Global citizenship and development: From benevolence to global justice?

Abstract

This chapter presents a critical challenge to the celebration of global citizenship and its role in development. Exploring how ideas of global citizenship have played a key role in the recent popularisation of development, I show how its mainstreaming can reinforce citizenships rooted in ideas of benevolent responsibility for the other. Using research on development education and international volunteering, I demonstrate how global citizenship has become depoliticised, and how development is used to achieve wider personal, corporate, and state objectives in relation to citizenship. In this chapter, I argue that looking beyond popular global citizenship initiatives reveals a range of emerging and existent global citizenships of importance to redefining development in terms of global justice.