The Politics of the Intellect in Developing Countries

Abstract

Global citizenship, it has been argued, should not be some idealized concept that is ‘mechanically superimposed on the present reality of geopolitics’ (Falk, 1994, p. 139), because then global citizenship remains a ‘purely sentimental … and slightly absurd notion’ (ibid.). Instead, ‘if global citizenship is conceived to be a political project, associated with the possibility of a future political community … it assumes … a far more constitutive and challenging character’ (ibid.). Global citizenship is therefore most usefully viewed ‘as an emergent and historically evolving concept, rather than something which is fixed at a given point in time’ (Gaventa and Tandon, 2010, p. 10).