed media, deep adaptation | a quartet of videos, this feature is self-generated, searching for a more beautiful world, with charles eisenstein, navigating the storm of global change, the sanctity of food, mugwort | plants rule the world, eleanor on 72nd street, exactly this spot | how air is, graffiti on the lee monument | gray, listening to the intelligence of your body, blessed community   the families we make, becoming ‘blessed community’, love, care and community, find the others | start a conscious change collective, are transition towns our key to a more beautiful future, mindful living at morningsun, prisons as monasteries, unitive narrative | a new lens for approaching the sustainable development goals, the art of life | a documentary, what i learned visiting intentional communities, crone wisdom | the soul of community, way of council | speaking and listening from the heart, desert blues | the music moves in circles, return to fixing things | the artist’s posthumous garage sale, sibling beit midrash | jacob’s gift, the rope bridge | monument, the way out | end of the egoic era, envisioning the beloved community, the eco-institute at pickards mountain | my experience as a black participant-turned-leader, a us department of peacebuilding, how to have a community conversation, chinese brush painting: a lesson | conflagration, the bridge to tomorrow is a work-in-progress, the sacred masculine  , masculine/feminine | a non-binary view, in search of the sacred masculine, the great simplification, erasure of indigenous identity, finding ben | mental health, justice, and healing, gender and peace | thoughts on the russian war in ukraine, blueprints for men, climate crisis | a problem of myth, ritual fire and sacred masculinity, trauma and healing for boys and men of color, adrift in the world, lessons from the ancient samurai, a cloud never dies | a film about the life of thích nhất hạnh, baptism of fire, the butterfly man in the house of pain, dusty and me, reflections on outliving my son, awakened life, a contemplation on resilience in ukraine, in the dream, my father reprimanded me for wearing earmuffs indoors | for my son, texas buddha | horse talk, taimu shakuhachi flute | art of emptiness, one final inning in st. louis, our spiritual commons   the inner resources we share, synthesis and the intuitive mind, our spiritual commons, waters of spirit, the soul of nations, global citizenship and universal values, honoring commons-based circuits of value, the value-renewed society, transformative social and emotional learning (sel) as a catalyst for climate action, embodied thinking and embodied feeling, autobiography of a yogi | 75 years on, the atlas of disappearing places, the world of itō jakuchū, the hermetic revival, the moment | alan watts and the eternal now, message from haiti | inspiration between two, lord of the forest | good fences, bum’ma (because i couldn’t say grandma), text | along the willamette, calendula seed | spirit rise, the holomovement, all things are a commons, the indwelling spirit, toward a global wellbeing mindset, the potential of grassroots environmental stewardship, meeting mugwort, joanna macy | climate crisis as spiritual path, seeking “ssshhh”, humble like the earth, are you sure   the cultivation of belief, are you sure, marching orders | covid’s attention war, post-truth politics and collective gaslighting, perceptual intelligence, seeing truth in van gogh, healing wetiko, the mind-virus that plagues our world, red brain, green brain, a quest for truth as a continuous motion to reconsider, the noosphere is here, ‘great turning’ visionaries | part 1, ‘great turning’ visionaries | part 2, earthjustice | working at the brink, deep winter, watching river otters, being brave, searching for what we already know, truth that affirms and regenerates all life, the industry of us | all you cannot see, truth is an orange canary from lisbon, garbage | pedaling my bike past jefferson davis place, let’s see what happens next | mid-20th century salvation, the juniper tree, composer, david crowe, 23 million trees planted, realigning withearth wisdom    , indigenous to life, the wisdom of our ancestors, the big ocean cantata, how to be a soil keeper, to reason with a madman, how not to lose the elephant for all its parts, our animal bodies and the unitive state, the web of meaning, trauma and regeneration, emerging renaissance | the art and wisdom of leigh j mccloskey, hermetic wisdom and the attributes of our time, glacier, elder, teacher, realigning with earth wisdom, the wonder of it all, practicing the art of wonder through radical presence, between prayer mat and smoke hole, reconnecting our children to nature, seeking the honey of life, slant | vernacular, signposts and hedges | visiting my brother’s nebraska farmstead on august 30th at dusk, into the riptide | the best we can imagine together, today you are a river in my hands | once trees grew inside me, inhale exhale, the century of awakening  , century of awakening, awakening to life, global challenges are directing us toward a unity of purpose, vow of 120,000 actions, the descent to soul, gravity and allurement, the two faces of digital spirituality, sacramental conversation, the ecozoans, can we measure culture and consciousness, dismantling the patriarchy within, living communally, reclaiming spiritual wholeness, the unchaining and the unveiling, scaffolding for a thrivable planet, cultivating spiritual intelligence, the age of freedom, the joy of living and learning interconnectedly, remembering nature, prayers in the dark, ‘uncomfortable’, poems for the solar age, butterfly effect, topophilia | thicket, master sha | tao calligraphy, how quickly the light changes | before you set your table, unexpected grace | love poem with accolades, visionary spirit   transition and transformation, the role of the visionary, unlocking a fresh vision for the world, dying into the creative, a global governance paradigm shift | first principles first, what is global education and why does it matter  , vision and change | fermentation as metaphor, thoughtforms | the materialization of sustained ideas, across the creek, looking back | the visionary spirit of resilience, deschooling dialogues: on initiation, trauma and ritual with francis weller, choosing earth | with duane and coleen elgin, reilly dow | art of the scribe, new visions give hope in dire times, rough initiations, “dear darkening ground”, david berkeley | oh quiet world, death and rebirth, birdsong as a compass, the power of pausing, we are all radical, dismantling solid bricks, cinderella story, kitchened | postcard from the mother ghost, it couldn’t be clearer, a poem for my students, ocean breeze, into the morphic | reality ritual, rapids of change   our collective journey, our collective journey, what is solidarity, the tree saviors of chipko andolan | a woman-led movement in india, making the case for a small farm future, what would hagia sophia say, an evolutionary transition is coming—are you ready, what indigenous wisdom can teach us about economics, somatics, healing, and social justice, recovering the divine feminine, oppression, interconnection, and healing, humanity and the microbe: a soul agreement, crazywise | shamanic mysticism and mental wellness, venerating the sacred | art as cultural therapy, we the “peoples” | the un at 75, the sustainable development goals begin with mindset, decolonization matters, five centuries of self-quarantine, living radical impermanence, turning our crises around from the inside out, a universal congress, horizontal governance, salmon migration as earth expression, epiphany | in the know | mapping, power colours memories identity fighting, true wealth  , the evolutionary potential of wealth, true health | what if the virus is the medicine, the treasure of our living, relational commons, soil wealth and a regenerative green new deal, the power of allurement, how we win | divestment and nonviolent direct action, advertising and trading | the markets’ problem twins, vision for a city of hope near auschwitz, bioregions and regeneration | honoring the places where we live, mystical anarchism, a spiritual biography, economic justice and ecological regeneration, wrestling with wealth and class, joy and value of connection to place and community, breakfast table revelation, safe houses | giving refuge, good fortune, two poems by joy mcdowell, two poems by diane kendig, two poems by ellen waterson, love letters from seaweed, in the hands of alchemy, greenplanet-blueplanet | sacred economy and caring, fragile gold, in the labyrinth   pathways to healing, walking the labyrinth, the labyrinth and the black madonna, rebuilding earth’s forest corridors, civility and its discontents, freedom and energy from healing white racism, howling in place, wall street to main street to world street, the science of oneness, covid-19 is a symbol of a much deeper infection, our finest hour, if we choose, hitching for hope, with ruairí mckiernan, gazing into the heart of perfection, shelterless in the time of covid-19, taking turns, weeding the labyrinth, in the garden, biracial identity | seeking to be unconditioned, a letter to herman creek canyon, mind matters most, becoming medicine, the vitality of paradox, ordinary grace, john fullerton on the qualities of a regenerative economy, leading in unknown terrain, wisdom from the flood.

Already have an account? Log in here .

Create a free account and we will share the world of Kosmos.

• Early, priority access to the freshest Quarterly
• Kosmos Newsletter, with briefings, podcasts and short videos delivered to your inbox
• Opportunities to engage online with thought leaders and affinity groups
• Invitations to our yearly retreats and other Kosmos gatherings

Create a Free Account

Possible Futures   Regeneration, Connection and Values

A story still unfolding, thomas berry and the rights of nature, ten economic insights of rudolf steiner, holding a seed for the future, from what is to what if, the unexpected journey of caring, re-imagining america, the alchemy of power, the next civilization, with jeremy lent, collective trauma and our emerging future , sacred season gathering of songs, freedom to make music, global social witnessing, a cry for help, active hope | time with joanna macy, healing the wounded mind, art in a time of catastrophe, hopeful essay penned by firelight, our scarlet blue wounds, kito mbiango | the power of art to drive action, closer looking | microscopy and aboriginal art, three poems, new spirit, wise action  , new spirit, wise action, beyond ‘sacred activism’, fourteen recommendations when facing climate tragedy, restoring the housatonic river walk, shut it down: stories from a fierce, loving resistance, thich nhat hanh’s code of global ethics, every act a ceremony, inner work makes our outer work massively more effective, the sun of darkness, white men and native america, burning man | what we’ve learned, kathy thaden | an inner fire, big lazy | music for unsettling times, kendra smith | the disappearing art of living, holacracy | an emergent order system, the practice of liminal dreaming, god becomes a hairdresser, men at the end of their strings, what you cross the street to avoid, a long convalescence, decoding the trump virus, seven practices of ‘holistic activism’, memes, mantras, and modern illusions of the eternal, including the earth in our prayers, the paradox of wise activism, living in flow, fluency in the language of stillness, values as a means to invite greater depth, summer 2019  , resonance and relationship, to all my relations, the holy grail of restoration, freeing the dragon, developing a mindful approach to earth justice work, rhino conservation, bringing reefs back to life, farming while black, selfcare freedom, the stones will cry out, sacred headwaters of the amazon, eating as if life and the planet mattered, sam lee | birdsong hits the charts, among the nightingales in berlin, reforestation in portugal, dancing with animals, cooperation with wild boars in palestine, killing us softly, where are we in the story of the universe, borders of our perception, the gift of tears, a song of pause, captives of our desire, documenting land trauma, spring 2019  , the earth is doing her best, dancing with gaia, the community awaiting us, turtles among us, resilience, the global challenge, and the human predicament, book | trees of power, paradise lost | the sequel, cultivating right livelihood, quiet places initiative, rising earth consciousness, consciousness and the combustion engine, the lie of the land | conversation and essay, rejoining the great conversation, physics and spirituality, a vision for the world, chama river revelations, rights of nature, council of the wild gods, the power of community, gallery 1 | in the realm of the world’s heart, gallery 2 | flower flourescence, gallery 3 | guardians of the sacred in tibet, emergent universe oratorio, a conversation with alanis obomsawin, three poems from reverberations from fukushima, dear reed canyon, winter 2018   global citizen, global spirit, the practice of global citizenship, we are all global citizens | seeing ourselves in the advancement of all, breaking out of the domination trance, evolving toward cooperation, on edge work, migration flows, and glocalization, returning to indigenous worldview, liquid democracy and the future of governance, book | farming for the long haul, delivering the un global goals | the consciousness perspective, the insurgent power of the commons in the war against the imagination, on elevating the human narrative, film | lifeboat, refugees adrift at sea, for love of place | reflections of an agrarian sage, sacred diplomacy in the emerging ecozoic era, globalism-nationalism, the new left-right, the economics of solidarity, spirit, and soul, global citizenship | an emerging agenda in education, caring for the soul of humanity, a pocket full of stones, the most important thing, being and becoming in a field of resonance, an overcast morning, i sit down to write, almost bethlehem, the rebel’s silhouette, xiuhtezcatl martinez | break free, playing for change, the universal declaration of human rights, toward a global ethic, statement on the unique challenge of nuclear weapons, the earth charter, fall 2018   all consuming, the four nutriments, un-pick-apart-able, tending the wild, making politics sacred again, from the unreal to the real, the problem with “more”, the galileo project, eager: the surprising, secret life of beavers and why they matter, do we really want to be happy, the deschooling dialogues | plant medicine and the coming transition, eldering in the age of consumption, water and the rising feminine , a tale of two pipelines, unity and the power of love, between the inner and outer worlds, wind | a letter to my daughters, healing the hunger, the selling of the soul, nourishment, are we addicted to fear, what the wind taught, the prophecy, green medicine, the fairy begs for bacon, finals time, how love builds a home, may everything flower, healing sound with jesse paris smith, consumption as the path, books in brief, climate news.

Contributors

KOSMOS Summer Quarterly, 2018

Unlearning together, awake, awakened, woke, change the worldview, change the world, presence at the edge of our practice, dynamic governance, roots and evolution of mindfulness, indigenous worldview is a source we now urgently need, the wanderer’s preparation in the death lodge, the deschooling dialogues: grief, collapse, and mysticism, social breakdown and initiation, forgive: the new practice and mantra for black men, the migrant quilt, the connection, healing into consciousness, wealth and abundance, confessions of a recovering catholic, the habits of schooling, an uncommon song, purposeful memoir as a path to alignment, being human, the night i didn’t stand up, absence presence, yorkston/thorne/khan.

Search the United Nations

• UNAI Principles
• Map of UNAI Members
• List of UNAI Members
• Special Series
• Select UN Events
• UNAI Events
• SDGs Best Practices
• SDGs Guidelines
• SDGs Training Sessions
• SDGs Workshops
• The Why Join Guide
• Tools for Researchers
• Bulletin Board
• Submit the 2024 Activity Report
• Become a Millennium Fellow
• UNAI Voices
• Sustainable Development Goals
• UN Agencies
• UN Information Centres
• Dag Hammarskjöld Library
• UN Stories Archive
• UN Publications
• Internships

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

UNITED NATIONS

• Universal Declaration of Human Rights

TAKE ACTION

• Lazy Person's Guide
• UN Volunteers
• Youth Engagement
• Past Contests and Scholarships
• Request a Speaker
• Visit the UN

NEWS AND MEDIA

• UN News Centre
• Press Releases
• Office of the Spokesperson
• UN in Action
• UN Social Media
• The Essential UN

ISSUES AND CAMPAIGNS

• SDG of the Month
• Observances and Commemorations
• Celebrity Advocates for the UN

What it Means to be a Global Citizen

Becoming a global citizen.

At The Global Citizens’ Initiative (TGCI) we define a global citizen as someone who sees himself or herself as being part of an emerging world community and whose actions help define this community’s values and practices.

Historically, human beings have always organized communities based on shared identity. Such identity is forged in response to a variety of human needs and forces– economic, political, religious, and social. As group identities grow stronger, those who share them organize into communities, articulate their shared values, and build governance structures to support their beliefs.

Today the forces of modern information, communications, and transportation technologies are helping people develop global identity.  In increasing ways these technologies are strengthening our ability to connect to the rest of the world; for example through the Internet; through strengthening our ability to participate in the global economic marketplace; through the ways in which we now see the world-wide impact of atmospheric change on our environment; and through the empathy we feel when we see pictures of humanitarian disasters in other countries.

Those of us who see ourselves as global citizens are not abandoning other identities, such as allegiances to our countries, ethnicities, and political beliefs. These traditional identities give meaning to our lives and will continue to help shape us. However, as a result of living in a hyper-connected and interdependent world, as global citizens we have an added layer of global responsibility.  Our responsibilities include the following:

First, the responsibility to understand the ways in which the peoples and countries of the world are inter-connected and interdependent : For example, we need to understand the ways in which the global environment affects us where we live; the ways in which human rights violations in foreign countries can affect our own human rights; how growing income and resource inequalities within and between countries affect the quality of our own lives; how the global tide of immigration affects what goes on in our countries and how our own country’s immigration policies affect other nations.

Second, global citizens have the responsibility to understand global issues :  Global issues are those that cannot be solved by individual nation-states. For example, we need to understand the impact of the growing scarcity of natural resources on all countries; the challenges presented by the current distribution of wealth and power in the world; the roots of conflict within and between countries and requirements of peace-building and peacemaking; and the challenges posed by a growing global population.

Third, global citizens have the responsibility to understand our own perspectives and the perspectives of others on global issues : Almost every global issue has multiple ethnic, social, political, and economic perspectives attached to it. It is the responsibility of global citizens to understand these different perspectives and work to build common ground solutions. A global citizen usually avoids taking sides with one particular point of view, and instead searches for ways to bring all sides together.

Fourth, global citizens have the responsibility to advocate for greater implement ion by our countries of international agreements, conventions, and treaties (ACTs) related to global issues : Global citizens have the responsibility to advocate for having our countries sign outstanding global agreements that they have not signed and for ratifying and complying with those that they have signed. ACTs are one of the building blocks of global collaboration among countries, collaboration that is essential for building a sustainable world community. Country global citizenship is just as important as the global citizenship of individuals. For more on this important topic of country global citizenship please visit TGCI’s Country Global Citizenship Project at  http://www.countryreportcard.org

Fifth global citizens have the responsibility to promote and advocate for greater international cooperation between our countries and other nations : When a global issue arises, it is important for global citizens to speak out on how our countries can work with other nations to address this issue; and how our countries can work more effectively with established international organizations like the United Nations, rather than proceed on a unilateral course of action.

Finally, global citizens have the responsibility to adopt lifestyles and values that reflect our commitment to building a sustainable planet and demonstrate respect for the world’s cultural diversity.  For example, we need to minimize our carbon footprint and protect the environmental resources in our local environment. We need to cultivate values of tolerance, compassion, and empathy for others, and build mutually supportive relationships with people from other cultures and countries.

Virginia Gazette Opinion | World Focus: W&M essay winner looks at US…

Share this:.

• Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on X (Opens in new window)

• Virginia Gazette Public Notices
• Gazette E-paper

Virginia Gazette

Virginia gazette opinion, virginia gazette opinion | world focus: w&m essay winner looks at us strategy.

The Monitor is dedicated to expanding general awareness of current events involving foreign policy. It is an interdisciplinary publication committed to serving an increasingly global world.

The 2023/2024 issue of the Monitor featured a variety of rigorously researched, well-written essays by William & Mary students. They commented with insight on the problems plaguing the world.

The essay by Lilly Doninger, “Operation Imagination: Reimagining U.S. Strategic Design Based on Vietnam Failures,” however, stands out.

It justifiably won the first prize in the Monitor competition.

Doninger is a senior at William & Mary studying international relations and Hispanic studies. She will be continuing her education at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, where she will get her master’s degree in strategy, cybersecurity and intelligence.

While at William & Mary, Doninger has participated in and led many academic projects. She held internships at the U.S. Army Training & Doctrine Command, the U.S. Army War College and the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command.

Doninger hopes to apply what she has learned at William & Mary into a future career in military operations analysis.

In fact, she is already doing it. Her essay may serve as an example, paraphrasing Colonial Williamsburg’s motto, “That the future may learn from the past.”

In the introduction to her essay, Doninger says: “The minute the United States pulled out of Afghanistan in 2021, the U.S. opened itself up to a future of uncertainty in terms of military planning and strategy. The era of counterterrorism was over. China and Russia continued to be looming threats, so the only way to characterize the expected future was great power competition.”

Doninger quoted the 2017 National Security strategy paper, asserting that after being dismissed as a phenomenon of an earlier century great power, competition has returned.

“Since the modern age of warfare, the United States has done this kind of thematic characterization to help guide the planners of tactical operations,” Doninger says. “The characterizations are devoid of nuance, the problem therein lies in the classic American strategic binaries — counterinsurgency or great power competition.”

She continued: “As the United States continues to develop technologically at a similar rate to China, any potential future confrontation will not depend on conventional ability, but rather who can out-nuance the other. A future U.S.-China war would require a complex combination by tactical approaches including adaptability to regular combat techniques, ability to navigate changing terrain and understanding of multidimensional aggressors.”

In her Monitor essay, Doninger uses historical analogies to U.S. strategic failures in the Vietnam War to help explain the importance for more comprehensive and imaginative military strategy when preparing for potential confrontation with China.

The Vietnam War analogy suggests ample recommendations for how the U.S. should proceed in time of tactical uncertainty as it remains the most prominent example of hybrid warfare battlefield in modern military history.

According to Doninger, the Vietnam case is incredibly relevant to the modern strategic context. “The U.S. has once again started to put significant energy into conventional warfare in light of the renewed shift to great power competition after the War on Terror,” she says. “As seen in Vietnam, an emphasis on one style of war may result in an adversary exploitation of vulnerabilities in other, more irregular styles.”

Concluding her essay, Doninger says, “The Vietnam analogy suggest that there needs to be early training, exercising, and preparation for complex threat environments, even when the overwhelming indication may be conventional warfare.”

Frank Shatz is a Williamsburg resident. He is the author of “Reports from a Distant Place,” the compilation of his selected columns. The book is available at the Bruton Parish Shop and Amazon.com.

More in Virginia Gazette Opinion

SUBSCRIBER ONLY

Virginia gazette opinion | commentary: how to get past our williamsburg bubble and help our planet.

Virginia Gazette Opinion | Building a bigger table for resilience

Virginia Gazette Opinion | Commentary: Your time investment in our community

Virginia gazette opinion | letters to the gazette, trending nationally.

• Baltimore D-Day veteran, 104, returns to Normandy, perhaps for the last time
• One nation, under watch: New brand of largely unregulated mass surveillance is expanding in Virginia
• Florida priest bites woman who grabbed Holy Communion wafers
• California city pays nearly $900,000 for ‘psychological torture’ inflicted by police to get false confession
• McDonald’s getting rid of soda machines, free refills

• Share full article

Advertisement

Supported by

Guest Essay

The Death of Iran’s President Does Not Bode Well

By Reuel Marc Gerecht and Ray Takeyh

Mr. Gerecht is a resident scholar at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Mr. Takeyh is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, has not always seen eye to eye with his country’s presidents. Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani nudged the Islamic Republic too close to the West for the supreme leader’s liking. Mohammad Khatami rattled the conservative elite with subversive talk of how faith and freedom could coexist. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was too insubordinate and too populist, while Hassan Rouhani’s flirtation with the Americans and his disappointing arms-control agreement drove him out of the inner circle.

President Ebrahim Raisi, on the other hand, was Mr. Khamenei’s ideal partner. A lackluster manager with dispiriting rhetoric and a vicious streak, he was steadfastly loyal to Mr. Khamenei, who is 85 years old, and an integral part of his plan to ensure a smooth succession. Mr. Raisi’s sudden death in a helicopter crash on Sunday has thrown that plan into disarray, scrambled Iran’s backroom politics and could further empower a younger, more radical generation of politicians that would bring further repression at home and aggression overseas.

Mr. Raisi was a revolutionary with an ideologue’s integrity. Early on he was appointed to various prosecutorial roles, where he regularly sought — and secured — the execution of regime opponents. In 1988, he firmed up that reputation by serving on the so-called death commissions that executed upward of 5,000 political prisoners. He then spent much of his career in the regime’s darker corners, becoming the head of the judiciary before being elevated to the presidency.

Despite this deep experience and loyalty, it wasn’t clear that Mr. Raisi would be a suitable successor to Mr. Khamenei, a development many observers and Iranians feared. The challenge of managing a government at odds with much of its population and the international community requires an unusual mixture of cunning, intelligence and cruelty. Mr. Raisi only possessed the last. But even if his ascension was uncertain, Mr. Khamenei still relied upon the cleric to help manage the coming transition: Mr. Raisi was reportedly part of a three-man committee vested with the responsibility to choose the next supreme leader.

Mr. Khamenei will now need to find someone else as reliable to execute, as ruthlessly as required, his vision, and arrange another contrived election to install him. This will not be easy: Iran’s political system has been so relentlessly purged of those present at the creation of the republic that little of the old establishment is left.

The new political landscape is largely dominated by younger men who openly lament the older generation’s corruption, lack of revolutionary zeal and unwillingness to take on more forcefully a fading American imperium. And because Mr. Khamenei must rely on this new group to sustain the revolution’s values and keep the theocracy intact, he will have to take their sensibilities into account as he considers both the next president and who should succeed him as supreme leader.

This new cohort has been toughened by battling various popular insurrections. Many have served in the security services and the Revolutionary Guards. They have a strong showing in the hard-line Paydari Party, which now holds the majority in Parliament. Among its most vocal members are Morteza Aqa-Tehrani, one of the party’s leaders, and Mehrdad Bazrpash, the minister of roads and urban development in Mr. Raisi’s government. They favor presidential contenders like Saeed Jalili, a former nuclear negotiator, who has demonstrated contempt for international norms and democratic accountability.

Mr. Raisi had little to say about matters beyond Iran’s borders. Foreign affairs really wasn’t his domain, though he did support the regime’s imperial adventures and recent clash with Israel. But Mr. Khamenei’s more youthful disciples have come of age as America has been retrenching in the Middle East, enjoying the talk in Washington of getting out of America’s so-called forever wars. Unlike many of their “neither East nor West” elders, they’ve welcomed the Chinese and Russian alliance with Iran and see the international arena, unlike the home front, as a domain where they can succeed.

The rising influence of this younger generation in the wake of Mr. Raisi’s death may also have a significant effect on Iran’s nuclear calculations. What appeared to be Mr. Khamenei’s cautious approach to constructing and testing a nuclear device may give way to voices eager to get on with it. The effort, on the other hand, of marshaling multinational proxy forces to do Iran’s bidding in the region will almost certainly persist unaltered, as its success is hard to question.

The larger issue of Mr. Khamenei’s succession, of course, also still hangs over the republic. It is often suggested that his son Mojtaba might assume his father’s mantle. The Islamic Republic may have dispensed with charismatic authority and theological erudition as preconditions for that post, but it does not favor dynastic succession, which is still seen by revolutionary leaders as an indulgence of Persian monarchs and Arab presidents. The younger Khamenei may continue to have an outsized role in the background, but his formal promotion would be difficult for Iran’s leaders to justify. That means another hard-line cleric of some stature and close ties to the security services will likely be considered, such as Ayatollah Ahmad Khatami, a member of the Assembly of Experts tasked with selecting the next supreme leader.

All this augurs poorly for the Iranian people and the international community alike. The generation on the cusp of taking power sees domestic oppression and foreign aggression as indispensable to the success of the revolution. They are even more resentful of the public’s widely held democratic aspirations than Mr. Raisi’s generation, equating all forms of dissent with sedition against the republic and the faith. Mr. Raisi’s death may give these younger men an opportunity to finally have their day.

Reuel Marc Gerecht is a resident scholar at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Ray Takeyh is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook , Instagram , TikTok , WhatsApp , X and Threads .