ABSTRACT
Global Citizenship Education (GCE) has been taken up by the UN on its educational platform under SDG 4, coupled with the Preventing Violent Extremism through Education (PVE-E) initiative, and intersecting with the Youth Engagement agenda. GCE is often criticised as the neo-imperialist attempt to produce ‘neo-liberal subjectivities’ to further entrench the market and move young people away from genuine anti-systemic critique. This chapter problematises the ‘neoliberal subjectivities’ critique by arguing that as a part of the Post-Washington Consensus, GCE is part of a dramatic shift in the global understanding of development and education and therefore is better understood as part of a Polanyian style ‘double movement’. Using documentary process tracing and discourse analysis, the chapter argues that the UN/UNESCO formulation of GCE/PVE-E makes two gestures. On the one hand it is a further iteration of the development–security nexus, and, second, the proposed subjectivity of the ‘global citizen’ is a republican citizen (in the absence of a global republic), that is a citizen whose capacity for participation in the market consists also of the same skills required for the construction of a global democracy. This chapter critically examines what’s at stake in the UN’s marshalling of classical republican cosmopolitanism in the context of the erosion of the legitimacy of ‘the global’.
