Whilst ‘global citizenship’ is increasingly and variously evoked by interna- tional development actors as well as scholars to mobilise groups and activi- ties or defi ne certain sets of behaviours (e.g., Biccum 2007 ; Baillie Smith and Laurie 2011 ; Desforges 2004 ; Edwards and Gaventa 2001 ), it remains conceptually contested. So despite, or indeed because of, the apparent easy affi nity between global citizenship and development, as captured in events such as Make Poverty History (2005) and practices such as international volunteering, we need to pay attention to some of the theoretical founda- tions and contradictions at the heart of global citizenship. Any such discus- sion is not only inevitably partial, both geographically and historically, but also critical to off ering a conceptual architecture for assessing the present and future of global citizenship and its relationship to development.
What it means to be a ‘citizen of the world’ is not new, as evidenced in the thinking of the stoics of Ancient Greece and more recent European political philosophy. It is also not an invention of the liberal West, with ideas of com- munity and subjectivity beyond the local expressed in multiple ways by diverse groups globally and over time. It is, however, both resilient and malleable, being debated across multiple academic disciplines and in relation to diverse social, cultural, and political circumstances. We can helpfully locate the resur- gence in debates around citizenship in the context of a set of recent social and political shifts at local and global scales that have important implications for the contemporary meaning of citizenship. Globalisation and debates around its implications for political community and democracy (e.g., Archibugi et al.
1998 ) have been particularly signifi cant, as have new experiences and ideas of mobilities and belonging (e.g., Calhoun 2003 ; Szerszynski and Urry 2006 ). In the context of international development, the emergence of a ‘global civil society’ has been centrally important, ‘What we can observe in the 1990s is the emergence of a supranational sphere of social and political participa- tion in which citizens’ groups, social movements, and individuals engage in dialogue, debate, confrontation, and negotiation with each other and with
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various governmental actors—international, national, and local—as well as the business world’ (Anheier et al. 2001b : 4).
Th e idea of a ‘global civil society’ is contested, empirically and conceptu- ally, particularly in terms of a lack of common political culture and notion of political community (Lupel 2003 : 20) and the dominance of emergent civic spaces by self-appointed private actors in the forms of international NGOs (Anderson and Rieff 2004 ). However, such spaces are providing new contexts in which citizenships are being developed and expressed, although uncritical celebration of them elides some of the theoretical challenges of global citizenship. Isin ( 2008 : 15) highlights how the increasingly complex and varying levels of social, political, and economic integration of states is implicating ‘their citizens involuntarily in a web of rights and responsibilities concerning the environment (wildlife, pollution), trade (copyright, protec- tion), security, refugees, crime, minorities, war, children and many other issues’ and ‘implicating them in various social, ethical, political and social decisions’.
Secondly, he points to the fact that ‘many citizens and non-citizens (illegal aliens, immigrants, migrants) of states have become increasingly mobile, car- rying these webs of rights and obligations with them and further entangling them with other webs of rights and obligations’ (Isin 2008 : 15). Citizens are then already part of contestations around what counts as ‘justice’ in ways that cut across the traditional North–South imaginaries that have framed development. To this might be added Falk’s ( 2002 : 15) identifi cation of the ‘increased normativity of international life; a neo-liberal ideological climate; the erosion of statist responsibility, creativity, capacity, and autonomy; and the general technological and economistic embrace of corporate or neo-liberal governance’. Th ese changes not only have provoked and enabled expressions of transnational civic action around issues such as global poverty, corpo- rate accountability, climate change, and human rights but also have shaped approaches to aid and development that privilege the mobility of capital in ways that deny citizen rights, such as through the privatisation of indigenous knowledge and undermining of the land rights of the poor. Citizenship in the contemporary period is characterised by growing complexity, with the diff er- ent layers, connections and inequalities through which citizenships are formed and practised complicating both ‘status and habitus (ways of thought and conduct that are internalised over a relatively long period of time)’ (Isin 2008 : 15). Th is complexity may open new possibilities for ‘global citizenships’, but they are not given. Acknowledging this complexity is an important part of engaging with often highly normative debates around the possibility of global citizenship or current claims for its existence.
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Dower ( 2002 : 1) identifi es the core feature of a global citizen as someone who ‘is a member of the wider community of all humanity, the world or similar whole that is wider than that of a nation-state or other political com- munity of which we are normally thought to be citizens. Th is membership is important in the sense that it involves (or would involve if people accept that they are global citizens) a signifi cant identity, loyalty or commitment beyond the nation-state.’ Global citizenship then has moral and institutional dimensions: it can be about not only membership of something but also an expression of particular ethics or values, or both. Th is connects global citizen- ship to debates around cosmopolitanism which help elucidate some of the key conceptual and empirical challenges around the status and habitus of global citizenship (e.g., Appiah 2006 ; Archibugi and Koenig-Archibugi 2003 ; Beck 2006 ; Vertovec and Cohen 2002a ), and have increasingly been brought into dialogue with debates in development (e.g., Baillie Smith and Jenkins
2012 ; Baillie Smith et al. 2013 ; Gidwani 2006 ; Kothari 2008 ; Pogge 2002 ). Vertovec and Cohen ( 2002b : 8–22) usefully delineate a range of approaches to cosmopolitanism as ‘a) a socio-cultural condition; b) a kind of philosophy or world-view; c) a political project towards building transnational institu- tions; d) a political project for recognising multiple identities; e) an attitudi- nal or dispositional orientation; and ⁄ or f ) a mode of practice or competence’.
We can fi nd strong resonances between ideas of political community beyond the nation state, openness to diff erence, recognition of universal val- ues, and commitments to the equal value of all humans, and some of the rhet- orics and practices of development (see Yanacopulos and Baillie Smith 2007 ). Commitments to ‘distant others’, manifest in global civic action and state aid, resonate with cosmopolitanism’s broad focus on ‘thinking and feeling beyond the nation’. So, at one level, we can see development as producing and being produced by forms of global citizenship that are premised on ‘identities, loyal- ties and commitments beyond the nation state’ (Dower 2002 : 1). But as the history and present of international development shows, these identities and commitments are not without problems.
Whilst we might understand global citizenship in relation to particular moral and ethical commitments that go beyond the nation state, there is a question of where these ethics originate from and what should be the ‘core norms’. Whilst sometimes constructed as if ‘from nowhere’, cosmopolitan or global citizenships are in reality rooted in histories and places. Appiah ( 2006 : xvi), writing about his father, who was a leader of the independence movement in what was the Gold Coast, says ‘he never saw a confl ict between local par- tialities and a universal morality—between being part of the place were and a part of a broader human community.’ However, the kinds of global citizenship
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that have become increasingly popular do not suggest such an easy accom- modation. As Jeff eress points out, a number of political philosophers (Dower, Singer, Rawls and Ignatieff ) have ‘all argued for a particular responsibility for
the Other that is either explicitly or implicitly theorised as an expression of global citizenship’ (Jeff eress 2008 : 27). In this, global citizenship’s contribution to development becomes a matter of those who are responsible, and those for whom others are responsible, denying agency to the poor and reinforcing the structural inequalities and historical legacies. Global citizenship in this sense bears little relation to a democratic reconceptualising of development as a proj- ect of global justice in which historical silences and exclusions are addressed (see also Noxolo, this collection). A fi nal problem is that without a set of shared values and understanding of relations, rights, and duties that can be eff ectively governed—in other words, without a global state—and given the persistence of national varieties of citizenship (Turner 2001 : 135), it could be argued that global citizenship is neither possible nor desirable.
To some extent, these problems arise if we think of global citizenship in terms of status and behaviours built from the ‘container concept of citizenship’ in which the nation state is the ultimate arbiter (Kivisto and Faist 2007 : 102). Appiah ( 2006 : xvii) suggests we should not think about cosmopolitanism as ‘some exalted attainment: it begins with the simple idea that in the human community, as in national communities, we need to develop habits of coex- istence: conversation in its older meaning, of living together, or association’. Focusing on citizenship in terms of process provokes diff erent questions and possibilities, ‘[t]he relationships, practices, and acts that construct, regulate, and contest citizenship are at least as important as the status assigned to indi- viduals. In this way, citizenship is always in formation, is never static, settled, or complete, and identities or subjectivities as citizen are similarly unstable’ (Staeheli 2011 : 6). Th is focuses attention on the ways in which global citizen- ship is produced and changes, seeing instability not as a ‘problem’ for global citizenship in particular, but as a feature of citizenship. It also draws attention to the factors that shape participation and the process of participation, as much as the status of the participants.
When Dower argues that what is important about global citizenship is the ‘the very fact of participation in public deliberation and activities for the global common good’ (Dower and Williams 2002a ), and Arneil ( 2007 : 314) suggests that ‘citizenship is not the either/or proposition of liberal theory (either one is a citizen or not) but a process that evolves towards equality,’ our attention is drawn not simply to the status of the participants but to what has shaped their participation or exclusion. Understanding global citizenship in these ways makes it central to the processes of reconceptualising development
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as a project of global justice and highlighting the importance of democratic participation. In these ways, it is perhaps unhelpful to see global citizenship as something that contributes to development, but rather, as a part of what development does and is. Examining some of the ways global citizenship has been mainstreamed in the popular lexicon of international development reveals ways in which it limits a move towards conceiving of development in terms of global justice.