Global citizenship

This course aims to shed light on long-term and articulated processes of global citizenship. Based on diachronic and cross-national comparative analysis, the course illustrates the essential role which citizenship provides for the foundations of democracy, at a time when populist regressions become increasingly more visible throughout the democratic word. In particular, the course integrates the two dimensions of 'political' and 'civic' citizenship, linking systematically the analysis of the public sphere with that of policy-making. This allows for considering a large volume of stakeholders and their interventions across the civic and the political dimension, while at the same time advancing a novel framework of analysis that goes beyond standard models of 'epistemological citizenship' with its usual reference to individual and group rights.

By the end of the course, students will acquire the basis for articulating diachronic and cross-national variations of citizenship in holistic legal, political and sociological sense, in the context of globalising economic, migratory and cultural developments. At the same time, students will develop critical thinking and independent judgement, engaging with the idea that global citizenship is not only global in its geographically prosaic terms, but in its inclusive force that has the potential to cut across social and political cleavages of different kinds. Students will also learn that citizenship does not happen only in terms of broad, abstract structural forces, but needs to be assessed in the direct intervention of specific groups and human agency in general. In so doing, students will learn much more about citizenship from below, looking at the intervention of active citizens and civil society within an ever-wide opening of global institutions and governance.