Cosmopolitan Citizenship

Globalization has reshaped the social fabric of the world increasing racial, ethnic, cultural and language diversity, and often creating problems between the self-proclaimed natives and the newcomers. Critical cosmopolitan citizenship (CCC) is a transformational education approach in the 21 st century. Research has shown that when students learn through the CCC approach they become allegiant to the whole world and work toward building a better place for all. When critical pedagogy and cosmopolitan citizenship constitute the methodology of learning and teaching, educators and students are encouraged to learn about global, national and local problems, and to become empowered to take action and transform the world. A brief overview of two Ontario Curriculum documents that address citizenship education in elementary and secondary school, and the English as a Second Language (ESL) and English Literacy Development (ELD) that educates newcomers, unveiled the absence of education for activism and empowerment, two practices that lead to action and change. This Action Research will inquire how Canadian students born in Canada and abroad, will approach cultural, social, economic and environmental issues, as they learn through a critical cosmopolitan education approach.

Walter Benjamin’s and Charles Baudelaire’s personage of the flaneur can be interpreted as a representation of the ambivalent attraction to the strange and unknown in the experience of anonymous city life, so characteristic for the modern age. To what extent can we interpret this role of the flaneur – given its essential qualities in these writings – as a representation of world citizenship? The thesis is that the flaneur is more a cosmopolitan in the cultural than in the moral sense of the term. To live up to the demanding moral ideal of world citizenship, the flaneur needs to change: from detached observation to more meaningful forms of inter-cultural engagement. Hence the flaneur offers some clues for the kind of ethos that is required for a cosmopolitan subjectivity as well as for how it falls short.

Elsewhere I discuss the relations between the Stoic concept of cosmopolis and similar tendencies in Aristotle, in particular, concerning the distinction between cosmopolis and a “dialogopolis”. In 2008, I coined a more appropriate Aristotelian “neologism”: “koinópolis”. Both concepts elicit and reconstruct from the treatment of dialectics and the intellectual commons (tà koiná) in the Aristotelian texts a concept similar to the Stoic cosmopolis but better “grounded”. The “ontological” status of an Aristotelian koinópolis is different from the Stoic cosmopolis. Where the Stoics write about the necessity of breaking radically with local customs in order to achieve membership in the intellectually constituted cosmopolis, the Aristotelian concept is immanent to every possible local human condition and constitution.

In this article, I explore a range of actually existing cosmopolitanisms performed by young people studying at a private higher educational institute in Singapore. Drawing on fieldwork over a period of eleven months conducted with these educated but non-elite youths between 2013 and 2014, I discuss how private degree students (a vernacular term) draw on various resources across different sites and domains of their everyday life to construct themselves, as well as their campus experiences, as ‘cosmopolitan’. Adopting an understanding of cosmopolitanism as a social practice, I argue that these young people perform three criss-crossing pathways to become cosmopolitan that unsettle dominant conceptions of cosmopolitanism as an elite cultural capital, disposition, and subjecthood within extant scholarship on international/transnational education. In particular, I explore these pathways through the framing themes of ‘rooted cosmopolitanism’, ‘cosmopolitan learning’, and ‘unanticipated cosmopolitan’. In doing so, the article adds texture and complexity to existing discussion about young people’s subjective views as well as practices of cosmopolitan citizenship in and through international/transnational higher education.

Processes of globalisation as well as institutions of global or regional governance do not only challenge democratic self-determination within and across different jurisdictions, but question core principles of democratic theory. Situated at the intersection of discourses on democracy, justice and citizenship, a conception of democratic membership which encompasses the relations individuals hold towards political institutions as well as towards other members of a democratic collectivity promises to provide a valuable perspective for addressing these challenges. Due to the proliferation of political institutions beyond the state, one central question that arises is whether citizenship can and should be pluralized, i.e. whether one person can and should hold more than one democratic membership in different jurisdictions of different kinds and sizes. The paper discusses this question from the combined perspectives of democratic membership and democratic institution-building. It starts out from recent theories of a future democratic order of multiple memberships by Habermas, Bohman and Benhabib. It then develops its argument by reconstructing current citizenship debates, not least the discussions about the citizenship of the European Union. Sketching possibilities as well as tensions a multiplication of memberships will encounter, the paper presents the original concept of complementarity developed by Niels Bohr as a fruitful perspective for analysis. Understanding multiple memberships as complementary, i.e. as necessary but nevertheless contradictory complements of each other, does not only help to structure the debates on citizenship or to critically relate the different proposals for institutionalizing multiple memberships. As it highlights the basic gains as well as challenges of pluralising democratic memberships, which exceed questions of identity, and calls for a differentiation between their substance, subjects and contexts. Thereby, it provides a fruitful perspective for future thinking about and research on possible institutional orders of plural democratic memberships.

Kwame Anthony Appiah (London, 1954) is one of the most renowned philosophers of contemporary thought. His work in the field of ethics and moral reach diverse subjects as sexual orientation, nationalism, social discrimination on ethnic or religious reasons and responsibility of governments and international organizations in development and poverty eradication.

This project explores user-generated satirical YouTube videos as forms of citizen-made, participatory cultural production in the context of post-protest Morocco. Using a combined method of textual and critical discourse analysis, I map out the issues most satirized in these alternative cultural forms, then examine their counter-discursive ideological positions, and last explore the consequences of online satire on political culture in Morocco. I argue that the emergence of the web as a participatory medium and a competing cultural form is giving rise to new articulations of dissenting political culture through the enabling of (counter)publics, and the invitation of glocal, cosmopolitan practices of cultural citizenship.

As Chair for the International Center for Information Ethics, I am responsible for promoting and maintaining the founding vision of the academic community of ICIE, for managing its global-wide membership, its advisory board, and for attending to and updating global chapters, credentials, contacts, and communications.

This qualitative research documents the educational strategies of international migrants to Shanghai who are attempting to raise their children as cosmopolitans through immersion in local Chinese schools. We distinguish this localizing educational strategy from the established network of international schools designed to serve the families of corporate expatriates. Instead, our research subjects consist of self-initiated expatriates, or ‘middling transnationals’, who have chosen to prioritize immersion in the language and culture of China by sending their children to local schools. This localized, or Sinocentric, model exposes non-Chinese children to a challenging and nationalistic Chinese curriculum. Our analysis of these practices as a form of cosmopolitan education challenges both the goal of teaching a universal and placeless ethical cosmopolitanism and the assumption that a meaningful cosmopolitan education must take place in the idealized setting of a liberal cosmopolitan school system. We also highlight the difficulties families face in this approach, describing this as an ‘entangled cosmopolitanism’, an enriching but uncomfortable engagement with both local and home-country educational cultures.

This paper aims to propose a normative argument for the
inclusion of the Roma through the concept of the
European citizenship. The cornerstones of liberal thought,
liberty, justice and equality, will pose the focal point of this
study. After analysing the ways in which these liberal
principles came to be central to our present conception of
citizenship, this paper will engage with the exclusion of
Europe's biggest minority, the Roma, from the
entitlements of citizenship. It will examine the ways in
which marginalisation occurs and illuminate into the
reasons for the avoidance of a citizenship discourse in
relation to the Roma by the relevant authorities. By
drawing on the liberal tradition which urges for
institutional reform once present structures are unable to
fulfil liberal principles, this study will show that the
implicitly exclusive practices which take place within an
theoretically inclusive framework, necessitate a
differentiated approach. The paper proposes, drawing on
Young's idea of a differentiated citizenship, to
institutionalise this conception at the European level, as
only such a vision is able to do justice to the liberal
principles.

What personalities and processes need to be present for religious traditions to successfully establish new constituencies? In Aceh, for example, did recently arrived Arabs from Aden play key roles in the processes of "Islamisation?" While few claim rank outsiders to have been crucial in chapters of significant religious change, in this paper I argue that neither are individuals⎯albeit inadequately⎯described as insiders. Accounts provided by historians done with dissecting the dynamics of religious change note the presence of multi-lingual and mobile mediators, who have been described as "inbetweeners", who were adept at importing new ideas⎯including ways of dealing with the divine. Commerce across the Indian Ocean both before and after the rise in European presence centred on ports where being different was normal. Pre-colonial port-cities produced ethnolinguistical “creole” or “cosmopolitan” communities whose comfort with ethnoreligious diversity is lamentable scarce in present-day South and Southeast Asia. This paper considers the role of “mobile mediators” and “inbetweeners” in the importation of a range of Islamic movements in Thailand. I make suggestions about the personalities and processes through which ideas espoused by Imam Al-Ghazali (1058–1111), Sheikh Ahmad Ibn Idris (1760-1837), and Muhammad ‘Abduh (1849-1905) become known in Thai/Malay Peninsula. I describe the contributions and discuss the identity of local luminaries including Shaykh Ahmad al-Fatani, Ishmael Lutfi Japakiya, Direk Kulsriswasd, and Conrad Laurens Coolen to the spread of mystical, modernist, reformist, and revivalist Christian and Muslim movements.

Based on thematic content analysis of textbooks, curricula, and an overview of educational legislation after the 1989 change of political regime in Romania, this paper presents empirical evidence to argue that that post-socialist citizenship education displays surprising similarities with converging post-war changes in the concept of the ‘good citizen’. The findings suggest a complex picture of change combining liberal, communitarian and cosmopolitan renditions of the new citizen, all having a common thread: the shift towards a post-national ethos de-linking the citizen from the exclusive purchase of national belonging and decoupling citizen action from the absolute duty to the patria. Such significant changes are often overlooked due to the dominant focus on the failures to comply with an idealized Western liberal model. However, they invite us to reconsider current understandings of both the pitfalls and the opportunities of post-socialist citizenship education by considering them from a different angle: that of wider socio-cultural change that is gradually being institutionalised at the world level.

No weakening, but rather an expansion, of statehood can be observed in the contemporary world. This does not, on the other hand, imply that extensive forms of constitutional ordering do not exist outside the realm of states. Instead, the evolution of world society has been characterized by a protracted dual movement where the expansion and densification of statehood and autonomous forms of transnational ordering gradually emerged in a mutually constitutive fashion. One implication of this is that neither the concept of the state nor the concept of nonstate transnational entities is adequately capable of delineating the object of constitutional analysis. Instead, the concept of normative orders has been introduced as an overarching category capable of identifying the contexts within which constitutional ordering emerges.
Subsequently, a distinction between the internal and external dimensions of the law of normative orders has been introduced, specifying them as respectively oriented towards establishing internal condensation of a given normative order and external compatibility between different normative orders. With this background, a framework for the analysis of constitutional frameworks of normative orders is developed. The central element is a distinction among three dimensions: First, a constitution implies a coupling between a constitutional object, in the form of a hierarchical organization of a given normative order capable of reproducing an autonomous source of authority, and a concordant legal framework. Second, constitutionalization implies a coupling between an internal reconstruction of an external constitutional subject within the constitutional object, and the register of legal rights, establishing a framework for exchanges between the constitutional object and the wider world as represented by the constitutional subject. Third, constitutionalism denotes the institutionalization of a double function, in the form of a principle-based and legally fortified striving toward universal inclusion, providing a sense of direction in time through an articulated form of constitutional consciousness.
The insights developed are briefly illustrated by the case of the global Fairtrade Certification System.