A Culture of Peace via Global Citizenship Education

Globality denotes the development of society on a universal scale. Society is no longer contained by the nation state and social solidarity in the Durkheimian sense becomes global rather than national. This development intensifies the ethical challenge of modernity: the development of a cosmopolitan conception of the human subject. This paper asks what this ethical challenge demands both of us as individual citizens and of the states to which we belong. A cosmopolitan conception of the human subject is one that abstracts from group-based differences of identity in specifying what it is to be a person. Whether people get to be persons depends on the action of the state in providing a constitutional framework of right. It depends also on individuals becoming both willing and able to be self-determining persons who can recognise their fellows as persons. The development of a cosmopolitan conception of right is hindered by profound ambivalence about the modern project of self-determination and the demands it makes of us. It is hindered also by the lack of a secular account of the human subject and by conceptions of human rights that follow upon an onto-theological conception of the human subject. These are anti-statist in orientation and share this in common with laissez-faire economic globalism. Cosmopolitan right depends on both persons and states understanding what it would mean to re-conceive the res publica such that states are oriented as public authorities within a constitutionally governed interstate order.

This thesis proposes to shed new light on the debates in international relations theory between the communitarians and cosmopolitans by focusing on three concepts of rights: citizenship, human rights and state sovereignty. It argues that the current boundary between citizenship and human rights is drawn by the concept of state sovereignty, and to that extent, while it is constantly challenged, radically transcending it is difficult. The task is approached through analysis of texts in three different areas, namely, political theory, history of international law, and development of European Community/ Union citizenship. Part One re-examines political theory debates concerning membership and treatment of outsiders. Chapter I looks at three concepts of citizenship and their justifications for excluding non-citizens and assesses whether the arguments would be still valid if the political community assumed in the theories had not also been a sovereign state. Chapter II will analyse the concept of cosmopolitan citizenship, emphasising the difficulty of radically transcending the current boundary between insiders and outsiders. Part Two will look at the history of international law, in an attempt to show the way the boundary between citizenship and human rights has shifted as the concept of state sovereignty and interests associated with it changed. Chapter III will analyse the international human rights law, focusing on the rights whose interpretation is restricted so as not to challenge the boundary between citizenship and human rights. Part Three takes a close look at the process of European integration. This section focuses on horizontal expansion of the boundary between citizenship and human rights, which has taken place within a regional boundary. This unique example is anomalous to the norm of the nation-state system, which justifies a clear boundary between citizens and aliens on the basis of the assumption that a nation state constitutes a special community.

Villanova Law Review, 2005

Varieties of Sovereignty and Citizenship, ed. S. Ben-Porath and R. Smith (University of Pennsylvania Press), 2013

Freedom and Borders, 2024

4.1 Perspectives for Citizenship 4.2 The Concept of Peace and Its Relation to Freedom 4.3 Peace, Freedom, and Equality 4.4 The Defenses of National Citizenship

Abstract: While the concept of global citizenship has a pedigree dating back more than two-thousand years, as well as many current advocates and interpreters, scholarly critics tend to dismiss it as simply incoherent. How, they ask, can it be possible to practice global citizenship in the absence of some global state? This chapter argues that, although the full formal trappings of citizenship are not likely to emerge anytime soon at the global level, individuals can make important contributions toward realizing its substance there. In assuming duties to promote comprehensive rights protections for others who do not share their state citizenship, and promoting the sort of suprastate institutional transformation that could more reliably secure such protections, they can enact some key aspects of global citizenship. Further, such an institutionally developmental approach to global citizenship is shown to be less distinct than claimed from many domestic conceptions, which define citizenship partly in terms of ideals and practices that are acknowledged to need further development.

Global Citizenship Education, 2008

Inter American Journal of Education For Democracy, 2009