Centering Global Citizenship Education in the Public Sphere

International Enactments of GCED for Social Justice and Common Good

Susan Wiksten, Susan Wiksten

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000407051
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Pedagogía
• Categoria: Educación comparada

This book brings together key perspectives from scholars in the Global South and Global North to illustrate diverse ways in which the UN's Global Citizenship Education (GCED) agenda can promote social justice and be used as a vehicle for negotiating and learning about diverse and shared objectives in education and the global public sphere.

Recognizing the historical function of education as a prominent public sphere site, this book addresses questions around how forms of global education can serve as public sphere sites in various contexts today and in the future. Specifically, it questions established notions of education and proposes new interpretations of the relationship between practices of education and the public sphere to meet the needs of our contemporary turbulent era and a post-2020 world. By offering conceptual analyses, examples of policy and educational practices which promote global learning, democratic citizenship, common good, and perspective-taking, the text offers new critical understandings of how GCED can contribute to the public responsibilities and roles of education. Chapters consider examples such as non-formal adult education at the Mexico–US border, teachers' responsibilities in Japan and Finland, developments in education policy and practices in Brazil, civic religious teachings in Canada, online learning in the United States and China, and support to the participation of women in higher education in Pakistan.

Given its unique approach, and the range of case studies it brings together, this book is a timely addition to the literature on education in the global public sphere. It will prove to be an invaluable resource for scholars working at the intersections of global education and transnational education policies, and for teachers involved in global education.

1 Cosmo-uBuntu Theorizing About the Global Citizen in Modernity’s Frontiers

Lived Experience in Mozambique, United States, and South Africa

José Cossa

Global Citizenship and the Cold War: The Tale of Two Youngsters

Samantha Smith was a young American schoolgirl born on June 29, 1972 in Houlton, Maine, United States; she passed away on August 25, 1985 in Auburn, Maine, United States (Smith, 1982). I was born on April 23, 1972 in Maputo, Mozambique, and I have had the fortune to witness the unfolding of the legacy of this young American girl activist and see its relevance dissipate along with our memories of the Cold War (Borstelmann, 2006). The epiphany of the significance of this parallel reality for two young people born in the same year and two months and 12,934 km (8037 miles) apart came to me while conversing with Tim Wilson¹ in the cafeteria of the Seeds of Peace Camp in Otisfield, Maine, decades after Samantha wrote the letter that propelled her to fame. Incidentally, at the time when Samantha wrote the letter to Yuri Andropov (Smith, 1982), then Soviet Leader, I had written a letter to my president, Samora Machel, about ending the Cold War and the Civil War in Mozambique. While Samantha’s letter made it to Andropov, mine did not reach Machel because the person I trusted did not direct the letter accordingly. I was not confident that mailing it through the Post Office in Maputo would guarantee delivery of the letter to the President, so I asked someone in the Mayor’s Office in the Municipality of Maputo to hand-deliver the letter to someone who could hand it to Machel.² Samantha’s letter survived the test of time; my letter had no copy to survive and serve as evidence of its legacy. This juxtaposition is evidence that a range of manifestations of privilege play a key role in the geopolitics of citizenship.

The aforementioned privilege manifest in these two concurrent events initiated by two children of the same age is an example of enactments of citizenship amidst injustice. I am confident that there were numerous children, our peers, who shared our sentiment about the Cold War and its spillover wars, often labeled as civil wars, thrusted by the competing ideological polarizing of capitalist nations versus communist nations (Sherwood, 2019). The global reach of the Cold War, built on the previous so-called World Wars (Schlesinger, 1967), which were in turn built on modernity-informed ambition of grandeur and forced the innocent parts of the world to choose sides and suffer or perish along the way—in other words, no matter what sides they chose, the inhabitants of these countries would likely suffer or perish because they were less human than the descendants of the architects of modernity and less important than an ideology and power. For instance, Kramer (1999, p. 573) argues that “ideology goes a long way toward explaining the sheer intensity of the Cold War”, albeit cautioning us not to rule out the importance of material interests and power.

Global citizenship for Africans was in this context contingent on their alliance with the Eastern or Western bloc and the recognition of such status was in rhetoric only. In other words, such recognition was a recognition of convenience, provided it brought advantage to the parties they subscribed to. At the practical level, no African country was part of the global citizen schema and, consequently, no African was a global citizen. I remember when I was a teenager our country sent numerous young people mainly to the USSR and East Germany (Appleyard, 1991) to study and work (Oppenheimer, 2004). These young people left with the assumption that they would be recognized as fellow humans in the countries they landed, but the reality proved to be that of serving as laborers (Schenck, 2016), discrimination, and utmost racism (Schenck, 2018).

The realities of Samantha and I are evidence of enactments of citizenship. Samantha was a citizen of a country whose citizens enjoyed and continue to enjoy rights to global access; I was a citizen of a country whose citizens had, and still have, numerous limitations to access the world beyond their geopolitical borders. Fluidity across geopolitical borders designed after the Berlin Conference of 1884–1885 (Uzoigwe, 1984) has been the yardstick to what constitutes a global citizen. In turn, this limits the nomenclature to those who have such fluidity through tourism (UNWTO, 2017), with Africans faring at the bottom of the matrix (UNWTO, 2019). Citizens of the United States and European countries, regardless of age, can travel to most parts of the world without worrying about visas, as opposed to citizens of Mozambique and other African countries. During the Cold War and the concurrent Apartheid era in South Africa, Mozambicans needed to apply for an entry visa to South Africa for a fee of R100.00 (USD$5.91), which is equivalent to R681.00 (USD40.00) today;³ however, the acceptance or denial of the visa was at the discretion of the South African Consul, regardless of whether or not the prerequisites were met by the applicant. Incidentally, exploitative and discriminatory practices of Apartheid South Africa were in many ways the same as the immigration practices that Africans are subjected to when going abroad to this day.

Four decades later, I have the experience of having lived in Eswatini (then Swaziland), South Africa, Egypt, and the United States. At some point I have considered myself a global citizen because of the globe-trotting that I have been able to enjoy, which has afforded me the cultural intelligence, cultural exposure, and the art of navigating cultural spaces and negotiating acceptable participation with relative ease. While I am never fully a part of a specific place, I am never fully foreign to it. When I tell people about the countries in which I have resided and the places I have traveled to, from, and through; a common immediate response is an affirmation that I am a true global citizen. Nonetheless, albeit its apparent nobility, I have come to realize that such a concept begs the question; it calls for a reflection about what constitutes conditions that are necessary and sufficient for one to qualify as a global citizen, as well as properties and dimensions that rule out those who do not fit within the boundaries that dictate the criteria for global citizenship. Essentially, when does one become a global citizen? What qualities does one have to possess in order to be considered a global citizen? What distinguishes a global citizen from those who are not global citizens? These questions reveal that the concept of “citizen” and, consequently, that of “global citizen” are undoubtedly contestable yet assumed as simple. Thanks to the colonial enterprise and the political machines it instituted, we have embraced, at times unconsciously and unwillingly, the idea that we are citizens of a country and, when more adventurous, citizens of the world, that is, global citizens.

Despite my disagreement with the use of the term “indigenous”, Castro makes the important distinction that “the indigenous looks downwards, to the land from which he emanates; he gains his strength from the soil. The citizen looks upwards, to the Spirit incarnated in the form of a transcendent State; he receives his rights from above” (Castro, 2017, p. 189). If we read past the problematic colonial concept of Indigenous, that is, one that applies to only those outside the borders of modernity, and juxtapose it with non-modernistic cosmologies (e.g., native American, native Australian, and African), we can safely say that Castro’s claim provides insight into the dissonance between native American and African perceptions of being human and being a citizen of a country, which in turn have an implication on perceptions of a global citizen. If one’s perception of being human is tied to land (Cossa, 2017), and one’s perception of citizenship is tied to an abstract concept inherent in the modernistic construction of State and its violation of native nations while imposing randomly constructed nation-states, it is plausible to argue that a concept of global citizenship constructed by the State and so-called international entities is founded on a colonial premise, thus founded on injustice. Please note that the use of “international” is to highlight the fact that “national” as used by such entities is a violation of “national” as understood by existing nations outside the perceptions of “nation” imposed by colonial practices (Meneses et al., 2018)—this means that there are no truly international organizations in the real sense of nations because what is represented in this descriptor are the erroneously and unjustly labeled nation-states.

An argument in favor of problematizing and rallying against the hegemonic colonial concept of nation (Towns, 2020) pervasive in official documents legitimizing as “international” entities such as the United Nations (UN), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the International Criminal Court (ICC), the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), the International Labor Organization (ILO), the International Court of Justice (ICJ), etc., is an argument in favor of de-colonializing the “national” by claiming equitable recognition in the global arena. This requires a nuanced understanding of power dynamics (Cossa, 2008) and an eventual reconfiguring of the world’s geopolitical borders (Nguluma, 1980) by restoring humanity’s relationship to land and de-bordering geopolitical colonial spaces (Cossa, 2017).

Castro (2017) further claims something in the lines of what I have labeled epistemological genocide (Cossa, in press)—that is, beyond epistemological violence (Vázquez, 2011)—characterized by an attempt to erase the core of how people perceive their existence and humanness. The claim presupposes an attempt to separate the native American of Brazil, in Castro’s case, from the land to which the native belongs (not owns) and turn the native into a citizen (a poor citizen, for that matter). The native’s perception of the human is intrinsically and unfathomably connected to land, which gives the native meaning rather than constituting a possession; the citizen’s perception of the human is intrinsically and rationally connected to State, which gives the citizen meaning and ties the meaningfulness of citizenship status to ownership of land. In other words, removing land from the native renders the native meaningless and lost in the cosmos; not giving land to the citizen renders the citizen powerless and a lesser citizen or one with lesser rights and access to power. I argue that the Protestant ethic, a brainchild of modernity, and its consequent perceptions of work constitute a mechanism for turning the native into a citizen who holds to an evasive idea of fairness aimed at perpetuating the native’s pseudo-membership of the State apparatus.

Moreover, the status of citizenship appeases the exploited with the illusion of belonging to the mainstream populace, a strategy used by colonial powers to develop an army of natives who would fight for the abstract cause called patriotism. For instance, during colonialism, the Portuguese instituted a pseudo-citizen status of “assimilado”, the assimilated, for a small number of blacks who fulfilled the prerequisites for the status (Cá, 2011, see also Headrick, 1978). By inference, global citizenship seems to serve as a mechanism to appease the inhabitants of the space exterior to modernity and keep them from rebelling against the system’s imbedded coloniality.

Historicity of Global Citizenship: From Ancient Greece to Modernity

Based on the reductionistic premise that law equals justice, it makes sense for those pursuing justice to have faith in the law. However, what we often miss is that the law is tied to humans’ ontological and axiological lenses and results from the intention, deliberation, compromise, and action (praxis) of a small powerful segment of any given society. Blok (2013) posits that the notions of “citizen” in ancient Greece carried a

strong principle of equality amongst citizens [where] equality is a relative concept that depends largely on the preconceptions of society. Indeed, the charged discourse on equality is not a product of the modern day, but a Greek exercise through and through.

(Blok, 2013, p. 4)

Furthermore, we seem to pretend as though we do not see the inherited colonial in the law of the nation-state configuration and the international law that regulates relations between nation-states. For instance, the fact that such legal systems in the nation-state and the international justice bodies do not represent African, native Australian, or native American national laws but override such laws, at best, as customary laws should make us suspicious about the hegemonic conceptualization of global citizenship. As much as so-called democratic processes and Herodotus’s principle of “equality under the law” (Herodotus, 1920/1994/ca. 440 BC) are aspired to or claimed as factually operating and effective, it is clear from history that true democracy and “equality under the law” are relative and utopian at the nation-state and global levels—otherwise, we would have won the battle against injustice through de jure rulings. While ...